Word: zapata
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...ZAPATA AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION by John Womack Jr. 435 pages. Knopf...
...quote is from Carlos Fuentes' novel Where the A ir Is Clear. The speaker is a former Mexican revolutionary who has turned businessman. Emiliano Zapata, a flesh-and-blood revolutionary with the unappeasable single-mindedness of a saint, no doubt would have spat at such words. He was a horse trainer and farmer who led the land-hungry campesinos of Mexico's south-central state of Morelos during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. To Zapata opportunists like the character in the Fuentes book were cabrones(s.o.b.'s). "As soon as they see a little chance...
John Womack Jr.'s social history of the Mexican Revolution is scholarly, engrossing and highly sympathetic to Zapata. A Harvard professor of Latin American history, Womack, 31, clearly shows that Zapata's fidelity and incorruptibility were deeply rooted in the bitter struggle of Morelos farmers to guard their land titles and water rights. Their enemies were the rich landowners constantly seeking to add acreage to their already vast haciendas...
Outside his home ground, Zapata was frequently regarded as an obstinate savage by the succession of national leaders who rose and fell in the bloody welter of an inconclusive revolution. What he and his people wanted was set down with forceful simplicity in the Plan de Ayala, the catechism of Zapatismo and a landmark document in the history of Mexico's agrarian reform. Perhaps the most important point in the plan was the one that called for the surrender of one-third of hacienda lands to the farmers...
...this basic aim there could be no compromise with the politicians and intellectuals in Mexico City. Even alliances with other guerrilla generals had to be entered into with a measure of mistrust. This is particularly true of Zapata's relations with Villa, whose army of drifters, muleskinners, railroad laborers and bandits were "more a force of nature than of politics." Like Zapatismo, Villismo was a populist movement. But unlike Zapata's farmers, Villa's hordes had few fixed aims...