emiliano zapata biography in english

The Murder, Memory and Myth of Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata

Shortly after the sun rose on April 10th, about a week and a half before Easter, Emiliano Zapata was already awake and riding his horse. He rode along the cool countryside with the comfort that comes from knowing the land. The obvious and hidden trails, the creeks, the hills, he knew them all. Zapata had both hunted and hid in that land.

Years before, when he fought for Francisco I. Madero—who eventually disappointed him—this land was among the first places Zapata had seized control of in his beloved home state of Morelos. Together, he, Madero and several others wanted to overthrow the government. The plan, Zapata thought, would be to redistribute the land. Most revolutions die without accomplishing much. It’s why the successful ones become ingrained in a nation’s psyche. Almost inevitably, they become romanticized and referenced by those whose politics are far removed from the revolutionary.

The Mexican Revolution lived—at least in as far as it overthrew and replaced a government. And so, remarkably, the first goal lasted long enough to make the failure of the second goal hurt men like Zapata that much more. As the leader of the campesinos saw it, Madero had betrayed the cause. Madero was killed—betrayed—but lived long enough to hear Zapata call him a traitor. Zapata lived and, as a master horseman, continued to ride like he did that spring morning in 1919.

Known as a dapper man, one can easily imagine Zapata riding on that cool morning, his mustache immaculately groomed, wearing his usual dark-colored, three-piece suit. A neckerchief tied loosely around his neck, a large sombrero shading not just his eyes but part of his face, all of it smelling like it had been out in the sun and dirt for too long. He rode and breathed the fresh countryside air and pondered. There had already been several attempts on his life. As with Madero, it wasn’t uncommon for the highest of leaders to die at the hands of treacherous men. And yet, it was that same betrayal brought Zapata to this idyllic place that morning. He’d grown desperate.

Years before that morning, Zapata and Pancho Villa—leader of the northern revolt—sat side-by-side in the presidential chair in the country’s capital. They posed for a picture. Villa smiled, his grand mustache not large enough to hide his jovial eyes and smile. Zapata sat to Villa’s left. He gave a stoic, almost menacing stare into the camera. If you were among the poor, this picture captures what was arguably the high point of the revolution. If you were among the elite, the picture concerned you, even if only symbolically.

But since that day, the fortunes of both Villa and Zapata—the revolution’s most charismatic figures—had turned. Villa lost several key battles, twice in Celaya, and eventually retreated to the Sierra Madre mountains, where he hid from the US forces intent on capturing and killing him for raiding their country. Similarly, Zapata and his men fought to survive. This, among other reasons, was why he reached out to Jesús Guajardo, a constitutionalist. Years before, Guajardo had presided over the killing of hundreds of unarmed Zapatistas. But now, he claimed he was ready to fight for Zapata.

Their first contact was the type that happens in love and war. A few weeks prior to that morning, Guajardo had received an order to once again attack Zapatistas. But instead of following orders, Guajardo was discovered by a superior a few hours later in a cantina, presumably drunk. He was jailed before he was ultimately allowed back in the field, and Zapatista spies said Guajardo felt hurt and disgruntled by the scandal. It became the perfect moment for Zapata to smuggle a note to Guajardo.

Like teenagers in an illicit love, they wrote and snuck messages to each other. Zapata asked Guajardo to join his side. Guajardo agreed. Eventually, they met and as a sign of good faith Guajardo killed fifty-nine of his own men. He also brought the one thing all those in revolt consistently want for: weapons and ammunitions. Still, Zapata was wary.

As the day became hotter, Zapata continued to ride. He’d been fighting for the better part of a decade. In Anenecuilco—his home, some twenty kilometers north of the Hacienda de Chinameca he was riding outside of—his family had fought for far longer. During the War of Independence, Zapata’s grandfather was one of the boys who snuck across Spanish lines and delivered whatever insurgents needed in their fight for liberation; tortillas, gunpowder, liquor, salt. Later, Zapata’s uncles fought in the War of Reform. They also fought against the French Intervention. On both his maternal and paternal sides, locals associated Zapata’s family with courage. The type of people who wouldn’t betray your trust. A century of fighting and now, potentially, the future of Zapata’s fight, and by extension the fight of his people, rested on this meeting’s outcome.

He waited. While waiting he heard reports federal troops were near. Zapata and his men investigated. They found nothing. He waited longer. He waited so long, in fact, that Guajardo sent a formal invite from inside the house hosting their meeting. Zapata, not yet ready, declined. When Guajardo sent Zapata a beer—to combat the escalating heat—he again declined. Perhaps it was a poisoned drink, Zapata thought. Perhaps, as some of his spies suspected, this was all a ruse.

Finally, hours since dawn, in the early afternoon—2:10pm to be exact—Zapata decided to meet. He told ten of his men to follow. The rest stayed behind and rested, trying to stay cool under the shade of the surrounding trees. The house they would meet in was inside the hacienda gates. He and his ten men rode inside. They approached the house, and as they did Guajardo’s soldier saluted Zapata – a man who until that moment, he’d considered his enemy. It’s quite possible it was the first time most of these men had seen Zapata in the flesh.

There he was: Emiliano Zapata. The man who’d long been the enemy of the federal government. The man who Mexico City newspapers called a bandit, a terrorist, a barbarian whose savagery inspired comparisons to Attila. Emiliano Zapata, who had not just inspired fear but also a devotion so intense his followers would rather die than turn against him. Emiliano Zapata. They wrote songs about him. They praised him. If you’d seen him then, you might even think he was immortal. Emiliano Zapata. This is who they saluted.

They raised their rifles in the air and shot at the sky. And as Zapata and his men rode closer, the entire thing looked something like preparations for a parade. Zapata dismounted. The show of respect continued with a bugle sounding three times.

Once. Twice. The third bugle’s note still hung in the air when those who had just paid their respects lowered their rifles, aimed and shot Zapata. And though not all of them hit their target, nearly a thousand men inside that hacienda fired their guns.

The local hero died, betrayed on his own land, never fully knowing some of his notes to Guajardo got intercepted. The correspondence ended up in the hands of the same general that had caught Guajardo in the cantina. And during a supper, a few weeks before the day of Zapata died, that general—González—showed the notes to Guajardo. He accused him of being not just a drunk but worse: a traitor. Stunned and eventually in tears, Guajardo understood how treasonous acts end. He knew he’d get executed. But Gonzalez said he could spare his life. And so, Guajardo, with no options, agreed to ambush Zapata. If successful, he’d live – so long as Zapata was either captured or killed. Morelos’ favorite son died.

“Our general Zapata fell, never to rise again,” said a Zapata aide of one of the Mexican Revolution’s ultimate betrayals. In that gunfire and chaos, Zapata’s horse suffered a wound and rode away, scared and alone. Guajardo’s men kept Zapata’s lifeless body. They loaded it on a mule and traveled some twenty-five kilometers north to Cuautla. Inside a police station, authorities identified Zapata’s remains. They took photographs and the following day, newspapers across the country wrote of Zapata’s death.

Locally, in Cuautla, before his burial, thousands came to view the body. Some saw it and knew—despite the swelling—that it was Zapata. They cried like babies, even the grown men hardened by war. “The wings of our hearts fell,” one Zapatista said after seeing the body.

Others saw the same body and refused to believe it was him. As he lay there, lifeless, looking so vulnerable, they refused to believe it. And so, Zapata lived on in the types of stories and songs told to Mexican children, that then get passed on for generations. Tales originally told by people who swore they were true.

They say Zapata never died that April 10th. That he lived and fled to the Arabian Peninsula and would return when most needed. They said something about his dead body wasn’t right. That a scar was different, that a mole was missing, that the body had all ten fingers, when the real Zapata was missing a finger.

“We all laughed when we saw the cadaver,” one of Zapata’s soldiers said decades later. “We elbowed each other because the jefe was smarter than the government.” They say Zapata knew about Guajardo’s impending trick and that Jesús Delgado — a spitting image of Zapata, who traveled with the general as a body double —was the man killed. Others say it was another man, Agustín Cortés, or Joaquín Cortés, or Jesús Capistrán, or, as Zapata’s son put it, “some pendejo…from Tepoztlán.” Whoever it was, the name didn’t even matter. The important thing was that, according to these stories, Zapata lived and would eventually return.

And some say he did return. They claimed he’d visit only when protected under the cover of night. Others swore that, just like on the dawn of April 10, 1919, they’d see him atop his horse. He’d ride up in the mountains and always keep watch. Others said they saw that same horse, alone, galloping in the hills. They said it was an impossible white color.

Several decades after his murder, the daughter of a man appointed by Zapata to protect the land documents that proved their ownership, spoke of Zapata’s return. She said Zapata was an old man by then, and too aged to continue his struggle.

Zapata, whether you see his picture as a young man or were among those who claimed to have seen him in old age, has come to symbolize whatever noble cause the Mexican Revolution stood for. It was that same cause that for years brought together veteran Zapatistas. Increasingly, they too became old. And each year, on a day like today—April 10th—they gathered and expected Zapata’s return. A resurrection. He’d arrive and together they’d continue fighting for justice.

Today, a century after Zapata’s death, across Mexico and other parts of the world, the living—and perhaps even the dead—continue their fight inspired by Emiliano Zapata.

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Emiliano Zapata

"I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees."

—Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata, born into the peasantry of Morelos, Mexico, emerged as an icon of the Mexican Revolution , tirelessly advocating for land reforms and the rights of the rural working class.

His story is one of unyielding conviction, a tireless struggle for justice, and an unquenchable thirst for liberty. This timeline charts the key events in Zapata's life, a journey filled with battles and betrayals, victories and setbacks, all woven into the fabric of Mexico's tumultuous history.

AUGUST 8, 1879 — THE HUMBLE BEGINNING  

In the small village of Anenecuilco in Morelos, Mexico, Emiliano Zapata was born into a peasant family.

The harsh realities of rural life, complete with its injustices and class struggles, became his earliest school.

It was a time when land and liberty were dreams of the common man, and these dreams would shape the course of Zapata's life.

1897 — EARLY CONFRONTATION WITH INJUSTICE

The hacienda, an embodiment of the entrenched class and power system, was steadily encroaching upon the lands of the peasants. It was an injustice that tugged at the heartstrings of young Emiliano Zapata.

Fueled by a profound sense of right and wrong, he began to sow the seeds of dissent, slowly rallying the villagers against the land-grabbing perpetrators.

In these early stages of confrontation, one could already perceive the future leader in him—an embodiment of resilience and defiance.

The Struggle of Resistance

Resistance, however, is never without challenges. The hacienda was backed by the powerful elite and the government, entities that were not easily swayed by the pleas of the peasants.

Zapata's attempts at protest were met with firm and discouraging resistance. However, such impediments didn't dampen his spirit; they fueled his resolve.

Each act of defiance was an exercise in courage, a step toward an ideology that would shape his life and the destiny of his country.

Seeds of a Larger Revolution

While the efforts of Zapata and his comrades didn't yield immediate success, they planted an important seed. It was a seed of thought, a seed of defiance, and above all, a seed of revolution.

The events of 1897, insignificant as they might seem in isolation, marked the beginning of a journey, a journey that would lead Zapata and his people to confront a system that perpetuated inequality and injustice.

The young man who stood up against the hacienda was not just Emiliano Zapata, the son of a peasant—he was Emiliano Zapata, the budding revolutionary.

1906 — STEPPING INTO LEADERSHIP

Emiliano Zapata, by 1906, had carved a niche for himself in the social fabric of Anenecuilco.

His stalwart defense of the community's interests and unwavering commitment to justice had not gone unnoticed.

The man who once stood against the haciendas as a young protestor was now elected as the president of the village council.

The villagers saw in him a leader, a guardian of their rights, and a symbol of hope against the overwhelming might of the haciendas.

Guardian of Community Interests

As president, Zapata took on the mantle of protector of his community.

His role wasn't merely administrative—it was a call to arms, an assertion against the encroachment of communal lands.

He defended the collective rights of the peasants and sought to safeguard the communal lands from the insatiable greed of the landed elite.

It was a challenging role, one that demanded courage and conviction, and Zapata rose to the occasion.

Against the Haciendas

The election to the council presidency did not mark an end to Zapata's struggles—rather, it signified a new chapter in his confrontation with the haciendas.

The issue of land encroachment remained a relentless force, an insidious threat that kept creeping into the lives of the villagers.

As the president of the council, Zapata found himself at the forefront of this struggle, leading his community in a continuous battle against the powerful landowning class.

It was a David-versus-Goliath situation, but Zapata, resolute and unyielding, embraced his role, reaffirming his commitment to the cause of land and liberty.

1909 — A LEADER EMERGES

In a sign of his growing stature, Emiliano Zapata was selected in 1909 to represent a conglomerate of villages before the governor of Morelos.

His mission was formidable—he was to carry the hopes and demands of the rural peasantry, to argue their case for land rights, to make their voices heard in the chambers of power.

His ascendance to this role signaled the trust his people had placed in him, the confidence they had in his ability to stand for them, to articulate their grievances.

Indifference from the Powerful

Yet, Zapata's passionate pleas fell on deaf ears.

The governor of Morelos, an embodiment of the state machinery, remained indifferent to their cause.

The cold apathy of the establishment served as a harsh reminder of the vast chasm that existed between the rulers and the ruled, the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the marginalized.

The response, or rather the lack of it, only served to reinforce the deep-seated inequalities and injustices that Zapata was fighting against.

An Inflection Point

However, the governor's indifference didn't dampen Zapata's resolve. Rather, it served as a catalyst, a pivotal moment in his transformation from a local leader to a revolutionary figure.

His encounter with the high-handedness of the authorities was a wake-up call, an experience that helped crystallize his understanding of the systemic injustices inherent in the socio-political structure.

From this juncture, there was no turning back.

Zapata had been jolted out of any illusions of a peaceful resolution—he knew now that the path to land and liberty was fraught with challenges, but it was a path he was determined to tread.

NOVEMBER 20, 1910 — THE SPARK OF REVOLUTION

Francisco Madero, a progressive reformer, challenged President Porfirio Díaz in the presidential elections. However, Díaz had Madero arrested, and this sparked the Mexican Revolution.

Zapata, already dissatisfied with the government, found a common cause with Madero.

MARCH 1911 — THE PLAN OF AYALA

Francisco Madero, a progressive reformer who had become President, showed an initially promising stance for peasants, raising their hopes for much-needed land reform. However, as time passed, Madero's pace of change proved to be disappointingly slow, the lofty promises of his campaign increasingly seeming hollow.

Zapata, who had once found a common cause with Madero, grew increasingly disillusioned.

He saw in Madero's lethargic approach a betrayal of the revolution's spirit, an unwillingness to confront the entrenched interests that upheld the status quo.

Drafting the Manifesto

In response to this perceived betrayal, Zapata took a radical step.

He penned the Plan of Ayala , a manifesto that not only voiced the frustrations of the peasantry but also outlined a vision for a more equitable society.

It was an audacious document, one that explicitly called for sweeping land reforms and redistribution of estates.

The Plan didn't merely critique the system—it proposed an alternative, a vision of social justice rooted in the rights and dignity of the peasantry.

Declaring Rebellion

Zapata's Plan of Ayala was not just a document of critique and vision—it was a declaration of rebellion.

Unwilling to wait for Madero's slow-paced reforms, Zapata took matters into his own hands.

He declared himself in rebellion against Madero's government, signaling a shift from peaceful negotiation to open confrontation.

It was a bold move, one fraught with danger and uncertainty, but it was a step Zapata was ready to take.

He chose to challenge the might of the establishment, armed with nothing but his unwavering conviction and the support of his people. It was a step that further cemented Zapata's status as a revolutionary leader, a champion of the peasants' rights.

1912 — THE REVOLUTION'S STRUGGLES

In this year, Emiliano Zapata found himself battling on two fronts.

On one hand, he continued his fight against the landed elites who refused to acknowledge the rights of the peasants. On the other hand, he had to resist the forces of Francisco Madero, who had become the president but had failed to deliver on his promises of land reform.

It was a testing time for the revolutionary, but Zapata's resolve didn't waver. His determination only served to cement his leadership and strengthen his cause.

1913 — THE TEN TRAGIC DAYS

The year began with a bloody event known as La Decena Trágica, or the Ten Tragic Days, in Mexico City. President Madero was overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by General Victoriano Huerto.

This event dramatically changed the dynamics of the Revolution. Zapata, who had been an opponent of Madero due to his slow pace on land reform, now found himself opposing the even more ruthless regime of Huerto.

This marked the beginning of an even more violent phase in the Mexican Revolution and in Zapata's struggle.

1914 — THE BRIEF TRIUMPH

In a turn of events that few could have predicted, Emiliano Zapata, the peasant leader from Morelos, found himself leading his forces into the heart of Mexico—the capital city itself.

It was a significant moment, not just for Zapata and his troops, but also for the revolution they represented.

The capture of Mexico City was seen as a symbolic victory, a message to the powers-that-be that the revolution was not just a remote disturbance, but a force capable of reaching their doorsteps.

A Glimpse of Victory

For a fleeting moment in 1914, it seemed as if the revolution was on the brink of an astounding victory.

Zapata's forces held sway over Mexico City, a tangible sign of their strength and resilience.

Amid the chaos and uncertainties of revolution, this was a moment of hope, a brief respite where the dream of a transformed Mexico appeared within grasp.

Zapata himself, even as he negotiated the labyrinthine challenges of power, must have felt a sense of achievement, a sense that his lifelong struggle was bearing fruit.

Conflict and Retreat

However, revolutions are rarely straightforward, and Zapata's moment of triumph was short-lived.

Internal power struggles within the ranks of the revolutionaries began to undermine their united front. Disagreements over the course of the revolution, differing ideologies, and personal ambitions sparked conflict—marrying the unified stance they had managed to hold thus far.

This discord led to an eventual retreat from the city.

The dream of a quick victory evaporated, replaced by the harsh reality of a prolonged struggle.

The Resilient Revolutionary

Despite the setback, Zapata didn't lose heart.

His belief in the cause of the revolution remained unshaken.

His leadership, his commitment to the peasantry, and his unwavering belief in land reform remained undeterred.

If anything, the events of 1914 served to steel his resolve. In the face of adversity, Zapata stood tall, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a beacon of hope for his followers, and a thorn in the side of the establishment.

1914 may have ended in retreat, but for Zapata, it was merely a chapter in the ongoing saga of the revolution.

1915 — THE CLASH OF IDEOLOGIES

The year 1915 brought about a new challenge for Emiliano Zapata: a confrontation with Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalist forces.

Carranza, who had risen to power following the fall of the previous regime, represented a different strain of the revolution. His ideology was in stark contrast to that of Zapata.

Where Zapata was a radical, advocating for sweeping land reform and staunchly defending the rights of the peasantry, Carranza was more conservative, representing a more moderate, institutional approach to reform.

A Battle of Ideals

Throughout the year, the ideological divergence between Zapata and Carranza fueled fierce confrontations.

The battles were not just for territory, but for the heart and soul of the revolution itself.

On one hand, Zapata's Plan of Ayala called for the reclamation and redistribution of land, aligning closely with the hopes and aspirations of the peasantry.

On the other hand, Carranza's Constitutionalist forces sought to usher in changes within the existing framework, causing tensions with Zapata's more radical approach.

The struggle was not merely political—it was fundamentally a battle of ideals, a struggle to define the path forward for Mexico.

Resilience Amidst Conflict

Despite the formidable challenge posed by Carranza's forces, Zapata demonstrated remarkable resilience.

He continued to lead his troops against the Constitutionalist forces, refusing to compromise on his commitment to land reform and the rights of the peasantry.

These confrontations, though difficult, further solidified Zapata's reputation as a steadfast leader and champion of the rural working class.

The Fall of a Friend

While Zapata was deeply engaged in confronting Carranza's forces, 1915 also marked a significant personal loss for him.

In June, his fellow revolutionary and one-time ally, Pancho Villa, suffered a heavy defeat in the Battle of Celaya against Carranza's forces.

The defeat marked a significant setback for Villa and changed the course of the revolution.

1916 — THE YEAR OF DEFENSE

The year 1916 found Emiliano Zapata in a defensive stance, deeply committed to safeguarding his stronghold in Morelos.

This was his home, his bastion, a symbol of the revolution he led. Against the aggressive maneuvers of the Carranza government, Morelos stood as a testament to Zapata's resilience.

His dedication to protecting his people and their lands never wavered, even as the forces of the established order threatened to overwhelm him.

A Revolution Fractured

While Zapata was holding his ground in Morelos, the broader revolutionary movement was facing a disheartening reality.

The unity that had once powered the revolution was fracturing; ideologies were clashing, alliances were failing, and the revolution was losing ground.

Carranza's government, firmly entrenched and fortified by its Constitutionalists, was steadily gaining the upper hand. But Zapata, despite these adversities, stood firm, serving as a beacon of hope amidst a sea of despair.

Unyielding Conviction

Zapata's resolve in the face of mounting challenges was remarkable.

Each attack from the Carranza forces was met with fierce resistance, every attempt to encroach upon his land was repelled.

Zapata's conviction was rooted in his unwavering belief in his cause—the rights of the peasantry and the necessity for radical land reform.

His tenacity was a rallying cry for his followers, a source of strength for those who were beginning to lose hope.

The Northern Campaign

Even amidst his defensive stance in Morelos, Zapata managed to coordinate a northern campaign in an attempt to link up with his ally, Pancho Villa, who had been waging his own battles against Carranza.

This demonstrated Zapata's strategic acumen and his commitment to the broader revolutionary cause.

Despite the severe challenges, Zapata's spirit remained undaunted, his will unbroken.

The year of defense, as 1916 came to be known, was emblematic of Zapata's fighting spirit, and a stark reminder of the revolutionary leader's unyielding commitment to his cause.

1917 — A CONSTITUTION, BUT NO PEACE

In February 1917, the new Constitution of Mexico was adopted.

While it promised some reforms, it was not enough to satisfy Zapata's demand for radical agrarian reform.

Conflict continued to brew, and the divisions within the revolutionaries grew deeper.

1918 — HOLDING OUT HOPE

Despite the ongoing challenges, Zapata managed to maintain control over Morelos and continued to implement his vision of land reform in areas under his control.

As the world was plunged into the chaos of the first World War, Zapata held out hope for his cause, firmly entrenched in the ideals of liberty and land for his people.

APRIL 10, 1919 — THE MARTYRDOM

On the 10th of April 1919, Emiliano Zapata met a fate that is all too common to revolutionaries who dare to challenge the status quo—he was betrayed.

Lured to the hacienda of Chinameca by government forces feigning interest in defection, Zapata walked into an ambush.

The leader, who had spent years evading the countless attempts on his life, was finally ensnared, falling victim to an act of treachery most foul.

It was a grim day, marking the physical end of one of Mexico's most enduring revolutionary figures.

The Fallen Champion

Zapata's death sent shockwaves through the revolutionary movement and across Mexico.

The champion of the peasantry, the fiery advocate for land reform, the uncompromising leader who had withstood years of conflict against overwhelming odds, had fallen.

It was a significant blow, not just to his followers, but to the revolutionary cause as a whole. The loss of their leader, their guide, their source of inspiration, left a gaping void.

The Immortal Ideals

Yet, even as Zapata's physical presence was extinguished, his influence proved to be indomitable.

His ideals—his unwavering commitment to land and liberty, his undying belief in the rights of the peasantry, his vision of a just and equitable society—did not perish with him.

Instead, they lived on, immortalized in the hearts and minds of those he inspired.

Emiliano Zapata: Mexico’s Greatest Revolutionary

When you hear the words “Mexican Revolution” which historical figure do you immediately picture? We’re guessing it’s Pancho Villa, the sombrero wearing, gun-toting Robin Hood bandit who infamously attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916. But while Villa is the revolutionary who gets all the press, he was far from the most respected, most influential, or even most interesting. No. That honor instead goes to a mestizo horse trainer from the impoverished state of Morelos, a man who began his life with almost nothing, and wound up reshaping the whole of Mexico. That revolutionary’s name? Emiliano Zapata.

Born into a small village during the heyday of the Porfirian dictatorship, Zapata’s life should’ve passed in blissful obscurity. Yet a combination of circumstance and timing wound up thrusting him into the spotlight just as Mexico exploded. An uncompromising supporter of land rights for the poor, a general capable of conquering Mexico City, and a tragic folk hero who died for his cause, this is the story of Mexico’s greatest revolutionary.

A Poor Man in a Cruel World

For a man identified so closely with revolution, it’s a mild historical irony that Emiliano Zapata was born just as the greatest period of Mexican upheaval ended.

In 1876, three years before Zapata’s birth, the decades of unrest that had followed independence came to a close when General Porfirio Diaz seized the presidency, ushering in a long period of stability and growth known as the Porfiriato.

But don’t go thinking that stable means popular. 

The Porfiriato was a dictatorship. Elections were rigged, dissent was crushed, and the lower classes locked out of power. And nowhere suffered under Diaz’s perfumed boot more than Zapata’s home state of Morelos. In 1879, the year of Zapata’s birth, Morelos was Mexico’s newest state, a small blob of mountainous terrain not 100km from Mexico City. It was also one of the poorest. Seriously, Morelos’s major commodity was dirt-poor peasants farming dirt-poor land.

And this poor quality dirt was about to cause a massive problem.

For generations, the villages in Morelos had relied on communal land to produce enough crops to avoid starvation. But now Porfirio Diaz was in power. And he couldn’t care less about communal land rights. While the Porfiriato turned a blind eye, wealthy land owners known as hacendados started aggressively occupying communal land in Morelos. There’s actually a story – probably apocryphal – that when Emiliano Zapata was just 9 he witnessed his father break down crying after a hacendado fenced off an orchard.

At first, the villages of Morelos tried to fight back.

They petitioned officials, staged protests, even tried to hire lawyers.  But the Porfiriato was propped up by the same people stealing that land. What was Porfirio Diaz gonna do? Arrest the hacendados keeping him in power? For Zapata, growing up in Morelos meant growing up in a world where hacendados could not just steal land without consequences, but kill anyone who got in their way.

There’s a famous story about one village lawyer who took his case against a hacendado all the way to Porfirio Diaz himself.  Diaz shook the guy’s hand, told him he’d look into it… and then had the lawyer thrown into a labor camp. And that’s where things stood in Morelos just before the Mexican Revolution broke out: a bunch of voiceless, pissed-off peasants desperately crying for a leader to stand up for their rights.

Luckily for them, Emiliano Zapata was about to answer that call.

Stand Up and Fight   

So that’s the world Zapata inhabited. But what about the man himself? Who was the guy about to fight for Morelos? Emiliano Zapata was born on August 8, 1879, in the village of Anenecuilco, just one of the many Morelos villages losing vital land to the hacendados.

But while Zapata’s village was dirt poor, the man himself was not. The family Zapata was born into was actually doing kinda OK – at least, by Mexican peasant standards.  They had one of the biggest houses in Anenecuilco, and Zapata’s father was a respected horse trainer. This career evidently rubbed off on the young lad. By the time he was a teenager, Zapata was one of the best horse-trainers in Morelos, with even the hacendados after his expertise.

This would turn out to be a very useful trait to have.

Not long after Zapata turned 17, both his parents died. The following year, 1897, Zapata took part in land rights protest and was arrested and drafted into the Porfirian army. But when he was discharged six months later, it wasn’t into poverty.

With Zapata senior dead and Zapata in the army, the super-rich hacendados had become super-desperate for a great horse trainer.  And now Zapata was back, they were willing to pay super-big bucks. For Zapata, this was almost like being gifted a bottomless piggybank.

He competed in races, in rodeos; hawked his skills to whoever could afford them.

While he certainly never got rich, he got not-poor. Not-poor enough to afford not just fancy clothes, but also the bucketloads of wax it presumably took to maintain that glorious moustache.  As Zapata’s local fame grew, so did his interest in village politics. Remember that possibly-fake story about Zapata watching his father weep over an enclosed orchard?  

Well, Zapata certainly seems to have remembered it, because in 1906 he began sitting in on village meetings about how to stop the hacendados being such land-stealing dicks. By 1908, 25% of all land in Morelos was owned by a mere 17 families. Given that the other 75% was mostly low-quality stuff those families didn’t want, this was a serious issue. But Zapata wasn’t yet ready to pick up a gun and fight to make things fairer.

This was 1908. The Porfiriato had stood for 32 years, so long that revolting against it seemed impossible. Yet 1908 was also the year the foundations of the Porfiriato would be destroyed by an unlikely source: 

Porfirio Diaz himself.

A Brave New World?

If you’ve ever accidentally blurted out something only to immediately regret it, just know that there’s no way you’ve ever regretted it as much as Porfirio Diaz.

In 1908, Diaz gave an interview to the American journalist James Creelman that was supposed to be full of softball questions Creelman could then write up into a vomit-inducing puff piece. Unfortunately, Creelman just happened to ask what would happen when Diaz – now in his 70s – became too old to run Mexico. It’s here that Diaz didn’t just stick his foot in his mouth, but practically swallowed his own legs.

Diaz declared that Mexico would become a democracy. That he would step down in 1910 and allow a fair election to choose his successor. 

“I have waited patiently for the day when the people of the Mexican Republic would be prepared to choose and change their government at every election…” he told Creelman. “I believe that day has come.”

Now this was all highest grade cattle dung. Diaz just wanted to sound good to Creelman’s American readers. But Diaz forgot to tell anyone in Mexico he was lying. So when the interview was published in February, 1908, everyone was like “is this for real?” To which Porfirio Diaz basically replied “Err… yeah? I mean, I guess?”

And so began the slow implosion of the Porfiriato. Down in Morelos, Emiliano Zapata was one of those looking to test Diaz’s word.

The state governor had just died and local elites had put up a jerk to replace him. So Zapata and some other village leaders decided to run their own candidate. If Diaz was for real, he’d let them campaign. And he did. To everyone’s surprise, Zapata and the others were able to travel Morelos, drumming up support for their guy.

This meant Zapata meeting many of the movers and shakers in other villages, and getting his name out across the state, along with his candidate. Come the Morelos election in February, 1909, Zapata’s group were certain they would win.

But, no. At the last moment, Diaz remembered he was meant to be a dictator and rigged the vote. The new Morelos governor lost no time hiking up taxes on the villages that had supported Zapata’s candidate as a warning to never vote against Porfirio Diaz again. To say this made Zapata furious is kind of like saying Krakatoa made a little bit of a bang.

From this point on, he was no longer going to play the Porfiriato’s game. 

If Diaz wasn’t going to change by his own accord, maybe it was time someone forced him. The following year, 1910, Zapata made his first stand. A local hacendado had fenced off a communal hillside. So Zapata armed 80 men, went up to that hillside, and tore the fences down. For his trouble, he got labeled a bandit and had to flee into the mountains.

So far, so unimpressive.

But something was about to happen in wider Mexico that would change Zapata’s fortunes. While those in Morelos had gotten early warning that Diaz wasn’t really gonna allow fair elections, the rest of Mexico hadn’t got the message. So come the 1910 election, a wealthy liberal named Francisco Madero ran against Diaz. And – crucially – everyone decided to vote for him. 

And suddenly Diaz was faced with a country full of people desperate to see the back of him.

Of course, Diaz didn’t let the vote happen. True to type, he had Madero arrested and declared himself winner of a new presidential term. But Diaz had unleashed a very powerful genie with the Creelman interview, a genie called Hope.  And, once that particular genie was out the bottle, it proved impossible to put back.

Later that year, sympathizers helped Francisco Madero escape Mexico and get into the US. 

There, Madero made a momentous decision. If Diaz wasn’t going to leave voluntarily, Madero would force him out at gunpoint.

Viva la revolución!  

Today, Mexico celebrates November 20 as a public holiday, as that’s when Madero declared his revolution against Diaz. But if you’d been in Mexico on November 20, 1910, you’d have barely noticed.

That’s because Madero’s call to arms was heeded by no-one.

Well, almost no-one. The only reason November 20 has gone down in history is because one of the few people to heed Madero’s call was Pancho Villa. And Villa was a guy who knew how to do revolution. But what about Zapata? How did he respond to Madero’s call?

Um, he didn’t really do anything.

Down in Morelos, Zapata couldn’t give a cat’s gonad what Pancho Villa was doing way up in the north. Sure, he wanted Diaz gone, but it’s not like Madero was promising land reform. In early 1911, though, things changed. On March 11, Madero crossed back into Mexico to take control of the growing revolutionary army. Almost immediately, they started whupping Diaz’s guys in battle. Zapata now faced an urgent choice. Either jump onto this revolutionary bandwagon and hope things worked out, or step back from the brink and wait for the next opportunity.

Zapata jumped.

That May, Zapata’s peasant army managed to capture the city of Cuautla. At the same time, Pancho Villa seized Ciudad Juárez. Faced with multiple revolutionary armies on multiple fronts, Diaz saw the writing on the wall. On May 25, 1911, Porfirio Diaz resigned and boarded a boat to Europe. He would die in exile just four years later.

Fair warning: Diaz is just about the only person in this video who isn’t going to die violently. In the wake of Diaz’s flight, an interim president took over for the sole purpose of organizing new elections. Since everyone knew Madero would win, the interim president asked the revolutionary armies to stand down. To which Zapata replied “nah, we’re good,” and promptly captured Cuernavaca. If that seems strange to you, just remember that Zapata had been burned before. He wasn’t going to end his rebellion until Madero had committed to land reform.

That June, the two men finally met in Mexico City to discuss the issue.

While Madero didn’t give any firm commitments, Zapata did leave the meeting thinking Madero was an honest man he could do business with.  He was so convinced of this that even when the federal army attacked Morelos under the bloodthirsty General Victoriano Huerta, Zapata thought it was all the interim president’s fault. That Madero would put an end to all this when he was finally elected.

Oh, Zapata. Are you in for a nasty surprise.

That October, 1911, Madero won the presidency in a landslide. Almost immediately he dispatched an agent to negotiate with Zapata. At first, things went well. The agent seemed super into Zapata’s ideas on land reform, and it really looked like things were going somewhere.

And then it all went wrong.

Either acting under secret orders or because he’d gone rouge, a general in the federal army surrounded Zapata’s men in the middle of negotiations. When Zapata tried to desperately contact Madero, he got an odd message back. We will negotiate, Madero assured him. But only if you surrender unconditionally.

It was the last straw.

Zapata broke off negotiations. Taking a small band of men, he fled back into the Morelos mountains, bitter at his apparent betrayal.  It was clearly time for another revolution.

Only, this time, it would be Zapata leading the charge.

The Plan of Ayala  

At this point you may be wondering why Zapata is a guy who deserves a Biographics. Sure, he’s helped overthrow one dictator, but there’s gotta be more, right? Well, yeah, there is. And it’s known as the Plan of Ayala. Issued by Zapata on November 28, 1911 – barely three weeks after Madero double-crossed him – the Plan of Ayala is still one of history’s key revolutionary texts. A radical agrarian manifesto, it would go on to influence nearly every Latin American revolutionary since. And, boy, are there ever a lot of Latin American revolutionaries.

So what was it?

At its heart, the Plan of Ayala was a vision for a fairer world based on land redistribution. While it comprised of 15 points, most of them were just trash talking Madero, so we’ll concentrate strictly on points 6 through 8. In abridged form, they went something like this:

Point 6: communal land seized by hacendados will be given back to villages.

Point 7: One third of all land held by the rich will be expropriated and given to the poor, so everyone has a chance to improve their lot in life. Landowners will be compensated.

Point 8: Those who resist point 7 will have their lands nationalized without compensation, with the government using this land to create a fund for war widows and the very poorest.

The Plan of Ayala wasn’t so much a game changer as it was the creation of a whole new game. At the time it was written, the Russian Revolution was still several years off. The idea of a revolt that put the very poorest in society at its heart was near unprecedented. This was a radical, radical document.

And it was going to blow up Mexico.

That winter, revolts against the Madero government inspired by the Plan broke out across Mexico. So the government fought fire with fire. In Morelos, the federal army took Zapata’s family hostage. Started burning down villages and funneling the survivors into concentration camps. Zapata himself couldn’t have run a better recruitment campaign. As the atrocities mounted, his ranks of guerilla fighters swelled to the tens of thousands.

Not that Zapata ran anything like a regular army.

His soldiers were peasants. They often took up arms when needed, only to put them down again the moment the battle was won and go back to farming. Nor was Zapata actually their leader yet. At first the peasants in Morelos fought in small, decentralized groups who occasionally came together to take a city or whatever.

It wasn’t until early 1913 that Zapata could really be said to be in charge. 

And by then, his Zapatista army was on the verge of taking Mexico City. When he issued the Plan of Ayala, Zapata had also issued a promise to march into Mexico City and personally hang Madero from a tree. Come early 1913, it really looked like he was gonna do it.

But fate had other ideas.

On February 9, an attempted coup broke out in Mexico City, led by Porfirio Diaz’s nephew, Felix Diaz. While Madero managed to hunker down safely in the Presidential Palace, he also couldn’t defeat the insurrectionists. So he called in General Huerta, the guy we last met killing civilians in Morelos. Huerta took one look at the mounting death toll and decided he could use this for his own ends.

On February 17, Huerta switched sides. Backed by the US ambassador, he convinced Madero to surrender. Then he had Madero loaded into a car, driven to a secluded spot, and shot dead. In the aftermath of the Ten Tragic Days, Huerta sidelined Felix Diaz and had himself declared president. His first act was to send a messenger to Zapata and see if he wanted to join forces.

It was the beginning of a new era in the Mexican Revolution. And it wouldn’t end until nearly all its players were dead.

We Almost Won…

The dictatorship of General Huerta was as short and as pointless as a blow-up Napoleon sex doll. When Zapata got Huerta’s offer to join forces he was all like “wait, weren’t you the guy killing all those villagers in Morelos? Uh, NO,” and went straight back to fighting.

But Huerta was also unpopular outside Zapata’s clique. 

In the North, Pancho Villa restarted his revolution. In the state of Coahuila, governor Venustiano Carranza declared himself in rebellion and raised an army known as the Constitutionalists. Before Huerta could even warm the president’s chair, his regime was crumbling on all sides. It didn’t help that Huerta was basically trying to be the new Porfirio Diaz. Even those who supported his coup didn’t want to live under a Porfiriato tribute act.

By mid-1914, the combined pressure of the Zapatistas, Pancho Villa’s army, and Carranza’s Constitutionalists had left Huerta a dictator incapable of dictating to anyone. On 14 July, Huerta resigned and fled Mexico. Although he would later try to re-enter the country and raise a new army, he’d be arrested at the border by US authorities. He died in prison in 1916.

But while Huerta’s departure was a win for the revolutionaries, it also made things a thousand times worse.

The problem was that Zapata, Villa, and Carranza were all in this fight for different reasons. Zapata wanted land reform and to Hell with everything else. Villa wanted money and fame and to hang some elites, while Carranza wanted to be president without quite knowing why.

When Huerta fled, all three of them started eyeing one another sideways, like the three cowboys at the end of The Good the Bad and the Ugly, knowing they’re going to have to draw pistols on one another, but unsure until the last second who they’re going to shoot. Zapata finally made his decision in the fall. After a failed October meeting between the three revolutionary armies in Aguascalientes, Zapata got frustrated and ordered his men to march on Mexico City.

On November 24, Carranza fled the city ahead of 25,000 armed Zapatistas. 

Incidentally, those Zapatistas were all so overwhelmed by the capital that instead of raiding it they went barefoot from door to door, shyly asking for food and water. But Zapata hadn’t taken the city to show off. He was here to do business. On December 6, that business finally arrived.

Pancho Villa rode into Mexico City at the head of an even bigger army than Zapata’s. The two men met at the Presidential Palace to work out the basis of an alliance. The basis was this: they would both work to lock Carranza out of power. In return, Zapata would get his land reform, while Villa would get a civilian president – one whose name likely rhymed with “Bancho Billa.”

As these two great revolutionaries left the palace, they must’ve felt their time had finally come. That they were unstoppable. Neither man knew that the high water mark of the revolution had already come and gone.

All that was left now was for the two of them to be swallowed by the waves.

The Plan in Action

Not long after his meeting with Villa, Zapata abandoned Mexico City. Back in Morelos, he started putting the Plan of Ayala into action. In practice, this meant redistributing land however he saw fit. Mostly that involved expropriating haciendas, but Zapata wasn’t above burning them to the ground if the local hacendado refused to comply.

The Zapatistas even set up a Rural Loan Bank, helping peasants buy their own plots to farm.

It was a transformation for Morelos, one that Zapata was sure would provide a template for the entire country. He even contacted Woodrow Wilson’s White House to see if they fancied recognizing him as Mexico’s legitimate president.

The White House passed on the offer. But whatever high Zapata was feeling in early 1915 was about to be lost forever. As was his newest ally.

In April, Pancho Villa fought Carranza’s forces at the Battle of Celaya. Villa used his classic near-suicidal cavalry charge, which in this case turned out to be completely suicidal. Carranza’s general, Álvaro Obregón, had been studying tactics from WWI, and used machineguns to mow down Villa’s army.

By the end of the battle, Villa was alive but no longer a threat.

That meant there was nothing to stop Carranza from turning his attention solely onto Zapata. That October, the United States officially recognized Carranza as Mexico’s head of state. Around the same time, the federal army moved into Morelos, determined to bring Zapata to heel.

Once again, villages were burned. Once again, civilians were killed. 

But this time, Zapata didn’t just flee to the hills as a noble folk hero. He tried to fight back using Carranza’s own tactics. The results left indelible bloodstains on Zapata’s legacy. In November, 1916, Zapatistas bombed two passenger trains heading into Mexico City. The terror attack killed almost 400 people – double the death toll of the 2004 Madrid Train Bombings.

While the slaughter didn’t dent Zapata’s popularity in Morelos, it left him isolated in the rest of Mexican society.  The final nail in the coffin came in early 1917.  After months of deliberation, Carranza promulgated a new constitution that basically ripped off the Plan of Ayala. 

It opened the door for expropriations. For nationalization of communal land. For redistribution. For a fairer society where peasants were actually treated as human. For most Mexicans, the Constitution of 1917 made Zapata’s fight seem pretty pointless. “Dude, you’ve already won. Just stop fighting!”

But Zapata wouldn’t stop. Or maybe couldn’t.

And, realistically, who could make him?

He was still popular in Morelos. No matter how many trains Zapata bombed, no matter how constitutions Carranza issued, nothing would change the fact that Morelos was going to stand by Zapata to the bitter end. So Carranza simply made sure that end came quicker and was more bitter than anyone had expected. In 1919, a federal general fighting in Morelos named Jesús Guajardo abruptly switched sides. His unit turned on the other federal forces, killing 59.

When he got the news, Zapata arranged a meeting with Guajardo, eager to bring him into the Zapatista fold.  Guajardo suggested they meet at a remote hacienda. Apparently having never heard of the concept of a trap, Zapata agreed. On April 10, 1919, Emiliano Zapata and ten armed men rode to the abandoned hacienda to negotiate with Guajardo. 

Before Zapata could even open his mouth, dozens and dozens of federal soldiers opened fire from hiding places. The revolutionary never stood a chance. Zapata died that day in a hail of bullets, just the latest Mexican revolutionary to meet a violent fate. 

He wouldn’t be the last.

Barely a year later, on May 21, Venustiano Carranza would be assassinated in turn by his former general, Álvaro Obregón. Obregón’s luck would last a little longer, before he, too, was assassinated in 1928. By then, the only other leader to survive the revolution was also dead. Pancho Villa was gunned down in 1923, in an ambush not unlike the one that killed Zapata. And, just to tie things up, we should probably mention that Guajardo was also assassinated after helping arrange Zapata’s assassination, because apparently that’s just how things roll in revolutionary Mexico.

Hey, we did warn you everyone in this video but Diaz was gonna die violently.

At the end of all that bloodshed, then what did Emiliano Zapata achieve? Why do we still know his name today? For an answer to that, just look back at the Plan of Ayala. In the decade of the revolution, land reform had gone from a drum being banged by a few obsessed peasants in Morelos to something the whole of Mexico cared about.

Even though Carranza’s 1917 constitution was scrapped after his assassination, elements of the Plan of Ayala still crept into its successor. Even today, it affects how many in Latin America think about land rights. But Zapata was more than just a guy who wrote an influential plan.

In his years as a revolutionary, Zapata became famous as someone who cared about the poor, who was uncompromising in his beliefs, who was willing to stand up to a rotten system. He was far from a perfect man, but he was also something more than a mere human. He was a folk hero, a Robin Hood who really existed. A myth brought to life.

For all his faults, Emiliano Zapata is one folk hero the world will never forget.

Excellent podcast on Zapata’s early life (multiple episodes): https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2018/09/907-morelos.html  

Episode two: https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2018/11/913-the-plan-of-ayala.html

BBC Podcast on the Mexican Revolution: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhz8d  

Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emiliano-Zapata  

Biography: https://www.biography.com/political-figure/emiliano-zapata  

Assassination: https://books.google.cz/books?id=8urEDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA376&lpg=PA376&dq=mexico+city+train+bombing+1916&source=bl&ots=MxZGyndqQB&sig=ACfU3U01HIQ2TJItNSByDkie9TjaxulWHQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUr6Pl7aDlAhUFmVwKHbSvDZsQ6AEwGXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=mexico%20city%20train%20bombing%201916&f=false

Francisco Madero: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francisco-Madero  

Huerta: https://www.thoughtco.com/biography-of-victoriano-huerta-2136491  

Carranza: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Venustiano-Carranza

Mexican Revolution: https://www.britannica.com/place/Mexico/The-age-of-Porfirio-Diaz  

Mexican Revolution: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mexican-revolution-and-the-united-states/civil-war-conventionist-view.html  

Zapatista train bombing:  https://books.google.cz/books?id=F4-dAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA651&lpg=PA651&dq=zapatista+train+bombing+mexico+city&source=bl&ots=up813iydPN&sig=ACfU3U1NmNAzM5crBrpelucaHK1gtUxnnw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifkfeQ7KDlAhW0nVwKHdvqDukQ6AEwDnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=zapatista%20train%20bombing%20mexico%20city&f=false

Read the Creelman interview here: https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-3-mexico/primary-documents-with-accompanying-discussion-questions/document-4-president-diaz-hero-of-the-americas-by-james-creelman-1908-interview-with-president-porfirio-diaz/  

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Remembering Emiliano Zapata: Three Moments in the Posthumous Career of the Martyr of Chinameca

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Samuel Brunk; Remembering Emiliano Zapata: Three Moments in the Posthumous Career of the Martyr of Chinameca. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 August 1998; 78 (3): 457–490. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-78.3.457

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A people without monuments is a people without history. —Absalón Castellanos Domínguez, Governor of Chiapas

My father doesn’t need commemorations. He’s already had plenty of speeches. Nothing but demagoguery. Nothing but empty promises, and the campesinos are still as screwed over as before. —Mateo Zapata

The powerful and their big money don’t understand why Votán-Zapata doesn’t die, they don’t understand why he returns and raises his death-transformed-into-life through the word of truthful men and women. —Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

Emiliano Zapata is one of the most significant figures in Mexican history. In early 1911 he and a small group of campesinos from the south-central state of Morelos joined a broader rebellion against the regime of long-time president Porfirio Díaz. They fought to stop haciendas from continuing to infringe on the land and water rights of peasant communities in their state and to recover resources that had already been lost. They fought, too, for local liberties—for the right of villagers to take greater responsibility for their own destiny. They fought, in sum, for conditions crucial to the preservation of their rural culture. Zapata soon took over the leadership of this growing movement and Díaz, surprisingly, soon fell. Zapata then discovered, however, that leaders of other revolutionary groups did not consider land reform a pressing problem, if they thought about the issue at all. And so he continued to fight, for nearly a decade, in the struggle that became known as the Mexican Revolution, developing a national program and a national reputation in the process. On April 10, 1919, he was ambushed and killed at the hacienda Chinameca by soldiers loyal to the revolutionary faction of Venustiano Carranza, who had been trying since 1915 to consolidate power in Mexico City. Zapata was buried in the graveyard of the important Morelos town of Cuautla.

Zapata’s military career was over, but his posthumous career had just begun. His lasting power was vividly demonstrated on the first day of 1994, when the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) rose up in the state of Chiapas against the regime of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. For a historian who has devoted considerable time to exploring Zapatismo in dusty archives, it was astonishing—and somewhat disconcerting—to watch as these Chiapan rebels came to be called, so casually, los zapatistas. But the advent of this neo-Zapatismo has contributed to a remarkable contest over Zapata’s image during the 1990s, and this has certainly been rewarding for this scholar, not only in showing that Zapata continues to be significant, but in suggesting how and why that might be so.

In an attempt to allow market forces freer play in the Mexican economy, in 1991 and 1992 Salinas took the highly controversial step of abandoning those provisions in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 that called for the redistribution of land and protected communal landholding. Although for decades politicians of the ruling party—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)—had claimed that Zapata’s demands had been the inspiration for Article 27, the Salinas administration frequently employed the figure of Zapata, both visually and verbally, in pushing its reforms. Salinas’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo, has continued both his predecessor’s agrarian policies and his efforts to make use of the memory of Zapata. 1

Salinas and Zedillo have not been particularly successful in giving a new meaning to Zapata’s legacy. Peasants opposing the changes to Article 27 have generally utilized Zapata in their marches, and since 1994 the EZLN has rallied opposition to the national government around a renewed Zapatismo, often in creative ways. In August 1994, for example, the EZLN held a convention in Chiapas. To house this event, it carved a new settlement out of the jungle, which it named Aguascalientes , in reference to the site of the convention that occurred in the thick of the Mexican Revolution in 1914. At that original convention, the followers of Emiliano Zapata and those of Francisco “Pancho” Villa formed an alliance, which was consolidated when Zapata and Villa met in Mexico City in December of that same year. There they were memorialized in one of the revolution’s most famous photographs, which pictured Villa sitting in the presidential chair, Zapata beside him with a giant sombrero on his knee, and a crowd of hopeful revolutionaries behind them. To advertise its Convención de Aguascalientes, the EZLN plastered Mexico City with posters that appropriated this photograph, inserting in place of Zapata the EZLN’s most prominent spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, wearing his signature ski mask, but also with the sombrero. Beside him, supplanting Villa, was social activist and professional wrestler Superbarrio Gómez, in his customary wrestling garb. Salinas, too, proved himself adept at this kind of political theater. Shortly after the outbreak of the Chiapas insurgency he proclaimed amnesty for the rebels and expressed his desire for dialogue. Although Salinas was not ready to renounce the PRI’s historical ties to Zapata, he elected to announce these measures in front of an image of Carranza. The symbolism was not lost on Subcomandante Marcos. 2

Clearly, Mexican politics in the 1990s are about more than policy offerings. They are also about style, about “spin.” And for Salinas, Zedillo, and the EZLN, finding the proper spin has meant, among other things, deciding how best to engage in the battle over symbols surrounding Zapata. This is true because Zapata, as the key spokesman for the revolution’s most fundamental social issue, has remained a commanding historical personage. But the political imperative to make something of Zapata has perhaps less to do with the story of Zapata the man than with that of his mythical twin—with the way in which memories of him have developed within Mexico’s political cultures since his death.

Florencia Mallon defines political culture as a combination of “beliefs, practices, and debates around the accumulation and contestation of power.” 3 Myth, meanwhile, can be defined as “a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.” 4 This definition does not exclude the possibility that elements of a myth might be historically accurate. Indeed, it is difficult to make a precise distinction between myth and history, given that both fall short of “truth” in that both cut experience down to a thinkable, and therefore meaningful, size. The difference may lie in the kinds of meaning they contain: in its connection to “the world view of a people,” a myth is popular and communal in a way that history generally is not. 5

In his book Imagined Communities , Benedict Anderson has drawn attention to the ways in which myth has helped people imagine—or create—nations, often by allowing them to envision a deep historical unity for a population based on what they assume to be shared cultural roots. 6 Anderson also contends that nationalist thought is, in general, much concerned with issues of death and immortality and that this preoccupation is reflected in the tombs of the unknown soldier that exist in many countries. The imagining of a nation, in other words, often includes what can perhaps best be called ancestor worship. 7

This generalization about ties between death and nationalism is intriguing because the circumstances of Zapata’s death have been of tremendous significance to the process through which he has been mythified. Speech makers habitually refer to him as the “Martyr of Chinameca,” and his death has provided a stage for remembering him through the rituals of commemoration held on the anniversary of his assassination, first at his grave and then, increasingly, elsewhere. Octavio Paz has written that Zapata’s image is “made up of patience and fecundity, silence and hope, death and resurrection.” To this he adds the observation that “Zapata dies at every popular fair.” 8

The examination of the myth of Zapata, then, leads to questions about the formation, or reformation, of national identity after the revolution. The use of this myth by Salinas and Zedillo indicates that it also has something to do with state power and with continual efforts by representatives of the state to convince others of the state’s legitimacy. 9 Relationships between elements of political culture, identity, and the state have only recently begun to receive careful attention from students of the Mexican Revolution. The participants, observers, and historians who first wrote about the revolution described it as a popular, agrarian event that overturned the feudal Díaz regime and instituted social reform. 10 But as the decades passed and the new state revealed itself to be a corrupt and authoritarian structure that seemed incapable of—or uninterested in—resolving the problem of peasant poverty, this interpretation proved difficult to maintain. During the 1970s and 1980s, historians of the “revisionist” school downplayed popular mobilization and social reform and stressed, instead, the emergence of a new elite that established a more centralized and effectively coercive state. Among the products of the revisionist current was Ilene O’Malley’s study of the development of hero cults between 1920 and 1940; which explored how the state constructed a conservative, demobilizing myth of the revolution. 11

Though it was often only implicit, a key question raised by the revisionists was whether a truly popular revolution could produce an authoritarian state. The publication of Alan Knight’s recent synthesis, which convincingly revived the popular and agrarian emphases of those who first wrote on the revolution, suggested a better question: Why and how did such a revolution produce such a state? 12 In recent years historians have sought to answer this question by focusing on the relationship between Mexico’s various political cultures and the process of state formation. In a series of broad, suggestive articles, Knight has done much to frame the discussion of this relationship, arguing that at least up to 1940 the state had only limited success with a cultural project that aimed to modernize Mexican society, enhance identification with a national community, and, of course, legitimize state power. 13 By scrutinizing the negotiations between the state and popular cultures that are embodied in public celebrations, political discourse, and the implementation of such revolutionary programs as “socialist” education and land reform, many of the contributors to two seminal edited volumes have also tried to measure the effectiveness of this project. 14

Informed by these postrevisionist studies, this article will return to the subject of hero cults by tracing the development of the myth of Zapata over the longue durée of Mexico’s twentieth century. It will do this by analyzing commemorative rituals held on the anniversary of Zapata’s death against the backdrop of three distinct moments in postrevolutionary history. The first of these commemorations took place in 1924, when the representatives of the new state were clearly still in pursuit of legitimacy. The second occurred in 1950, by which time we might presume that the state had achieved legitimacy, if it ever did. 15 The third anniversary to be discussed is that of 1995, when, as we have seen, the legitimacy of the state was again called into question.

This investigation of the Zapata myth will contend that the success of the state’s cultural project has indeed been limited. By honoring Zapata soon after his death as one of the founding fathers of the new revolutionary state, politicians gained considerable support from peasants in his home territory. In the decades that followed, these politicians were also successful in making the cult of Zapata an element of national identity by propagating it throughout Mexico. But while this combination of Zapata, nation, and state proved potent enough to reinforce the state’s legitimacy in the minds of some onlookers at any given anniversary ritual, the state never came to control memories of Zapata. One reason for this can be found in Paz’s slightly overstated observation that Zapata dies at every popular fair, which draws our attention to the fact that he has been remembered in localities all over Mexico. Like nations, smaller communities are imagined with the help of myths and through the repetition of rituals that—whether popular fairs or commemorations—bring people together to reaffirm communities of all sizes and disseminate myths within them. 16 Even as Zapata helped people imagine a national community, in Mexico’s various corners ritual observances of his death gradually created the conditions wherein communities of protest could form around him and use him to challenge the state’s legitimacy.

• 1924: Posthumous Zapata and the New Revolutionary Order

Zapata had already become the object of a hero cult while he was alive. Like other revolutionary leaders, he had become shorthand for his movement, simplifying its meaning, both for its members and for outsiders, by giving it a single human face. When he was killed in 1919 there were conflicting reactions among his followers. Some denied that it was Zapata who had been killed at Chinameca—denying the death of a hero is a conventional part of the mythification process. Others accepted his death and soon began the tradition of gathering at his grave on the anniversary of his murder. 17

In April 1920, Carranza was still in power, so the gathering at the grave—assuming that there was one—was probably a simple local or familial affair. Shortly after that first anniversary, though, the crowning rebellion of the revolutionary decade took place. Alvaro Obregón, who had long fought under Carranza, rose up to remove him from power because Carranza was fixing the presidential race to favor a weak candidate who might serve as his puppet, and Obregón wanted to be president himself. 18 By creating a broad coalition that encompassed many of the scattered guerrilla groups still fighting against Carranza—including the surviving Zapatistas—Obregón quickly won and took power, serving as president from 1920 to 1924.

Obregón was a masterful politician who understood that what had just happened in Mexico was a primarily rural revolution in which many country people, not all of them Zapatistas, had taken up arms to demand land. He realized that this demand would have to be addressed before political stability could be reestablished. But Obregón believed too much in capitalism and private property to pursue a thoroughgoing program of land reform. Instead, he promoted a rather limited agrarian reform, mostly doling out land in key regions where he wished to cultivate support. 19 Meanwhile, since it was Zapata who during the revolutionary decade had most adamantly voiced the demand for land reform, Obregón began to preside over the resurrection of the peasant leader’s image. Once cleansed of certain troublesome realities—like the fact that Zapata had fought for years against the Constitutionalist faction to which Obregón belonged—the memory of the Martyr of Chinameca promised to be helpful in retaining the support of the peasantry.

And so it was that federal officials began to descend on the state of Morelos—and particularly on Cuautla—to commemorate the day of Zapata’s death through increasingly elaborate rituals. In 1924, on the fifth anniversary of his death, the national government took an important step in its acceptance of Zapata. A series of triumphal arches—decorated with flowers, streamers, and Mexican flags—were placed along the street that led from the train station to the graveyard as part of a ceremony to greet Obregón’s handpicked successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, who was then, in effect, campaigning for the presidency. Joining Calles in a procession that wound beneath these arches were other national politicians, representatives of state and local governments from all over Mexico, such prominent individuals as Zapatista intellectual Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama and the muralist Diego Rivera, and five thousand peasants from Morelos and the neighboring Federal District. 20

After the procession arrived at the cemetery, several people spoke, including one who asked those listening to be thankful that they had an honest politician, in Calles, who would implement Zapata’s program without corruption. The crowd chanted “vivas” for Calles, who then proclaimed, “the agrarian program of Zapata is mine.” “I only want to tell you,” he added, “that the hero rests in peace, that his work is over, and that from today on present and future generations of campesinos will follow the path that he blazed through the heart of humanity.” 21 Later, people piled floral wreathes around Zapata’s gravestone.

Like the commemorations that would follow year after year, this ritual was organized not by the national government, but by local and state officials and prominent Zapatistas. In this case, Governor Alfredo Ortega of Morelos, Díaz Soto y Gama and his Partido Nacional Agrarista (PNA), and Genovevo de la O (a Zapatista general who was now the military commander of Morelos) made the arrangements and sent out the invitations. The role of the national government seems to have been limited to facilitating transportation between Mexico City and Morelos. 22 But the invitations that Obregón, Calles, and other national politicians were already becoming accustomed to receiving offered an opportunity to work on the edifices of state and nation. It gave them the opportunity to reaffirm alliances and understandings with local and state officials in Morelos and elsewhere, and, of course, the opportunity to appropriate Zapata, who could be used to justify their policies. Zapata thus came to serve as the vehicle for a symbolic occupation of a locality—Cuautla—that since 1910 had been difficult for national governments to control. 23

National officials were not, however, the only beneficiaries of the event. State and local politicians also stood to gain from this chance to reaffirm their relationships with national politicians and institutions. Moreover, among the five thousand peasants in attendance at the 1924 commemoration, waving banners and shouting ovations, were many Zapatista veterans. Given that Zapatista intellectuals had received government jobs and that land reform was well underway in Morelos, the apparent enthusiasm of these veterans hardly seems surprising. After all, symbols like the one Zapata was becoming cut two ways, both justifying more material developments and being justified by them. 24 Zapata’s followers were also getting something they needed. After a decade of warfare in which most of Mexico’s national administrations had labeled the Zapatistas bandits, their leader was now being acknowledged, in public ritual as well as national policy, as a founding father of the revolutionary state. The state was admitting that the Zapatistas had been right in their struggle all along. This must have been tremendously gratifying to the veterans, and there is no reason to suspect that there was any serious grumbling in the crowd about government hypocrisy. 25 The representatives of the postrevolutionary state and the local peasants were now joined together in the mythification process.

This is not to say that there were no tensions beneath the surface of this gathering. The unseemly speed at which Zapata was moving toward apotheosis on the national level was not lost on observers of the postrevolutionary scene. Newspaper editorials discussed the political motives behind the commemoration, and some journalists maintained that Zapata would be better remembered as metropolitan newspapers had tended to describe him while he was alive—as a bloodthirsty bandit, the Attila of the South—rather than as some sort of revolutionary hero. In fact, public concern over what Calles meant when he adopted Zapata’s program at Cuautla soon had him explaining that he embraced Zapatista agrarianism in only its most general outlines. 26

In addition, Zapatista unity was problematic. Zapatismo had ended the revolutionary decade in crisis. After mid-1915 it had become increasingly evident that Zapatista troops would not win the revolution. As Carrancista forces invaded Zapatista territory, both the food supplies and morale of the rebels declined precipitously; as a result, the movement suffered from a rising incidence of internecine conflict and a growing number of defectors. 27 The legacy of this internal turmoil was still apparent in the 1920s. Differences between Zapatista intellectuals competing for leverage in national politics had broken into open squabbling during the 1923 commemoration of Zapata’s death, and political struggles in Morelos often found Zapatistas lined up on opposite sides. 28

Another result of the crisis of the movement after 1915 was that for many peasants of Morelos and surrounding areas, Zapata was not an untarnished hero when he died. With his death, however, had come the opportunity for some to begin to rethink how he should be remembered. Oscar Lewis’s oral history account of the life of Pedro Martínez offers some clues as to how this reappraisal of Zapata might have developed. An inhabitant of Tepoztlán, Morelos, Martínez had left the failing movement in 1916 for the relative safety of Guerrero. But when he heard of Zapata’s death, he informs us, “[i]t hurt me as much as if my own father had died! I was a Zapatista down to the marrow of my bones. I had a lot of faith in Zapata’s promise, a lot of faith. I did indeed! I was one of the real Zapatistas.” 29

Real Zapatista or not, Martínez had chosen to leave the Zapatistas, and he still nursed grievances against the movement when Lewis began interviewing him in 1943. “I didn’t have the kind of character suited to the Revolution,” he complained. “I was not good at it because I was not base enough.” 30 We will never know when Martínez’s memories of Zapatismo and of Zapata crystallized into the shape they had taken, nor whether it was Zapata’s death, the coming of peace, or the Mexican state’s appropriation of the Martyr of Chinameca that motivated his return to the Zapatista fold. His description of Zapata as a father figure may have been mere hypocrisy, given that his identity as a Zapatista soon became crucial to a career in local politics. Or perhaps he remembered the peasant leader positively as a way of dealing with guilt about having abandoned the cause for which Zapata had died. It is also possible that he had always admired Zapata, never blaming him, personally, for the violence and hunger that had forced the flight to Guerrero. In any event, Pedro Martínez’s somewhat dissonant memories caution against any easy assumptions about the local roots of Zapata’s hero cult.

Despite some indications of a nascent tension in the interpretation of Zapata’s legacy, the apparent common feeling publicly displayed by those who participated in and observed the 1924 commemoration suggests that representatives of the state were enjoying some success in their quest to win legitimacy in Zapata’s home region through appeals to his memory. To the extent that it existed, this common feeling was built in part on material rewards, but it was about expectation as well, about the promise the young revolution held out that such rewards would continue to be offered. It presumably also had to do with the belief, shared by people of diverse class, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, that after a decade of destructive civil war this promise would be best pursued through the orderly behavior that the organizers of the ritual sought to model. 31 Zapata’s place in the new order was not, however, a foregone conclusion, and in the wake of the revolution the various overlapping communities in which his memory could play a role—Tepoztlán, the Zapatistas, the nation—were in a state of flux. Under these circumstances it would seem that the common feeling was less about agreement than it was the product of an unstable convergence of diverse positions. Far from enabling it to manipulate opinion, the state’s somewhat sudden and clumsy embrace of Zapata merely helped it open lines of negotiation.

• 1950: Words, Flowers, and Local Geographies

If in 1924 the postrevolutionary state was just being institutionalized, by 1950 that process had largely been completed. During the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), many of the social reforms promised in the Constitution of 1917 had been implemented, including extensive land reform. National politicians could now more convincingly argue that Zapata’s policies had been applied not just to Morelos and a few other localities—as was the case in 1924—but to the entire nation. Coinciding with the reformism of the Cárdenas years was the creation of a single-party state. 32 After 1940 the national government turned its attention to industrialization, and in the rush to capitalize the economy, social issues were put on the back burner. The land reform process had largely destroyed the hacienda system, but now the state, pursuing industrialization at the expense of campesinos, limited peasant enterprise by controlling credit, prices, marketing, and the processing of various agricultural products. It became increasingly clear that the distribution of land to the peasantry would not, by itself, solve peasant poverty.

Both Cárdenas’s reforms and the subsequent push to industrialize encountered some opposition. New political parties tried to challenge the power of the PRI, and some regional leaders managed to keep the federal government at a distance. 33 There were also occasional armed movements, including that of Rubén Jaramillo in Morelos. Jaramillo was an ex-Zapatista who had, like Pedro Martínez, left the movement before the fighting was over. But in defending peasant interests against the state-owned sugar mill at Zacatepec, he inherited the Zapatista legacy, to the extent that one corrido calls him “a second Zapata.” 34 In general, though, the violence of the revolution was now far in the past and a new national elite had increased state power and, apparently, captured considerable legitimacy.

President Miguel Alemán was in attendance at the Cuautla commemoration of Zapata’s death in 1950. So too were cabinet members; members of the national congress; representatives of various state governments; representatives of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC), the official peasant organization that had been created during the land reform process; and several generals of various revolutionary groups. Also present were members of the Frente Zapatista. Founded in 1940, and composed of Zapatista veterans and their families, this organization worked to unify Zapatistas, spread the Zapatista creed, and guard Zapata’s reputation.

Decorations similar to those of 1924 were in place in Cuautla and surrounding villages. Alemán arrived at about 11 a.m . and climbed into a convertible adorned with flowers, where he was joined by several of Cuautla’s most attractive young women. Together they rode from the edge of town to one of the central plazas, where the platform and podium for the speakers had been set up in front of a statue that portrayed Zapata on horseback and leaning down, rather paternalistically, to listen to and comfort a peasant standing beside him. Zapata’s remains had been placed beneath this monument during the 1932 commemoration, but other changes to the square had been limited so that sufficient space would remain for the booths of the town’s “famous fair of the second Friday of Lent.” 35

The commemoration on this day in 1950 was, as they had all come to be, as full of words as it was of flowers. The president of the Frente Zapatista, Adrián Castrejón, declared that he and other veterans “feel our chests flooded with emotion when we come to this site, where a monument is raised to his [Zapata’s] memory, to recall him with affection and reverence.” Congressman Norberto López Avelar then spoke for the PRI, despite the fact that he had fought in the revolution under the command of Zapata’s killer, Jesús Guajardo, and was accused by some of having directly participated in the assassination. A third speaker, CNC Secretary General Roberto Barrios, asserted that “the agrarian problem could be considered fully resolved” and that the government’s job now was to organize and improve existing ejidos. 36

There were nearly three hours of speeches. The ritual also included floral offerings like those of 1924; the president and other officials mounted a brief honor guard before Zapata’s remains; and Alemán received Zapata’s widow. Eventually, a contingent of motorcyclists began the annual parade. Behind them filed thousands of campesinos of the Frente Zapatista who—according to the Frente’s newspaper, El Campesino —marched in perfect order, holding up thousands of pictures of Zapata as a demonstration of “discipline and respect toward their leader.” Also participating were a women’s contingent, athletes, school children, and a delegation of old revolutionaries who had fought under Pancho Villa. 37

After the ceremony, Secretary of the Interior Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who would succeed Alemán as president in 1952, spoke to the press. Ruiz Cortines noted that Zapata was among those who had most contributed to the progress of the nation. He reinforced and clarified Barrios’s message by announcing that the greater part of Mexico’s land had already been distributed, and that the Alemán government was now focusing on irrigation projects, roads, and schools. Placing special emphasis on the need for irrigation, he added the claim that if Zapata were alive, water would be his main priority. 38

Zapata was also being remembered elsewhere on that same day in 1950. Using the land reform process as well as the cultural offerings of the institutionalized revolution—the educational system, the arts, and the mass media—national politicians, beginning at least with the Cárdenas regime, had promoted Zapata in Mexico’s provinces as a means of making him a truly national hero. In 1937, for instance, Cárdenas ordered governors to circulate the first two volumes of Gildardo Magaña’s history of Zapatismo, which had recently been published by the ruling Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR). “I believe it would be suitable to promote the distribution of the publication in question,” he added, “in schools, libraries, ejidos, unions, and civic centers, and so I urge you to acquire sufficient copies, because in doing so you will contribute to the defense and better understanding of the Revolution’s Social Program.” 39 The new rulers of Mexico clearly understood that the memory of Zapata could only serve as a source of national unity if the citizens of those regions of the country that he had never visited while alive also had something to remember. Not surprisingly, commemorations had a role in this conscious spreading of the cult of Zapata. With help from the Frente Zapatista and the CNC, the federal government encouraged the commemoration of Zapata’s death throughout Mexico, with the result that in 1950 ceremonies were held as far from Morelos as Sonora, over 1,500 kilometers to the north. 40

In Sonora’s Yaqui valley, the municipal presidents of Ciudad Obregón, Navajoa, and Bacum attended the celebration and the facades of the houses were decorated with national flags. The observance included two baseball games, a twenty-one gun salute, a barbecue, and a literary-musical event where a likeness of Zapata was positioned in a place of honor and the third grade girls sang a corrido. At San Pablo Oxtotepec, in the Federal District, two Zapatista veterans used the ritual as a platform from which to charge the secretary of defense with not having recognized their military rank. “They demand documents and photographs from us,” complained one, “as if the scars that reveal the bullets that perforated our bodies in the struggle were not enough.” Adrián Castrejón also spoke at Oxtotepec, stopping there on his way to Cuautla to note that many people were trying to end land reform, but that they would not succeed because Zapata’s “liberating message” was still alive in the consciences of the campesinos. In Atlixco, Puebla an “imposing” parade wound its way through the “principal streets” of the city. Zapatista veterans, military and civilian authorities, teachers, students, and peasants from various towns—with their respective bands—marched in the procession. After the parade Zapata was honored in front of his monument in the small plaza named for him, and there were an “infinity” of floral offerings. Elsewhere, commemorations included temporary altars to Zapata and at least one open podium. 41

By 1950, then, the institutionalized revolution that emanated from Mexico City had taken over events at Cuautla, and the cult of Zapata had become a key element in a postrevolutionary political culture that was now established at the national level. In the practice of hero worship and the employment of funerary wreaths, this political culture drew from the prerevolutionary past; but it added new hero cults, of course, and placed value on the revolutionary ideas to which these cults had become attached. 42 The speeches in Cuautla stressed that the revolution was a unified process; that the peasants were receiving material benefits from it; that Zapata was both a founding father of, and a martyr to, the revolution; and that the revolutionary process was ongoing. Speech makers emphasized that Alemán represented the continuation of the revolution in general and of Zapata’s work in particular.

The organizers of the ritual were also sending some nonverbal messages. If order had been an aspiration in 1924, by 1950 orderliness had infused this celebration of revolution, which was a display not only of national community but of power relationships and the position of diverse groups within that community. Women, therefore, had a separate contingent because it had become necessary, well before 1950, to assign them a place in the revolutionary order. Alemán’s convertible ride with the young ladies of Cuautla and the paternalism of the statue that housed Zapata’s remains suggest that the participation of these women in the parade did not necessarily reflect an equal status within the new order. 43 What it did reflect was the progressive ideas that then Secretary of the Interior Ruiz Cortines was making part of Zapata’s legacy. Given that there is no evidence that Zapata gave any thought to the role of women, such representations of progress were gradually separating how Zapata was remembered from anything he actually did or said. In part this was the intent of politicians who, like Ruiz Cortines, prefaced policy offerings with claims about what Zapata would have wanted if he had been alive and thus sought to mediate between the Zapata of the past and the changed circumstances of the present by incarnating the continuity of his program. In part, though, this effect can simply be attributed to the passage of time. It was natural that the celebration of 1950 was at least as much a commemoration of past Zapata commemorations, which had by now become history, as it was of Zapata’s death and life. 44

There were undoubtedly some in Cuautla who received these messages precisely as government functionaries intended them to be received. As the parade moved through streets imbued with the patriotic history of both the revolution and the independence struggle that preceded it, many participants and observers were surely swept up in a wave of patriotism, which created in them a feeling of inclusion in a shared national identity and experience that Zapata embodied. 45 To the extent that the state succeeded in using the ritual to create such a feeling of national community, those present were limited and controlled by the premises of the Zapata cult, which thus became an effective part of the state’s cultural undertaking. But if the state’s representatives seemed intent on overwhelming those in attendance with words and flowers in a way that made the commemoration either numbingly routine or mindlessly patriotic, their strategy was not entirely successful. There was grumbling on that day in Morelos, grumbling that demonstrates that not everyone was numb, or at least that for many the patriotism soon wore off once the parade was over.

A recurring theme of dissent in 1950 was that of promises broken. When asked in 1996 to describe what commemorations of Zapata’s death were like, Zapata’s daughter, Ana María, remarked that an event that should have been “for the people” had long since ceased to be popular. It is difficult to ascertain when she formulated this view of these proceedings, but in 1950 she took advantage of Alemán’s presence to reiterate a request that her pension be increased—a request she had made on the same occasion the year before. Although Alemán apparently agreed to the increase both times, in 1952 Ana María was still not receiving her money. 46 Alemán had also promised, at the 1949 commemoration, to compensate Zapata’s natal village of Anenecuilco for land it had lost to neighboring Villa de Ayala in the land reform process, and we might imagine that the Anenecuilcans again brought this conflict to his attention in 1950 because it had not been resolved. A 1952 petition from Anenecuilco complained, “we’re irritated by waiting and waiting” and threatened to settle things with Villa de Ayala directly. 47 Finally, an editorial on the 1950 anniversary in a Cuernavaca newspaper noted that “the pseudo-Zapatistas, sycophantic beings who have accumulated large fortunes in the shadow of the Caudillo of the South” would, as always, be present. These politicians, the editorial continued, were responsible for the lasting exploitation of the peasantry. 48

This grumbling was similar to what James C. Scott has called a “hidden transcript,” in that it constituted a critique by relatively powerless people directed against the behavior of the powerful who presided over the Cuautla ceremony. Because freedom of speech was often permitted in postrevolutionary Mexico, however, it was not necessary that the grumbling be hidden. 49 It existed around the edges of the main show at Cuautla, where it could be heard, but where it was peripheral and inconsequential—a peripheral transcript—to the processes of state formation and nation-building as the revolutionary elite envisioned them.

Peripheral transcripts—or at least conditions suitable for their conception—could also be found elsewhere. In many ways provincial rituals echoed the Cuautla ceremony. The speeches, floral offerings, and parades that occurred in places like Atlixco, for example, reveal some tendency toward formal, orderly events. But even if these ritual elements demonstrate that people in these localities participated in a national political culture, provincial rituals were not simply carbon copies of the Cuautla commemoration. Barbecue and baseball indicate a more relaxed atmosphere in the provinces, as does the participation of children in ways other than by marching in parades. The possibility of an open podium, meanwhile, hints that free speech may have been less peripheral to these village celebrations. And in the veterans’ protest of the Defense Ministry’s failure to recognize their contributions to the revolution, the kind of grumbling that existed around the edges of the Cuautla event took center stage at San Pablo Oxtotepec. While the state was forming at these sites as well as in Cuautla, and local and regional officials were likely to be present at any given village ceremony, only a highly centralized state structure could have assured that all of the state’s representatives would regulate the exchange of views about Zapata in the same way. 50

The Zapata cult, in other words, was becoming a focal point of local communities in such a way that variations on its meaning could develop across Mexico. Commemorations were important to this process in that they enabled the myth to occupy local geographies, where it became associated with unique histories, daily activities, and individual memories. There can be little doubt that Zapata came to inhabit Atlixco, where he was fixed to a particular plaza by a monument. But it is possible that the anniversary of 1950 left his memory even in that baseball field in Sonora, for myth and geography have been strongly connected throughout Mexican history. The best example of this may be the pre-Columbian tendency to associate features of the landscape with accounts of creation, but interactions between myth and geography have occurred in built environments as well, such as the shrines that serve as Catholic pilgrimage sites. Indeed, Catholic practice links the names of saints to diverse centers of population and to rituals celebrated in those localities on specific days. Mexico has thus been the site of what might be called ritual geographies—constellations of natural features, buildings and streets, monuments, and centers of population that are given their particular shapes by ritual and myth—for as long as people have lived there. And it is in this context that the cult of Zapata has been developing a ritual geography of its own. 51

By 1950 the state had disseminated Zapata’s myth in a way that helped make him a component of national identity; by associating themselves with Zapata during commemorations of his death, moreover, representatives of the state apparently maintained a measure of legitimacy in the countryside at a time when national policy did not benefit peasants. But “the reach of a politician,” Clifford Geertz has written, “is not quite the same as his grasp.” 52 If Zapata was part of the process of imagining a national community, he was also present—in many areas due, ironically, to the state’s effectiveness in spreading his myth—where local communities were being reimagined in the aftermath of the revolution. Zapata did not necessarily unite people in places where his myth took root. There were local struggles for holiness within the cult and, as on the national scene, not everyone agreed that Zapata deserved to be honored. 53 But local imaginings, as well as the grumbling in Morelos, had the potential to generate shared beliefs about Zapata that were peripheral to the construction of state and nation as it was pursued annually in Cuautla—beliefs that might ultimately call the state’s legitimacy into question.

• 1995: Resurrecting a Rebel

A crisis of revolutionary authority was evident in 1995. This crisis had its origins, perhaps, in 1968, when a massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City did much to discredit the ruling party. An increase in opposition movements—some of them armed—characterized the decades after Tlatelolco, and in 1988 the PRI began to encounter serious trouble at the polls. 54 Then, on the first day of 1994, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional launched its rebellion in Chiapas. Several assassinations, rumored to be the result of infighting within the ruling party, only added to the PRI’s political woes in the mid-1990s. The crisis was not, however, wholly political. Economic instability was also on the rise after 1968, marked by a prolonged recession in the 1980s and a general failure of agricultural productivity that was the logical result of the concentration of resources in the industrial sector. In general, campesinos remained the poorest members of Mexican society, and population growth in the countryside outpaced land distribution. Finally, the monetary policies of Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo generated a deep recession in 1995, which further undermined the ruling party’s credibility.

By 1995 Zapata had aged from father to grandfather in the paternalistic language that some employed on the anniversary of his death. But this was not the only way his cult had changed. 55 Again, part of the story has to do with geography. One important facet of the extension of the commemorations to Zapata was their arrival and evolution in Mexico City. Commemorations had been held there on the day of his death since the late 1920s, sometimes in front of a house that he had occupied near the San Lázaro train station and sometimes at the Monument to the Revolution, which was built in the 1930s. In the late 1940s, the Frente Zapatista began to lobby for a monument to Zapata in the capital, preferably on Mexico City’s showcase boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma. As a result of these efforts, in 1958 an equestrian statue was unveiled at Huipulco, in the southern part of the city. 56

The Huipulco monument became a natural gathering point for the peasants of the Federal District, but the evolution of this ritual geography around Zapata may also have helped his myth engage members of the urban groups that grew rapidly as Mexico industrialized after 1940. In any event, Zapata was present—now in opposition to government policies—in the student movement of the late 1960s and among urban guerrillas of the early 1970s. 57 In the years following 1968, there also seems to have been a more populist cast to the rhetoric of prominent speakers at the commemorations of Zapata in Cuautla. Probably permitted by national officials as part of an effort to appease students and others who were disillusioned by government policies and brutality, this rhetorical turn developed the old proposition of the “continuing revolution” into the stance that it had to continue because it had not yet gone nearly far enough to fulfill Zapata’s agrarian demands. 58

Meanwhile, the grumbling had continued at Cuautla, as had the practice of observing Zapata’s death in Mexico’s provinces—in 1969 the CNC organized more than 20,000 commemorative acts. 59 Undoubtedly, then, exchanges were occurring among several concurrent trends: the adoption of Zapata by urban protesters, commemorative rhetoric about the revolution’s agrarian failures, diverse and locally focused ceremonies in the provinces, and the critique by some Morelenses of the official Zapata. 60 Whatever the precise configuration of these exchanges, a different Zapata began to appear at anniversary rituals in the early 1970s. April 10 became the occasion for ritual protest on the part of campesinos who were increasingly united and mobilized. In 1972 hundreds of peasants from Tlaxcala and Puebla marched on Mexico City to commemorate Zapata’s death. Thereafter, the practice of converging on regional and national capitals grew, with the result that in 1984 peasants organized by the Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala arrived in Mexico City after having marched through eighteen different states. 61

There was also discussion of moving Zapata’s remains to the Monument to the Revolution. At the Cuautla commemoration in 1971, a campesino was given the rare opportunity to speak when Facundo Salazar Solís took the podium— ostensibly “outside the program”—to propose the transfer. The CNC and the Frente Zapatista quickly backed the motion, and Zapata’s sons Mateo and Nicolás came to support it as well, despite their frequent disagreements with the regime. Not surprisingly, however, folks in Cuautla insisted that Zapata had wanted to be buried in Morelos, and in 1979 independent peasant organizations came out against the nationalization of Zapata’s body, arguing that it was unacceptable for it to rest next to that of Carranza, which had been placed at the monument decades earlier. The idea lost steam, but not before it had become obvious that everyone involved understood the political implications of the ritual geography. 62 Instead, in the late 1980s the remains were placed beneath a new monument in Cuautla. This towering statue depicted Zapata alone, facing forward and propping up a gun with one hand and holding his famous Plan de Ayala, the 1911 document that expressed his demand for land reform, in the other. He looked much like a latter-day Moses—the Plan de Ayala replacing the Ten Commandments—but, as always, interpretations varied. “It doesn’t look like mi general ”, complained one old man who claimed to have fought with Zapata, “it looks more like a mariachi.” 63

Another location periodically proposed for Zapata’s bones was Chinameca. Commemorations there had slowly grown to rival those of Cuautla—apparently because many believed that the place of Zapata’s death was best suited to the observance of that event—and it was in Chinameca that the main ceremony took place in 1995. 64 Given the spiraling crisis, President Ernesto Zedillo hoped to use the commemoration for some kind of symbolic damage control and so made the trip to Chinameca himself. Indeed, while every president since Manuel Avila Camacho (1940-46) has attended at least one anniversary celebration in Morelos, Zedillo and Salinas have been the most regular presidential participants. On this occasion, Zedillo was joined by many other prominent politicians at the national and state levels, as well as by Zapata’s three surviving children.

The parade no longer played a part in the main ritual, but there were, of course, the traditional speeches. 65 After receiving what a Cuernavaca newspaper called an “effusive” reception from the campesinos, Zedillo spoke before a statue of Zapata on a rearing horse that had been placed at the precise spot where the Martyr of Chinameca had been shot. Calling for national unity, Zedillo promised a “permanent dialogue” with the peasants. He also promised that policies such as the Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales (PROCEDE), through which both he and his predecessor, Salinas, sought to guarantee individual property rights within ejidos, would help make the countryside more productive. The governor of Morelos, Jorge Carrillo Olea, also spoke, insisting that Zapata’s legacy had to do with “the march of the great Mexican people” toward dignity and civil rights, and not with violence, destruction, and the defense of group interests as some people seemed to believe. Zedillo then boarded a helicopter bound for Guerrero, where he inaugurated a number of public works. 66

Elsewhere, the tone of the 1995 commemorations was quite different, and the case of Oaxaca is enlightening. Located in southern Mexico, as is Chiapas, Oaxaca was also poor, heavily rural, and Indian, and was plagued by endemic land disputes—all of which made it fertile ground for the Zapata cult. These disputes were often between neighboring villages, reflecting the fact that Oaxaca was perhaps the most diverse and fragmented state in Mexico, with hundreds of separate municipal governments operating in localities differentiated by specific dialects of various Indian languages, as well as by other distinctive cultural and political traditions. 67 In Oaxaca, as in other parts of Mexico, the state, the CNC, and the Frente Zapatista have long been at work sowing memories of Zapata, and the result has been a well-developed geography of commemorations that dates back at least to the 1930s. 68 At these ceremonies Zapata has sometimes been used to bring together diverse villages in a way that might have laid the groundwork for the ritual protest that started in the 1970s. In 1965, at the Zapata commemoration in San Baltazar Chichicápam, for instance, the ejidal president of San Nicolás Yaxé called for “peace and concord” among the participating pueblos of Chichicápam, Yaxé, and Guilá. 69

On April 10, 1995, Oaxaca governor Diódoro Carrasco Altamirano traveled to the town of Loma Bonita in the northeastern part of the state. There, in the Benito Juárez auditorium, he addressed three thousand people, including state functionaries, municipal authorities, and members of peasant organizations. He highlighted his participation in the agrarian transformation initiated by Salinas and continued by Zedillo and spoke of the need to resolve land conflicts between communities. He also made several promises about public works in the area, in accord with an increasing tendency among politicians to at least symbolically reach into government coffers to finance projects and thus display their commitment to revolutionary progress. 70

Carrasco Altamirano added that he respected the right of people to “demonstrate respectfully” on the day of Zapata’s death. Surely he was thinking of what was then happening in the city of Oaxaca, where 15,000 peasants with ties to various organizations were marching to protest government policies. Around 10:45 A.M., approximately 6,000 members of the CNC arrived at Oaxaca’s monument to Zapata, located on Eduardo González Boulevard, where they left a floral offering and put in place a guard of honor. At least two cenecistas removed their hats and crossed themselves in front of Zapata’s image. Also present were several members of a nonofficial peasant group, who loudly criticized the CNC ritual. One of them yelled, “that’s an offense, not an offering.” 71

After the CNC left, opposition groups began to arrive en masse. One participant, who wore a ski mask in imitation of the Chiapan guerrillas, embraced the Zapata statue and waved the national flag while hundreds of others—not just peasants but teachers as well—chanted against various government policies. These protestors removed the flowers of the CNC peasants, engaged in a ritual of their own that included more floral offerings, and then replaced the CNC’s offerings, but in a different arrangement. On the same day, peasants besieged the residence of the state government, shouting “Zapata vive, vive / la lucha sigue, sigue ” (Zapata lives, lives / the fight continues, continues). 72

Although security measures were taken, it was probably no coincidence that Carrasco Altamirano left for Loma Bonita rather than remaining to preside over a commemoration in the state capital, as was more customary. But he had to plan his escape route carefully because the city of Oaxaca was not the only place in the state where in 1995 the anniversary of Zapata’s death was a moment of protest. In Juchitán, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, members of the Coalición Obrera Campesina Estudiantil del Istmo (COCEI), militants of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), oil workers, teachers, merchants, and others challenged the government’s economic policies by blocking roads and occupying banks and government offices. 73 At the same time, in the district of Juxtlahuaca there was a march of five hundred members of the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueña Binacional, which was composed of migrant workers of diverse Indian ethnicity who demanded that the governor respond to a petition they had given to him during the previous year. 74 Elsewhere in Oaxaca, and across Mexico, similar protests were occurring.

Ernesto Zedillo still sought to use Zapata to strengthen national unity, and Carrasco Altamirano apparently hoped to foster a sense of community among Oaxaqueños by linking Zapata to concrete rewards—or at least to the promise of such rewards—as had many politicians before him. It is clear, though, that in 1995 the most dynamic communities remembering Zapata were communities of protest. These protestors challenged the sense of order that the postrevolutionary state, and many ordinary citizens, had tried to instill in the commemorations. They even challenged the sacred nature of anniversary events—visible in the flowers and altars—if sacredness meant that those who honored Zapata had to be decorous no matter what they thought of government policies. In fact, the custodians of a more oppositional Zapata took advantage of the religious aura of the day: to some extent the commemorations had become protected arenas because Zapata’s symbolic weight required that the authorities be cautious about cracking down on protest. 75

One intriguing line of inquiry into how the ongoing elaboration of Zapata’s ritual geography might have helped empower such protest springs from the two peasants who crossed themselves in front of his Oaxacan monument. Zapata’s myth has contained a religious element ever since some Zapatistas began to assert—soon after his death—that he did not die at Chinameca and would some day return. For years people reported seeing his white horse in the hills of Morelos, and Zapatista veterans sometimes gathered on April 10 to await his return and the justice it would occasion. 76 Surely the fact that Zapata’s death occurred during the Easter season, and that his statue in Cuautla was built on the site of the fair held on the second Friday of Lent, reinforced the myth’s religious qualities. 77

The Morelenses who argued that Zapata did not die at Chinameca put him in the context of a popular messianism that national politicians, who were often anticlerical, would not echo. Politicians were not averse, however, to resurrecting Zapata in their own, rhetorical, way. In 1921 Querétaro congressman José Siurob made his preference for metaphor, rather than messiah, obvious at the Cuautla commemoration. He began by telling the story of an Indian isolated in the mountains who refused to believe that Zapata had died. Then he volunteered his own interpretation: “Proletarians of Morelos, although you see that grave simply adorned with two trophies of death, Zapata has not died; he lives, and he will live as long as lands are being given to the humble in Morelos.” 78

Since it seems to have been the state—instead of popular tradition—that brought Zapata to Oaxaca, we might presume that he arrived there cloaked in the rhetoric of a purely symbolic resurrection. But the behavior of those two men in front of his statue in 1995 hints that Siurob’s interpretation did not make a lasting impression on the popular Catholicism of Oaxaca’s peasants. 79 What was at stake in these different ways of conceptualizing Zapata’s resurrection? When national politicians used religious imagery, they were hoping to inspire a “transfer of sacrality” to the secular ideology of nationalism. 80 Peasants who contended that Zapata had survived Chinameca, on the other hand, were evidently placing their new secular hero into an old religious framework. The former, in other words, aspired to make Zapata a secular santo; the latter preferred to imagine him as a man-god in the tradition of Quetzalcóatl and Jesus Christ. 81 Continuing in this vein, one might propose that the state’s Zapata—dead and only metaphorically resurrected—tended to be a defeated peasant consigned to the past. 82 In 1924 Calles made sure to note, after all, that Zapata’s work was over. Zapata as a man-god who remained, in some less metaphorical sense, alive was of course a threat in the present.

But if by 1995 it was manifest that the state could not control how Zapata was remembered, ritual protest did emerge from within a national culture that protestors seemed to share with those they protested against. Though members of Oaxaca’s independent peasant organizations found fault with the CNC’s floral offering, they reused the CNC’s flowers and added flowers of their own. And so while demonstrations in Oaxaca constituted the symbolic capture of the city as the governor retreated, the word “symbolic” is critical. It was not a rebellion but, in essence, the acting out of a political position in the insistence that politicians negotiate more seriously and find a way to include the disillusioned in some national consensus about Zapata, the revolution, and the general direction of Mexican life. Indeed, the drive to negotiate was everywhere apparent. As Zedillo expressed his desire for dialogue in Chinameca, Chiapas celebrated the promise of future peace talks. In March, the Zedillo administration had given the EZLN an ultimatum that threatened the renewal of military action on the part of the state if the rebels did not agree, by April 10, to return to the bargaining table. But minutes before the start of this anniversary of Zapata’s death an accord was signed and the showdown averted. 83

The state has had some notable successes with the Zapata cult. In appropriating Zapata as one way of reconstructing national community after a decade-long civil war that permitted local ideas of community to flourish, representatives of the state did much to make him into the founding father of the institutionalized revolution that he eventually became. The state was also effective in carrying this myth far beyond Zapata’s home territory, in the hope that it would serve as part of the glue that would hold the nation together.

But though the postrevolutionary government did use Zapata’s memory in a way that might have helped mystify and manipulate, Ilene O’Malley’s emphasis on state agency—at least in the case of this hero cult—seems misplaced. The state was not able to force its version of Zapata on the peasantry. 84 Rather, the Zapata myth was a relatively unambitious part of the cultural project, which was often employed not with the idea of remaking rural Mexico—as socialist education was intended to do—but of propitiating it, at least in areas where agrarismo was strong. The cult began, after all, among the Zapatistas, whose memories of Zapata colored the way in which politicians came to think and speak of him. These Zapatistas were not simply trying to keep politicians honest about the facts of Zapata’s life, for the ways in which they remembered Zapata were not entirely ingenuous or authentic or apolitical. They were using Zapata to negotiate, and in general the myth of Zapata might be seen as a vehicle for negotiating—across ethnic, class, and cultural lines—the meaning of the revolution and the benefits it would have for different groups.

If there was never a time at which the new political elite could fully shape Zapata, then how can we explain the vast differences between the anniversaries we have examined? In 1924 the case seems relatively simple. Negotiations over Zapata’s meaning helped the state secure some legitimacy in Morelos, with considerable reinforcement from the land reform process that was taking place there. By 1950 negotiations were more complicated, in part because the coincidence of material rewards for peasants and the state’s use of the Zapata myth was now not nearly as great: Alemán attended the commemoration, but rural Mexico was being neglected as the country industrialized.

Here we might resort to the notion of “contradictory consciousness,” which suggests that political allegiances to different communities—or potential communities—can coexist. 85 To be a valuable component of the government’s cultural project, the official Zapata did not have to convince everyone at all times. It merely had to mystify enough to keep people divided about what the relationship between the state and Zapata truly was and how or whether the memory of Zapata could be used to challenge government policies. Nor did this mystification have to win over minds completely to keep communities of protest from forming; it only had to foster a kind of cognitive dissonance through arguments, such as that of Jorge Carrillo Olea, that Zapata’s legacy was not about violence. While the presence of such dissonance is difficult to document, it seems to have existed in the comments of Pedro Martínez; it might also be extrapolated from the behavior of Ana María and Mateo Zapata, who have appeared at the Cuautla commemorations year after year alongside national and state politicians, despite their critiques of government policies. 86 We might therefore speculate that in 1950 some of those who attended the commemoration were partially convinced by the state’s messages, despite the fact that the commemorative process also generated peripheral transcripts. In fact, it was in its ability to keep those transcripts peripheral that the success of the state’s Zapata could be measured.

To continue in this vein, ideas about Zapata’s political significance held by those who attended the commemorations in 1950 were evidently contradictory, while by 1995 a more decidedly oppositional consciousness was evident at rituals like those of Oaxaca. An alternative explanation would be that differences in behavior at the ceremonies in those two years had to do with changing strategies for negotiating material rewards rather than with developments in consciousness. People often behave in ways that are inconsistent with what they believe if they expect to profit from that behavior, and expectations about benefits did vary over time. In 1924 the promise of material rewards from the young revolution was considerable, and there was little or no dissent at the ceremony. In 1950 the bloom was off the revolutionary rose and more complaining could be heard, but Cardenismo was not yet a distant memory and ritualized exchanges about the allocation of resources proceeded in an orderly fashion. By 1995 recent history offered little hope, at least for peasants, that cooperating with the ruling party would lead to satisfactory benefits, and protest became a favored negotiating ploy. The trouble with removing consciousness from the equation, however, is that focusing exclusively on material rewards does not explain the existence of the cultural apparatus. If Zapata’s meaning was beside the point, why did the anniversary of his death become a moment of negotiation? Although it would be a serious mistake to lose sight of the practical considerations of the various participants in commemorations, what people thought about Zapata surely has some explanatory value.

In any event, contradictory consciousness draws us back to the geography of the commemorations and to the non-national communities that took shape around Zapata’s memory. In order to unite people, myths must be broad and ambiguous enough to be attractive to groups with different interests. But this flexibility means that they can be used in different ways, especially when they are rooted in new geographies and put into new ideological frameworks: Zapata as man-god rather than as secular santo. Given the suitability of the Zapata myth to peasant consumption, it is hardly surprising, then, that peasants—and, of course, others—made Zapata their own as he penetrated new localities and became part of a revolutionary layer of meaning that settled over past meanings, much as pre-Columbian religious landscapes had been dotted with Catholic shrines. In the decades between 1950 and 1995, peripheral transcripts gestated in Mexico’s geographical periphery until markedly different images of Zapata could be marched—or, in the case of the EZLN, e-mailed—back to local, state, and national centers of political power.

In documents composed for recent commemorations, the EZLN has developed a link between Zapata and Votán, who was, according to Tzeltal Indian myth, the first man to give land to indigenous peoples. 87 Connected in EZLN writings to other national heroes—Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, Vicente Guerrero—Votán-Zapata was the perpetual loser of Mexican history, who was able to transcend defeat because he found immortality in what was essentially a national community. “All of us,” a missive of April 10, 1995, read, “are one in Votán-Zapata and he is one in all of us.” But this national community was not completely inclusive. Rather, it was based on a rereading of Mexican history generated by conflict, much like those undertaken by previous rebels—leaders of independence and revolution alike—as they struggled to define Mexico. In this rereading, Zapata was at the center of a new creation myth for the nation that privileged the peripheral—the Indian and, in a broader sense, those who lived in “misery.” Excluded from this community were the powerful who, the EZLN asserted, wanted to “defeat and kill Votán-Zapata for good,” and had tried to do so in 1521 and 1919. 88 While the ultimate impact of this alternative national project remains to be seen, the powerful certainly have failed if it was their aim to kill Zapata. Zapata instead took a winding path back to provincial, rural Mexico, where he has again been making national demands much as he did when he first began to intrude on Mexican consciousness in 1911. 89

In tracing the trajectory of the Zapata myth across twentieth-century Mexican history, this article offers some suggestions about how the kind of intercourse between diverse political cultures that has recently begun to interest scholars might play out in the long term. If the postrevolutionary state found itself unable to reshape rural Mexico with programs like socialist education, the study of the Zapata cult indicates that the long-term prognosis for less ambitious aspects of the cultural project was also not entirely promising. Geography impeded government control of Zapata, and the state apparatus proved little more than a modest umbrella under which sundry memories of Zapata could flourish. Zapata’s myth was generated more by an amorphous and inclusive revolutionary process than by the relatively limited state. This is not to say that the state was particularly weak. It gained strength from Zapata and from the broader base of support he helped secure, strength that is reflected in the longevity of PRI rule. Moreover, it does seem that some enduring sense of national community took shape around Zapata, because even though in Chiapas he again adopted the guise, at least briefly, of a violent revolutionary, he remained the focus of negotiation. He was also, however, the focus of potential national projects distinct from that of the PRI.

In closing, a comparison may be useful. In Russia, statues of Lenin have recently been felled as another entrenched revolutionary party, and the system that perpetuated it, lost power. This is not likely to be the fate of monuments to Zapata. 90 As the twentieth century draws to a close, Mexicans have learned to think with Zapata, not merely about him, and this would seem to promise that his posthumous career will be a long one. 91

The research on which this article is based was funded by two summer research fellowships from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Earlier versions were presented to the Dirección de Estudios Históricos of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in 1996, and at the 1997 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association. Thanks are due to many people, including Gil Joseph, Jonathan Amith, and the anonymous reviewers at the HAHR , Ruth Arboleyda, Roger Davis, Laura Espejel, Matt Esposito, Ben Fallaw, Javier Flores, Eitan Ginzburg, Emily Greenwald, David Lorey, Alicia Olivera, Anne Perry, Francisco Pineda Gómez, Elsie Rockwell, Salvador Rueda, Paul Vanderwood, and Mary Kay Vaughan.

For some examples of Salinas’s use of Zapata, see Lynn Stephen, “Pro-Zapatista and Pro-PRI: Resolving the Contradictions of Zapatismo in Rural Oaxaca,” Latin American Research Review 32, no. 2 (1997): 50-54.

Manú Dornbierer, El prinosaurio: la bestia política mexicana (Mexico City: Ed. Grijalbo, 1994), 169-70, 191. Alan Knight, “Weapons and Arches in the Mexican Revolutionary Landscape,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico , eds. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 64, contends that the PRI began abandoning the use of revolutionary symbols during the 1980s. This may be true in part, but I do not find the process so clear-cut.

See Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 220. To be precise, this is Mallon’s definition of a regional political culture, but it is clearly more broadly applicable.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , 10th ed. (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1993), 770.

For a recognition of myth’s communal aspect, see Enrique Florescano, “Prólogo,” in Mitos mexicanos , coord. Enrique Florescano (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1995), 9.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 6, defines nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”

Anderson, Imagined Communities , 4-12.

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico , trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 142, 148.

Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 7, defines the state as an entity “constituted by the civil and military bureaucracy, or state apparatus, on the one hand, and those having formal control of this apparatus, the government (constituted in various branches, levels, etc.), on the other.” For a definition that emphasizes that a state is not an especially coherent whole, that state formation is a continual process, and that the struggle for power that this process entails has much to do with political culture, see Mallon, Peasant and Nation , 9-10.

For the historiography, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation , 5-12; and Mary Kay Vaughan, “Remarks on New Cultural Approaches to Mexican Revolutionary Studies,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Conference on Latin American History, New York City, 5 Jan. 1997.

Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-1940 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). Twentieth-century revolutions that appear to be “popular” have, of course, produced authoritarian outcomes in a wide variety of contexts throughout the world.

See, for instance, Knight, “Weapons and Arches”; “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” HAHR 74 (1994); and “Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 10 (1994).

Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation ; and William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 1994).

For the contention that the state had achieved a measure of legitimacy by this time, see Mary Kay Vaughan, “The Construction of the Patriotic Festival in Tecamachalco, Puebla, 1900-1946,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule , 235-36.

Some of the inspiration for this geographical argument comes from the series of talks given by Richard White at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in April 1996. On the workings of myth and ritual in Mexican localities, see William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, “Introduction: Constructing Consent, Inciting Conflict,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule , xxix; Vaughan, “Patriotic Festival,” 214, 219; and James B. Greenberg, Santiago’s Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 193.

On resurrected heroes, see Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 143; and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 96-101.

Linda B. Hall, Alvaro Obregón: Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911-1920 (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1981), 203-48.

Linda B. Hall, “Alvaro Obregón and the Politics of Mexican Land Reform,” HAHR 60 (1980).

El Universal (Mexico City), 11 Apr. 1924; and Excelsior (Mexico City), 12 Apr. 1924.

El Universal , 11 Apr. 1924.

Excelsior , 10 Apr. 1924; and Obregón’s personal secretary to the director of the National Railroads of Mexico, Mexico City, 8 Apr. 1924, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Fondo Presidentes, Alvaro Obregón/Plutarco Elías Calles (hereafter cited as AGN-OC), exp. 205-Z-2. See also, in the same file, Rodrigo Gómez to Obregón’s personal secretary, Mexico City, 2 Apr. 1924. In 1923, at least, the Obregón administration helped fund the event; see Obregón to State Treasurer of Morelos, Mexico City, 29 Mar. 1923, AGN-OC, also in exp. 205-Z-2.

See David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 23, 29, for the European conventions of “royal entry” and “triumphal entry” into a given locality, both of which were intended to put power on display. On the symbolic occupation of Morelos by the nation, see Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992). 55-57.

See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90.

In fact, there is scattered evidence to suggest that peasants may have agreed with official readings of revolutionary history. For the memory in one Morelos village in 1984 that the Zapatistas won the revolution and that Obregón ratified their land reform, see Joann Martin, Contesting Authenticity: Battles over the Representation of History in Morelos, Mexico (South Bend: Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Univ. of Notre Dame, 1993), 13.

See Nemesio García Salcedo, “Ante la tumba de Zapata,” El Universal , 7 Apr. 1924; Excelsior , 3 and 10 Apr. 1924; and El Universal , 12 and 14 Apr. 1924.

Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995), 171-225.

El Demócrata (Mexico City), 11 Apr. 1923; and Sergio Valverde, Apuntes para la historia de la revolución y de la política en el estado de Morelos, desde la muerte del gobernador Alarcón, pronunciamiento de los grates. Pablo Torres Burgos y Emiliano Zapata mártires, hasta la restauración de la reacción por Vicente Estrada Cajigal impostor (Mexico City: n.p., 1933), 245-55.

Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martínez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 108.

Lewis, Pedro Martínez , 101-2.

Thomas Benjamin, “La Revolución : Memory, Myth and History in Twentieth-Century Mexico,” unpublished manuscript; and David Lorey, “The Revolutionary Festival in Mexico: The Case of November 20 Celebrations in the 1920s and 1930s,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, 5 Jan. 1997. Both authors note the orderliness of revolutionary celebrations in comparison to older patriotic festivals. William H. Beezley, “The Porfirian Smart Set Anticipates Thorstein Veblen in Guadalajara,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule , 186, discusses the drive of the Porfirian government for more orderly rituals. For a provocative exploration of how the pendulum has swung between order and disorder in Mexican history, see Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development , 2d ed., rev. and enl. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 1992).

Building on Calles’s Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), Cárdenas created the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM). It was renamed the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1946.

On this regionalism, see Jeffrey W. Rubin, “Decentering the Regime: Culture and Regional Politics in Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 31, no. 3 (1996).

On Jaramillo, see Plutarco García Jiménez, “El movimiento jaramillista: una experiencia de lucha campesina y popular del período post-revolucionario en México,” in Morelos: cinco siglos de historia regional , coord. Horacio Crespo (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos del Agrarismo en México; Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, 1984), 301-10; and Donald C. Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1995), 67. A corrido is a Mexican folksong.

For the quote, see Excelsior , 20 Nov. 1931. See also Excelsior , 31 Mar. 1965; and El Campesino (Mexico City), 1 May 1950. Published monthly, El Campesino was the official organ of the Frente Zapatista.

El Campesino , 1 May 1950; Excelsior , 11 Apr. 1950; and Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-1981 , 2d ed. (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1982), 172. López Avelar would become governor of Morelos in 1958.

El Campesino , 1 May 1950. Spokesmen for Zapatismo had become great proponents of order in the years since 1924; see Carlos Reyes Avilés, Cartones Zapatistas (Mexico City: Dirección de Investigaciones Históricas y Asuntos Culturales, 1928), 63. In describing the parade of Zapatista veterans at the 1928 commemoration, Reyes Avilés proudly notes that some were armed because they played a role in keeping order in Morelos. See also the speech of Porfirio Palacios recorded in El Campesino , 1 May 1951.

El Campesino , 1 May 1950.

For the quote, see Lázaro Cárdenas to Governor of Aguascalientes Juan G. Alvarado, Mexico City, 1 Dec. 1937, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Fondo Presidentes, Lázaro Cárdenas (hereafter cited as AGN-LC), exp. 704/215. For another example of the conscious geographical broadening of the cult of Zapata, see Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 82. Magaña had been one of Zapata’s most prominent urban advisers, and in 1937 he was governor of Michoacán.

For an order, during the Cárdenas years, that local commemorations be held, see Oaxaca Nuevo (Oaxaca), 9 Apr. 1938.

See Charles A. Weeks, The Juárez Myth in Mexico (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1987), 37, for the elements of a commemoration for Benito Juárez in 1887.

For a more thorough analysis of the machismo and paternalism behind Zapata’s image, see O’Malley, Myth of the Revolution , 41-70.

For the recognition that these commemorations had a history, see Teódoro Hernández, “El XXX aniversario de la muerte de Zapata,” El Popular (Mexico City), 9 Apr. 1949, in the Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, Fondo Silvino González, newspaper clippings on Zapata.

For Cuautla during independence, see Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 157-64.

Interview with Ana María Zapata, Cuautla, 29 July 1996; and Ana María Zapata to Miguel Alemán, Cuautla, 31 Mar. 1952, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Fondo Presidentes, Miguel Alemán (hereafter cited as AGN-MA), exp. 514/34132.

Comisariado Ejidal Joaquín Quintero et al. to President Miguel Alemán, Anenecuilco, Apr. 1952, AGN-MA, exp. 404.1/2979.

El Informador (Cuernavaca), 9 Apr. 1950.

On hidden transcripts, see Scott, Domination , xii, 14; on freedom of speech, see Daniel C. Levy and Gabriel Székely, Mexico: Paradoxes of Stability and Change , 2d ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 91.

For two of several recent works that have called for conceptualizing the postrevolutionary state as a less centralized structure, see Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, “Ritual, Rumor and Corruption in the Constitution of Polity in Modern Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1 (1995); and Rubin, “Decentering the Regime”

Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan:A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 153, notes that in Hueyapan, Morelos, a particular barrio was responsible for hosting the commemoration of Zapata’s death—because one of its streets was named for Zapata and another was called “10 de Abril”—just as barrios had long been responsible for holding celebrations in honor of their patron saints. For other examples of ritual geographies in Mexico, see Luz Jiménez, Life and Death in Milpa Alta: A Nahuatl Chronicle of Diaz and Zapata , trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1972); John M. Ingham, Mary, Michael , and Lucifer: Folk Catholicism in Central Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986), 57-59, 122, 188; and Greenberg, Santiago’s Sword , 84. Two recent works dealing with the relationship between geography and memory elsewhere are Pierre Nora, dir., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past , 3 vols., English language edition edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996-98); and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995).

Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures , 338.

See El Campesino , 1 May 1955, for a description of conflict at Tlalchapa, Guerrero; and El Campesino , 1 May 1954, for events at Coyuca de Benítez in the same state.

Among the armed movements were the guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez in Guerrero, both of which used Zapata; see Hodges, Mexican Anarchism , 95, 102.

Excelsior , 11 Apr. 1996.

El Campesino , 1 Sept. 1949 and 1 Mar. 1956; Moisés González Navarro, La Confederación Nacional Campesina, un grupo de presión en la reforma agraria mexicana (Mexico City: B. Costa-Amic, 1968), 200; and Carlos J. Sierra Brabatta, Zapata: señor de la tierra, capitán de los labriegos (Mexico City: Departamento del Distrito Federal, 1985), 111-12, 121. On the Paseo de la Reforma, see Barbara A. Tenenbaum, “Streetwise History: The Paseo de la Reforma and the Porfirian State, 1876-1910,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule. This monument has since been moved farther south, to the Alameda del Sur at the intersection of the Calzada de las Bombas and Avenida Canal de Miramontes.

Hodges, Mexican Anarchism , 113, 129; and El Campesino , 31 Oct. 1971.

El Campesino , 30 Apr. 1969 and 30 Apr. 1971.

For the CNC’s commemorations, see Excelsior , 10 Apr. 1969. For more unhappiness in Morelos, see the editorials in El Eco del Sur (Cuautla), 10 Apr. 1966 and 7 Apr. 1968; and Polígrafo (Cuautla), 10 Apr. 1954 and 11 Apr. 1966.

On general interconnections between urban and rural movements during this period, see Hodges, Mexican Anarchism , 138.

Armando Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata: movimientos campesinos posrevolucionarios en México, 1920-1980 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1985), 106, 153; and Excelsior , 11 Apr. 1977. Land invasions began to occur on April 10 as well. See, for instance, Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, Movimientopopulary politica en Oaxaca (1968-1986) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 143. Finally, for an insightful discussion of whether 1968 was truly a watershed in terms of the formation of social movements, see Alan Knight, “Historical Continuities in Social Movements,” in Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico , eds. Joe Foweraker and Ann L. Craig (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1990), 94-95. Clearly, behavior at these Zapata rituals reflects significant change, at least by the early 1970s.

Salvador Rueda Smithers and Laura Espejel López, “El siglo xx: bajo el signo de Emiliano Zapata,” in Morelos: el estado , coords. David Moctezuma Navarro and Medardo Tapia Uribe (Cuernavaca: Gobierno del Estado de Morelos, 1993), 88; El Campesino , 30 Apr. 1971; Excelsior , 11 Apr. 1971 and Oct. 15-18, 1979; and El Nacional (Mexico City), 25 Aug. 1979. Moving Zapata’s body to Mexico City had been proposed as early as 1942; see Sierra Brabatta, Zapata: el señor de la tierra , 84. For a similar effort on the part of the nation to appropriate Pancho Villa’s remains, see Ana María Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 43.

For the quote, see Excelsior , 10 Apr. 1996; also, interview with Ana María Zapata, 29 June 1996.

Periódico Oficial (Cuernavaca), 10 Mar. 1965; Presente (Cuernavaca), 5 Apr. 1959; and Sierra Brabatta, Zapata: señor de la tierra , 89.

On the phasing out of the parade, see El Campesino , 30 Apr. 1971; and Polígrafo , 12 Apr. 1977.

Diario de Morelos (Cuernavaca), 10 and 11 Apr. 1995; Noticias (Oaxaca), 11 Apr. 1995; “Palabras del Presidente Ernesto Zedillo,” Chinameca, Morelos, 10 Apr. 1995, internet, http://www.quicldink.com/mexico/gobfed/zedill67.htm ; and La Jornada (Mexico City), 11 Apr. 1995.

Philip A. Dennis, Intervillage Conflict in Oaxaca (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), 5, 19, 51.

See, for instance, Oaxaca Nuevo , 9-11 Apr. 1938; El Campesino , 1 May 1954 and 1 June 1955; and Oaxaca Gráfico (Oaxaca), 10 Apr. 1962 and 9 and 11 Apr. 1969.

Oaxaca Gráfico , 11 Apr. 1965.

Noticias , 10 and 11 Apr. 1995. Though the trend grew over time, the inauguration of public works projects can already be seen in the 1920s; see Reyes Avilés, Cartones Zapatistas , 63. For previous rituals at Loma Bonita, see El Campesino , 1 June 1953 and 1 June 1954.

Noticias , 11 Apr. 1995.

Noticias , 10 and 11 Apr. 1995. Among organizations participating were the Comité por la Defensa de los Intereses del Pueblo (CODEP) from Putla, Tlaxiaco, and Juxtlahuaca; the Movimiento de Unificación y Lucha Triqui (MULT); the Organización Obrera Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OOCEZ); the Organizaciones Democráticas de Telixtlahuaca; the Comité Promotor por la Coordinadora de Organizaciones Populares (CPCOP); Section 22 of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE); and the Unión de Indígenas Zapoteco-Chinantecos ‘Emiliano Zapata’ (UIZACHI-EZ).

Noticias , 11 Apr. 1995. Much has been written about COCEI in recent years. See Jeffrey W. Rubin, “COCEI in Juchitán: Grassroots Radicalism and Regional History,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (1994); and Howard Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in Southern Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1994).

This is not to say that in the 1990s there have been no efforts to control the ceremonies. In a personal communication in April 1997, Elsie Rockwell informed me that in 1994 the authorities had shut down a commemoration in Puebla. In 1996 campesinos from Tepoztlán, Morelos, who intended to confront Zedillo at a ceremony to be held in the town of Tlaltizapán, were met on the road by police. In the skirmish that followed, one protestor died and many were injured or arrested; see La Jornada , 11 Apr. 1996; and Carlos Monsiváis, “Crónica de Tepoztlán,” La Jornada , 15 Apr. 1996.

Alicia Olivera, “Ha muerto Emiliano Zapata? Mitos y leyendas en torno del caudillo,” Boletín del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia , época II, 13 (1975): 48, 51.

On Lent celebrations in the Cuautla region, see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, “Introducción al ciclo de ferias de cuaresma en la región de Cuautla, Morelos, México,” Anales de Antropología 8 (1971).

El Demócrata , 12 Apr. 1921.

For more on Zapata as messiah in Oaxaca, see Stephen, “Pro-Zapatista and Pro-PRI,” 48.

On “transfer of sacrality,” see Adrian A. Bantjes, “Burning Saints, Molding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic Ritual, and the Failed Cultural Revolution,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule , 271. Bantjes borrows here from Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution , trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).

Serge Gruzinski, Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1520-1800 , trans. Eileen Corrigan (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), 187, suggests that Zapata was the last man-god, though he does not compare well to the colonial man-gods that Gruzinski discusses.

See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization , trans. Philip A. Dennis (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996), 55, on the state’s tendency to present the Indian world as a dead one.

Excelsior , 10 Apr. 1995.

Friedlander, Being Indian , 153-59, also stresses state imposition.

On the Gramscian idea of contradictory consciousness, see Daniel Nugent and Ana María Alonso, “Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua,” in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation , 239.

Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures , 120, argues convincingly that human beings move fairly easily between contrasting ways of understanding the world.

Stephen, “Pro-Zapatista and Pro-PRI,” 60.

For the quotes, see the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Votán-Zapata se levantó de nuevo,” 10 Apr. 1995, in Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN: documentos y comunicados , 2 vols., prologue by Antonio García de León, chronicles by Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowska (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1994-95), 2:306-9. See also Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Votán-Zapata,” 10 Apr. 1994, in Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN: documentos y comunicados , 1:210-13.

It is conceivable that Votán-Zapata was largely the creature of EZLN intellectuals, some of whom, like Subcomandante Marcos, were not from Chiapas. At the same time, this notion was clearly based on a deeper history of Zapata in Chiapas, which included protest in his name. Votán-Zapata was, in other words, a product of regional history, even if he was also an intellectual construct. On Zapata’s role in Chiapan protest, see Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata , 122; and Excelsior , 11 Apr. 1983.

The difference may stem from the fact that while peasant memory of Lenin was conditioned by a popular “naive monarchism,” Lenin’s cult lacked the deep roots that came from Zapata’s peasant origins. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983).

This notion is adapted from the insinuation by Carmen Nava, “Printed Mass Media Coverage of Patriotic Events, Brazil: 1940-1990,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, 5 Jan. 1997, that people think with the nation rather than—or as well as —about it.

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Emiliano Zapata Biography

Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary leader, played a crucial role in the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1920. As the commander of the ‘Liberation Army of the South’, Zapata led his followers, known as ‘Zapatistas’, in guerilla battles against oppressive rulers. He was dedicated to agrarian reforms and fought to return land to peasants and farmers. Though his efforts were cut short by his assassination, his vision was eventually realized as ‘Zapatista’ generals overthrew the government and implemented the land reforms Zapata had advocated for.

Quick Facts

• Also Known As: Emiliano Zapata Salazar
• Died At Age: 39
• Father: Gabriel Zapata
• Mother: Cleofas Jertrudiz Salazar
• Siblings: Celsa Zapata, Eufemio Zapata, Jovita Zapata, Loreto Zapata, María de Jesús Zapata, María de la Luz Zapata, Matilde Zapata, Pedro Zapata, Romana Zapata
• Children: Carlota Zapata Sánchez, Diego Zapata Piñeiro, Elena Zapata Alfaro, Felipe Zapata Espejo, Gabriel Zapata Sáenz, Gabriel Zapata Vázquez, Guadalupe Zapata Alfaro, Josefa Zapata Espejo, Juan Zapata Alfaro, Luis Eugenio Zapata Sáenz, Margarita Zapata Sáenz, María Luisa Zapata Zúñiga, Mateo Zapata, Nicolás Zapata Alfaro, Paulina Ana María Zapata Portillo, Ponciano Zapata Alfaro
• Quotes By Emiliano Zapata
• Revolutionaries
• Height: 5’7″ (170 cm), 5’7″ Males
• Died on: April 10, 1919
• Place of death: Chinameca, Mexico
• Cause of Death: Assassination

Childhood & Early Life

Emiliano Zapata was born as Emiliano Zapata Salazar on August 8, 1879 in Anenecuilco, Morelos, Mexico. He was the son of a well-known ‘mestizo’ peasant named Gabriel Zapata who trained and sold horses to people. His mother was Cleofas Jertrudiz Salazar. Emiliano had three brothers named Eufemio, Pedro, and Loreto and six sisters named Matilde, Jovita, Maria de Jesus, Celsa, Maria del la Luz and Romana. He received rudimentary education including book-keeping from his teacher Emilio Vara. His mother died when he was 16 years old and his father died 11 months later, after which he had to look after his family. In 1897 he was arrested for taking part in a protest rally against the owner of the plantation that had appropriated their farmland.

Recommended Lists: Mexican Revolutionaries, Leo Men

Later years.

After being pardoned, Emiliano Zapata again started agitating and was promptly drafted into the Mexican Army to stop him from agitating any more. After only six months in the Army he was discharged and sent to Porfirio Diaz’s son-in-law’s hacienda as a horse-trainer. In 1909 the villagers of Anenecuilco elected him president of the village council board and he soon became involved in the agitations carried out by the local peasants and farmers against the landowners. Once an entire village was burnt to the ground by the angry landowners because the villagers had forcibly occupied a piece of land. Zapata continued with his struggles and sometimes he was successful in getting the land back for the villagers by using very old title deeds to petition the governor to help return pieces of land to their rightful owners. Sometimes he got frustrated by the slow response of the government and forcibly occupied pieces of land he thought fit and distributed them to the peasants and farmers. During this period, the president of Mexico was Porfirio Diaz who had defeated a northern landowner named Francisco Madero in the 1910 presidential election. Francisco fled to the United States, declared himself as the rightful President, returned to Mexico and laid claim to the presidency causing a clash between the two. Seeing a great opportunity for land reforms, Zapata made a secret alliance with Francisco Madero who promised to carry out the reforms. In 1910 Zapata became the commanding officer of the ‘Ejercito Libertador del Sur’ or the ‘Liberation Army of the South’ and declared war against President Diaz.

Personal Life & Legacy

Emiliano Zapata married Josefa Espejo in 1911 and had a daughter named Paulina Ana Maria. He also had six sons Mateo, Juan, Nicolas, Felipe Diego, and Ponciano, and four daughters Elena, Josefa, Carlota, and Margarita who were born out of wedlock. He has influenced the history of Mexico and his life has been portrayed through movies, books, comics, clothing and music.

Emiliano Zapata was known as ‘El Tigre del Sur’ or ‘The Tiger of the South’.

“Never, I”

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Emiliano Zapata : a biography

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Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa Biographies and Lesson Plans

Inside : Learn about Emiliano Zapata Pancho Villa, their role in the Mexican Revolution, and resources for learning more.

(Above image modified from “ “ Villa and Zapata ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  Atelier Teee .)

Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, two leaders emerged to end the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and change Mexico forever.

Born a year apart, both rose from humble beginnings in families that were campesinos — people who worked the land.

Though both had a limited education and neither held political ambitions, their legendary status threatened those in power. Both men were eventually assassinated, four years apart from the other.

Emiliano Zapata was passionate about land reform and led a group of soldiers called the Southern Liberation Army. He is held up an icon of the common worker and defender of the poor.

Pancho Villa was a guerrilla fighter and led the Northern Division of soldiers. Somewhat shrouded in mystery and legend, “ He is seen as a Robin Hood, bandit, killer, womanizer, and since 1812, the only foreigner to have invaded, attacked, and killed Americans inside our borders. ” ( Laits University of Texas )

The paths of Zapata and Villa first crossed during the Mexican Revolution, with the ousting of Díaz and the turnover of several leaders after that.

This post takes a look a each man’s main life events, with resources for learning more.

Related: Famous Latinos & Hispanic Americans Home Page

Emiliano Zapata Pancho Villa Resources

Here’s an index of what’s included in the post. You can click on any link to jump straight to that section :

• Quick Facts about Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa

Emiliano Zapata Biography

Pancho villa biography.

• Lesson Plans for Students to Learn More
• Emiliano Zapata Pancho Villa YouTube Videos

Emiliano Zapata Pancho Villa Quick Facts

Emiliano Zapata Birth: August 8, 1879 Death: April 10, 1919 Spouse(s): Josefa Espejo, 1 child together (Paulina) Children: Paulina Ana María Zapata Portillo,Carlota Zapata Sánchez, Diego Zapata Piñeiro, Elena Zapata Alfaro, Felipe Zapata Espejo, Gabriel Zapata Sáenz, Gabriel Zapata Vázquez, Guadalupe Zapata Alfaro, Josefa Zapata Espejo, Juan Zapata Alfaro, Luis Eugenio Zapata Sáenz, Margarita Zapata Sáenz, María Luisa Zapata Zúñiga, Mateo Zapata, Nicolás Zapata Alfaro, Ponciano Zapata Alfaro Profession: Horseman, soldier Famous For: Fighting for fair land rights for peasants, guerrilla leader in the Mexican Revolution and commander of the Liberation Army of the South.

Pancho Villa Birth: June 5, 1879 Death: July 20, 1923 Spouse(s): María Luz Corral (Villa is reported to have married many other times, but Corral is the one marriage on record.) Children: One daughter with Maria Luz Corral, who died in infancy. Various other children from outside his marriage. Famous For: Being one of the top military leaders during the Mexican Revolution.

“Better to die standing up than live your whole life kneeling.” – Emiliano Zapata (sometimes attributed to

Emiliano Zapata Early Life and Family

Emiliano Zapata was born August 8, 1879 in Anenecuilco, Mexico. He was born into a family that worked with horses.

At the time, there was a sharp division between landowners and the peasants who worked for them.The Zapatas were part of the working class, but did own a small piece of land and were able to have a slightly better life. At 17, his parents died.

In 1897, Zapata’s life changed. He was arrested for participating in a protest over land rights, and drafted into the army. After only serving for six months, he was discharged to help train horses.

In 1909, local villagers elected Zapata president of the board of defense, to defend their land rights. Initially, he tried to restore the peasant’s land from the landowners through legal means. When that failed, they took up arms.

The Mexican Revolution

In 1910, Porfirio Díaz won a rigged election and his opponent, Fransico Madero, was exiled.

Zapata joined Madero’s side and organized an army of peasants in the southern state of Morelos, to fight against Díaz’s government. Zapata and his soldiers captured the city of Cuautla in 1911, causing Díaz to exile himself.

Emiliano Zapata had joined Madero with the goal of land reform. It soon became clear that Madero did not take this seriously or plan to fulfill his promises. Zapata then turned against Madero as well, writing his Plan of Ayala and naming Pascual Orozco leader of the revolution.

In a twist of fate, a Mexican general named Victoriano Huerta killed Madero before Zapata could. Huerta– known for his cruelty and violence– was hated by the revolutionaries.

Four of the leaders came together to fight Huerta, the “Big Four”– a group that included both Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Once Huerta was gone, there was infighting in the group.

Emiliano Zapata Death and Legacy

Carranza, one of the “Big Four,” wanted Zapata gone. He sent one of his generals to lead a group to ambush and kill Zapata. On April 10, 1919, Zapata was killed by Colonel Jesús Guajardo. He was 39 years old.

Emiliano Zapata’s legacy endured beyond his own lifetime, as often happens when a charismatic leader dies young. His untimely passing eventually sparked a small movement to carry on his ideals of land reform and protection for farmers.

Those who follow him are often called “zapatistas,” or the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional . Zapata was memorialized by Diego Rivera himself, in a portrait in 1932.

Pancho Villa Early Life and Family

Fransisco Villa, nicknamed Pancho Villa, was born June 5, 1878, in Dorango, Mexico. His given name at birth was actually José Doroteo Arango Arámbula .

Villa was born into a family of field laborers, but lost both of his parents young. When his sister was assaulted, he sought revenge by killing one of their employers. As a result, he spent his teenage years hiding in the mountains.

When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Villa aligned himself with the rebel Francisco Madero. He proved useful as a leader who knew the terrain and Madero became the new president.

However, in 1912, Pascual Orozco led a rebellion against Madero. Madero suspected Villa and sent him to prison. Villa escaped, fled to the United States, and returned to Mexico in 1913 when Madero was assassinated and replaced by General Huerta.

At this time, Villa formed a military group, the División del Norte. Together with Venustiano Carranza, Villa fought against Huerta and they took Mexico City in 1914. During this time, he also became governor of Chihuahua.

After a falling out with Carranza, Villa fled to the mountains with Emiliano Zapata. He avoided capture until the end of Carranza, in 1920, and was granted a pardon. His return to society, however, was short-lived.

Pancho Villa Death and Legacy

Pancho Villa was assassinated by a government-backed order in 1923, at the age of 45. Although Villa reportedly had no presidential ambitions himself, the president feared his powerful presence and popularity was a threat.

The legacy of Pancho Villa is a mixed one. Some see him as a sort of rogue Robin Hood character, and others condemn the violence he regularly utilized.

Learn more about through these 25 Pancho Villa quotes that gives us a peek into his view of himself, Mexico, politics, war, and more.

Printables and links to learn more

Free Resources:

• Younger students can color this  free printable
• Students can learn more about the Mexican Revolution through the film The Storm that Swept Mexico , with lesson plans from PBS .
• You can access an extensive lesson plan for high schoolers on the Mexican Revolution here.
• School for Chiapas has an extensive database of lessons, worksheets, and comprehensible videos in Spanish that cover topics like: ¿Quienes son las zapatistas? , a comparison of Emiliano Zapata and Malcom X, women in the movement, and more.

Zapata, Villa Biography Videos

If you plan to use these videos with students, do keep in mind that they cover violent stories and may include brief graphic scenes. Please preview before showing in class!

This is a good overview of Zapata and his historical context, in Spanish (6min 33s).

This quick into to Emiliano Zapata doesn’t go into his life story, but is excellent for describing why we remember Zapata and what his legacy is (1min 7s):

Longer biography of Emiliano Zapata (27min 57s):

Excellent biography of Francisco (Pancho) Villa in Spanish (7min 12s):

For a more in-depth look at Pancho Villa– and his controversial legacy– try this longer overview of his biography. Do be aware that rape is mentioned in this video. (19min 58s):

I hope these quotes and resources were helpful to you! If you have more ideas for resources or lessons, let me know in the comments below!

Image Credits:

Image 2: “ “ Pancho Villa y Emliano Zapata ” ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) by  LALO VAZQUEZ

Image 3: “ Emiliano Zapata ”Tierra y Libertad” ” ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) by  LALO VAZQUEZ

Image 4: “ Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  Atelier Teee

Image 5: “ Zapatistas ” ( Public Domain ) by  Thad Zajdowicz

Image 6: “ Agrarian Leader Zapata ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  IslesPunkFan

Image 7: “ Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata ” ( CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ) by  Paul Garland

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Arthinkal Magazine

Emiliano Zapata: The Iconic Mexican Revolutionary

by arthinkal · Published July 11, 2022 · Updated December 11, 2023

Emiliano Zapata. Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Emiliano Zapata was a Mexican revolutionary, who was a leading figure in the decade-long Mexican revolution. He was the main leader of the people’s revolution in the Mexican state of Morelos, and the inspiration for the agrarian movement known as Zapatismo .

Emiliano Zapata was born on 8th August 1879 in the rural village of Anenecuilco in Morelos, to Cleofas Jertrudiz Salazar and Gabriel Zapata.

Zapata was the ninth child out of ten children, with six sisters and three brothers.

The Zapata family were fairly well-known in the village and were most likely Mexicans of Spanish and Nahua heritage, known as Mestizos.

Born into a family of farmers, Zapata grew up witnessing the dire conditions and difficulties faced by the peasants in the countryside, especially the landless peasants. He saw his village struggle to reclaim the land stolen from them by the ever-expanding haciendas owned by rich landlords.

Most peasants in his village were landless peasants, and although the legend of Zapata states that he too was a landless indigenous peasant, that is not exactly accurate. Zapata’s family was believed to have owned some land and were rather well-off compared to the other peasants in the village, never really suffering from poverty.

As far as formal education was concerned, Zapata had very little of it.

When Emiliano Zapata was 16 or 17 years old, his father died, forcing him to begin earning some money for his family.

Fortunately, Zapata turned out to have an entrepreneurial spirit that helped him to succeed in the various ventures he undertook. He bought a team of mules to haul maize from farms to the town and bricks to the hacienda of Chinameca.

By then he had also become a highly-skilled horseman who competed in races and rodeos and even in bullfighting from horseback. His skills as a horseman caught the attention of Ignacio de la Torre y Mier , who was the owner of a large sugar hacienda, and Mier hired him as a horse trainer.

Zapata was also a successful farmer of watermelons during this period.

Protesting Against the Local Haciendas

The local haciendas in the village continued to seize the land of the indigenous peasants in order to expand their landholdings. But the villagers protested against such land seizures and its leaders put forth the required documents proving their right and title to the seized lands.

Emiliano Zapata was one of the members of the community who sought redress against such land seizures. During one such meeting with President Porfirio Diaz , who had promised to give the villagers a fair hearing, Diaz had them arrested, and many of them were conscripted into the Mexican Federal Army.

Becoming the President of the Village Council

By the time Emiliano Zapata had turned 30 years old, he was already a well-respected member of the community.

Despite his relatively young age, he was appointed president of the village council and was trusted by the villagers to take over the leadership and responsibilities of the village.

Zapata had earned such respect from the old and young members of the village alike by leading a campaign in opposition to the candidate Diaz had chosen as governor. Even though the campaign was a failure, Zapata managed to build and cultivate relationships with political authorities that would greatly help him later on.

In this way, Zapata became a leading figure and representative of his village, where people affectionately called him Miliano . He preferred this nickname over the title Don , which was customary for someone of his status in the village.

The Onset of the Mexican Revolution

The need for major land reform and the rigged and flawed elections of 1910 were the primary reasons for the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in the year 1910.

Businessman and later Revolutionary Francisco Ignacio Madero became a candidate for the presidential elections, threatening the rule of President Diaz. Madero campaigned vigorously but was jailed before the elections by Diaz so as to ensure he would not win. The result of the rigged election was obvious. Diaz won comfortably by a landslide and was elected President for another term.

Madero managed to escape from jail and fled to San Antonio in Texas, from where he wrote a letter denouncing the election and Diaz’s presidency as illegal and calling for a popular armed revolution against Diaz’s government.

Madero and his men came to be known as constitutionalists , who supported land reform and other changes that were supposed to improve and change the situation of the great mass of disadvantaged Mexicans.

Emiliano Zapata, seeing an opportunity to advocate for radical land reform, joined forces with Madero to support him for the presidency. Along with Zapata, Madero gained support from other revolutionaries as well, such as Pancho Villa in the north and Pascual Orozco .

Madero was viewed by these revolutionary factions as someone who was capable of bringing genuine change in the country and helping out the poor peasants through land reform.

Without wasting much time, Zapata, whose main political aim was to achieve land reform, joined Madero’s military campaign against Diaz. In his first military campaign, Zapata and his men, known as Zapatistas , captured the hacienda of Chinameca. And in May 1911, the Zapatistas captured the city of Cuautla in Morelos after an intense six-day battle against the federal army of Diaz’s government.

On the sixth day of the battle, the federal army withdrew and Zapata took control of the town. Diaz soon realized that he could not hold his position for long and wisely signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez with Madero and resigned as President.

Falling Out with Madero

Although Madero had made vague promises of land reforms that had won him the support of peasants, he was unwilling to implement any radical changes once he gained power. He merely demanded that public servants act morally in enforcing the law.

Looking at this change in Madero’s policies and his hesitation to carry out widespread land reform, Emiliano Zapata grew skeptical of Madero and his intentions.

Negotiations between the two failed in November 1911, just days after Madero was elected President. After failing to reach a compromise with Madero, Zapata and his men fled to the mountains of southwest Puebla, where Zapata and his general Otilio Sanchez drafted a radical land reform plan in their document titled Plan of Ayala . In it, Zapata also denounced Madero for betraying the ideals of the revolution, which Madero had laid down in his Plan of San Luis Potosi .

The plan drawn up by Zapata called Madero a traitor to the revolution and demanded all village lands seized under Diaz be immediately returned to the peasants. It also demanded that large plantations owned by a single family or person should have one-third of their land nationalized and redistributed to the peasants, and if any plantation owner resisted the reform, the other two-thirds would be confiscated as well. The plan also called for rural cooperatives to be formed and for measures to be put in place to prevent such seizure of land in the future.

Zapata had grown disillusioned with Madero’s vision of democracy built on ideals such as the freedom of the press, free elections, and other vague guarantees. He believed these freedoms and guarantees were meaningless to peasants who could neither read nor write and who were usually not even aware of the candidates standing for elections.

Continuing the Revolution

After the revolutionaries declared Madero a traitor to the revolution, Pascual Orozco was named the head of the revolution.

Orozco was ready to truly carry out land reforms that would return village lands to the peasants. A new rebellion began against Madero under the leadership of Orozco, with Emiliano Zapata serving as a colonel in the revolutionary army.

However, Zapata’s leadership began to stand out soon enough and his strategies gained recognition and force among the rebel leaders. Zapata proposed to center the fighting in the city of Cuautla as he believed it to be an ideal strategic position.

In order to achieve this goal, the Zapatistas had to control the area behind and below a line from Jojutla to Yecapixtla, and their plan of action was successfully executed in Jojutla.

But the revolution would soon suffer a major setback.

Becoming the Leader of the Revolution in Morelos

As Jojutla fell under the rebel army, the commander of the operation, Pablo Torres Burgos , resigned after losing control over his forces, who went ahead and looted and ransacked the area against his orders.

As Burgos left Jojutla with his two sons, a federal police patrol stopped them on the way and shot all three of them. The movement in the south was now left without a commander and the rebels elected Zapata as Supreme Chief of the Revolutionary Movement of the South.

However, things were not as black and white in the rebel army. There were others in the army who were vying for Zapata’s position. In fact, Zapata’s position as leader of the revolution in the south never even reached a true definitive level of recognition.

But Zapata managed to obtain 10,000 pesos from the inhabitants of Tacubaya, giving him strong financial backing for the battles to come and making his group the most financially strong group in the state of Morelos.

As Zapata became the leader of his strategic zone, his authority and influence in Morelos grew exponentially and his control now extended to several individual groups of rebels across the state.

After a meeting with another rebel leader, Ambrosio Figueroa , the two agreed to have joint power over the operations in Morelos.

Fight Against Huerta

In February of 1913, Madero was overthrown by a right-wing military coup led by General Victoriano Huerta , who was responsible for several atrocities and terrible crimes in southern Mexico while trying to put an end to the rebellion.

Zapata despised Huerta and Huerta now became Zapata’s main enemy. Zapata went into battle against Huerta along with Pancho Villa in the north. He also revised the Plan of Ayala to name himself as the leader of the revolution in the south.

Soon Zapata and Villa were joined by Alvaro Obregon and Venustiano Carranza , both of whom had raised large armies in Sonora and Coahuila respectively, in their fight against Huerta. Together, they were too strong for Huerta, who resigned and fled in June 1914.

As the rebels took over the territories previously under the control of the federal army, many soldiers of the federal army joined the rebels and the rebels also managed to capture guns and ammunition.

By mid-1915, the Zapatistas had taken the southern edge of the Federal District and were preparing to advance into the capital. In mid-July, Huerta was again forced to flee as a constitutionalist force under Carranza, Villa, and Obregon took control of the Federal District.

For Zapata, the problem of Huerta had been solved but a new problem emerged in Carranza.

Carranza Assumes Leadership

As soon as the rebels took over the Federal District and Huerta fled, the constitutionalists entered into a peace treaty declaring Carranza as the First Authority of the Nation by passing over Zapata and Villa.

Zapata and Villa were mainly ignored because Carranza was a wealthy aristocrat with important political connections and US backing, while they came from poor, lower-status backgrounds with progressive ideologies that were not favored by the elite of Mexican society.

Carranza also disliked the Zapatistas as he considered them to be uncultured savages.

Alliance with Pancho Villa

As Carranza assumed leadership of the country without the consent of the two main rebel leaders, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, Villa split from Carranza to form a popular front against him.

Villa’s departure forced Carranza to work diplomatically with Zapata to convince him to recognize his rule. A compromise with Zapata would allow him to concentrate on defeating Villa and not worry about his southern flank.

However, Zapata and Carranza failed to reach an agreement after Zapata demanded to have veto power over Carranza’s decisions. Of course, Carranza could not agree to that and the negotiations came to an end.

The constitutionalists were now divided along ideological lines with Carranza and Obregon leading the conservative faction, and Zapata and Villa leading the progressive rebellion against Carranza.

Zapata and Villa met to negotiate an alliance and decide on a strategy to overthrow Carranza. It was decided that Zapata would work on securing the area east of Morelos from Puebla toward Veracruz.

But when the campaign in Puebla was underway, Villa did not adequately support Zapata with weapons and transportation as had been agreed upon in their meeting. Zapata was disappointed by Villa’s lack of support, leaving him disillusioned with the alliance.

Rebuilding Morelos

The Zapatistas took Puebla and left a couple of garrisons there. But Emiliano Zapata had decided not to support Pancho Villa anymore against Carranza and Obregon.

Instead, Zapata turned his attention toward rebuilding Morelos, which was in terrible shape after the battle against the forces of Huerta.

Throughout the year 1915, Zapata and his men went about reshaping and reorganizing Morelos as per the Plan de Ayala. They delegated authority to the village councils to run their own local affair, and they redistributed the hacienda lands to the peasants.

The peasants began growing subsistence crops such as beans, vegetables, and corn, instead of cash crops. Due to this, the peasants of Morelos had more to eat at a much lower price than they had had before the start of the revolution.

The Zapatistas also implemented democratic reforms and legislation to keep the people of Morelos safe from abuses by soldiers.

1915 was a year of relative peace and prosperity for the people of Morelos. But things would not remain the same for long.

Back to War

The forces of Pancho Villa, who were fighting Carranza’s forces, were now on retreat after losing the Battle of Celaya in 1915.

But Emiliano Zapata did not take any action until Carranza’s forces were set to move into Morelos. It was only then that Zapata began attacking the positions held by Carranza’s forces. Even though the Zapatistas were able to take over many such important positions, they were unable to hold them for long.

Meanwhile, in Toluca, Villa’s forces suffered a major defeat, after which Carranza was recognized by US President Woodrow Wilson as the Head of State of Mexico.

Zapata continued to attack Carranza’s forces from Hidalgo to Oaxaca, and he even tried to gather support against the owners of haciendas. But all this was of no use, for the hacienda owners had already lost power throughout the country.

Zapata also undertook several low-scale attacks on the forces of General Pablo Gonzalez Garza which drove Gonzalez and his forces out of Morelos by the end of 1916.

Dying Revolution

By 1917, Carranza mounted national elections in all state capitals except Cuernavaca and also promulgated the 1917 constitution which included elements of the Plan de Ayala.

In the meanwhile, the revolution outside of Morelos was disintegrating. The revolutionary forces began disbanding and many joined Carranza or went into banditry.

Many leaders such as General Domingo Arenas joined Carranza, thereby securing peace for his region while also remaining in control there. This changed the attitude of many revolutionaries who began thinking that it was time to look for a peaceful resolution with Carranza.

Zapata was now under pressure as people in his rank and file, such as longtime adviser Otilio Montano and General Vasquez, began a movement within Zapata’s army demanding that Zapata surrenders to Carranza. For this, Zapata reluctantly had Montano tried for treason and executed.

Losing Morelos

In the fall of 1917, Carranza’s forces, led by Gonzalez and former Zapatista Sidronio Camacho (who had killed Zapata’s elder brother Eufemio), moved into the eastern part of Morelos and took over Cuautla, Zacualpan, and Jonacatepec.

In the meanwhile, Emiliano Zapata tried to unite the national anti-Carranza movement by seeking alliances with the northern revolutionaries and the southern Felicistas led by the liberalist Felix Diaz .

To make matters worse, the following year saw the onset of the deadly Spanish flu in Morelos, which resulted in the death of a quarter of the state’s population. This was a major setback to the revolution in the south.

In December of the same year, Carranza’s forces attacked Morelos with a greater offensive, taking over most of the state and forcing Zapata to retreat. While in retreat, Zapata urged Carranza through an open letter to resign his leadership for the sake of the country to Vasquez Gomez , who had by then become the main rallying point of the anti-constitutionalist movement.

Needless to say, Carranza did not listen.

Zapata’s Assassination

Getting rid of Emiliano Zapata now became Carranza’s top priority. Carranza wanted to prove to Mexican aristocrats and elites and to American interests that he was the only safe alternative to radicalism and anarchism.

What would ensue was nothing short of a dramatic movie script.

In March 1919, General Gonzalez ordered his subordinate Jesus Guajardo to begin operations against the Zapatistas in the mountains around Huautla. But shortly thereafter, Gonzalez found Guajardo carousing in a cantina and had him arrested. A public scandal erupted.

Seeing an opportunity to get Guajardo on his side, Zapata tried to smuggle in a note for him, inviting him to switch to the side of the revolutionaries. Unfortunately, the note ended up on Gonzalez’s desk and never reached Guajardo. Taking advantage of the situation, Gonzalez falsely accused Guajardo of being a traitor as well and explained to him that if he wished to redeem himself, he must feign a defection to Zapata.

Guajardo agreed and wrote to Zapata that if his terms were met, he would bring over his men and supplies to Zapata’s side. Zapata agreed to all his terms and suggested a meeting. He also ordered Guajardo to attack the Federal garrison at Jonacatepec. Guajardo agreed.

Gonzalez and Guajardo then informed the garrison of the attack ahead of time, and a fake battle was staged on 9th April 1919. At the end of the fake battle, the former Zapatistas who were in the garrison were arrested and shot dead.

Zapata was now convinced that Guajardo was sincere, and he agreed to a final meeting where Guajardo would defect and join the rebel forces. Guajardo invited Zapata to a meeting at the Hacienda de San Juan in Chinameca on 10th April. When Zapata arrived there, he was shot dead by Guajardo’s men.

Aftermath of Zapata’s Assassination

After the assassination of Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatistas, though weakened now, continued to fight against Carranza.

Even though Zapata’s death rid Carranza and Gonzalez of a serious threat, they lost all worker and peasant support for the upcoming 1920 election campaign.

The people of Morelos continued to support the Zapatista movement by providing them with supplies, weapons, and protection. However, several Zapatista generals began surrendering to Carranza in exchange for amnesties and for positions of local authority.

In the meanwhile, Obregon turned against Carranza and Gonzalez and aligned himself more with the Zapatista movement along with several former constitutionalists.

In May 1920, Carranza fled Mexico City, and Obregon and Genevevo de la O entered the capital in triumph. Zapatistas were given important posts in the interim government and then subsequently in the government led by Obregon.

The Zapatistas were also given complete control of Morelos, where they successfully carried out a program of agrarian reforms and land redistribution with the support of the government based on the Plan of Ayala.

Since his death, Emiliano Zapata has become one of the most iconic and revered national heroes of Mexico. He is also regarded as one of the greatest revolutionaries in history.

Zapata was a common man who stood up and fought for the rights of the poor peasants and workers of southern Mexico. He dedicated his life to achieving economic, political, and social emancipation of the peasants and workers who were wronged and who lived in severe poverty. He stood for their rights and he stood for justice.

Zapata’s influence still reigns to this day in Mexico, especially in southern Mexico where the Zapatista movement still goes on, albeit on a very low scale. Revolutionary tendencies still exist and thrive there with Zapata as their source of inspiration. In the south of Mexico, there are territories and communities that are under the control of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation .

Zapata’s Plan of Ayala sought to implement radical land reforms and liberties, which unfortunately have still not been implemented in the way and to the extent he wanted. For that, he is often referred to as a visionary who thought ahead of his time.

Even though Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution (influenced by the Plan of Ayala) was enacted on the scale imagined by Zapata, a great and significant process of land distribution was undertaken under President Lazaro Cardenas , who took office in 1934.

Being the charismatic revolutionary leader that he was, Zapata’s life and death have now assumed mythical and legendary proportions in Mexican history, folklore, and consciousness. Upon his death, he became a martyr and an inspiration to the masses and to countless revolutionaries across the world.

Organizations, streets, towns, stations, housing developments, etc., have been named after him. Statues have been erected in his honor, and his name and visage have frequently been used in political and revolutionary campaigns, even to this day. He has been depicted in books, music, movies, clothing, comics, musicals, plays, art, etc.

Zapata’s work still continues through his people and through his influence over modern Mexico. He was a leader of the masses, an iconic figure of modern history, and a symbol of justice and revolution.

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Leonard Castellanos,  RIFA, from Méchicano 1977 Calendario ,  1976, screenprint on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2012.53.1, © 1976, Leonard Castellanos

Leonard Castellanos born Los Angeles, California 1943

RIFA, from Méchicano 1977 Calendario 1976 screenprint on paperboard Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2012.53.1

For his contribution to the 1977 calendar cover, Castellanos included a psychedelic-hued portrait of Emiliano Zapata, one of the celebrated leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Chicano artists saw themselves as continuing Zapata’s legacy of resistance efforts for land and indigenous rights. Beneath the portrait, the artist includes the Chicano slang phrase “rifa,” which means “we are the best.” This boastful reference is prevalent among early Chicano arts iconography.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-14906

Emiliano Zapata born 1879 – Anenecuilco, Morelos, Mexico died 1919 – Chinameca, Morelos, Mexico

“Mexican People, support this plan with arms in hand and you will make the prosperity and well-being of the fatherland.”

Born in rural Mexico, Emiliano Zapata fought for the land rights of working people and led an armed group of poor peasants known as “the Zapatistas” during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Zapata was assassinated a year before the war ended, but the Zapatistas carried on his name and mission. After the revolution, many of the agrarian reforms Zapata had proposed were enacted. He remains an iconic revolutionary figure in Mexico today.

SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Emiliano zapata.

1879 - 1919

Emiliano Zapata Salazar (Spanish pronunciation: [emiˈljano saˈpata]; August 8, 1879 – April 10, 1919) was a Mexican revolutionary. He was a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, the main leader of the people's revolution in the Mexican state of Morelos, and the inspiration of the agrarian movement called Zapatismo. Zapata was born in the rural village of Anenecuilco in Morelos, in an era when peasant communities came under increasing repression from the small-landowning class who monopolized land and water resources for sugarcane production with the support of dictator Porfirio Díaz (President from 1877 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911) . Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Emiliano Zapata has received more than 3,757,622 page views. His biography is available in 70 different languages on Wikipedia . Emiliano Zapata is the 27th most popular social activist (down from 25th in 2019) , the 6th most popular biography from Mexico (up from 7th in 2019) and the most popular Mexican Social Activist .

Emiliano Zapata is most famous for his role in the Mexican Revolution, which he led. He was a peasant farmer who fought for land reform and the redistribution of wealth.

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Page views of Emiliano Zapatas by language

Among social activists.

Among social activists , Emiliano Zapata ranks 27 out of 538 .  Before him are Peter Kropotkin , Charlotte Corday , Olympe de Gouges , Irena Sendler , Bertha von Suttner , and Thomas Müntzer . After him are Omar Mukhtar , Martin Niemöller , Pheidippides , Élie Ducommun , Ferdinand Lassalle , and Simon Wiesenthal .

Most Popular Social Activists in Wikipedia

Peter Kropotkin

1842 - 1921

Charlotte Corday

1768 - 1793

Olympe de Gouges

1748 - 1793

Irena Sendler

1910 - 2008

Bertha von Suttner

1843 - 1914

Thomas Müntzer

1489 - 1525

Omar Mukhtar

1858 - 1931

Martin Niemöller

1892 - 1984

Pheidippides

600 BC - 490 BC

Élie Ducommun

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Ferdinand Lassalle

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Simon Wiesenthal

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1879 , Emiliano Zapata ranks 9 .  Before him are Leon Trotsky , Paul Klee , Kazimir Malevich , Emperor Taishō , Franz von Papen , and Otto Hahn . After him are Max von Laue , Owen Willans Richardson , Alma Mahler , Symon Petliura , Francis Picabia , and Ottorino Respighi .  Among people deceased in 1919 , Emiliano Zapata ranks 9 .  Before him are Theodore Roosevelt , Ernst Haeckel , Karl Adolph Gjellerup , Emil Fischer , Karl Liebknecht , and Alfred Werner . After him are Gojong of Korea , John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh , Andrew Carnegie , Ruggero Leoncavallo , William Crookes , and Carl Larsson .

Others Born in 1879

Leon Trotsky

1879 - 1940

Kazimir Malevich

1879 - 1935

Emperor Taishō

1879 - 1926

Franz von Papen

1879 - 1969

1879 - 1968

Max von Laue

1879 - 1960

Owen Willans Richardson

1879 - 1959

Alma Mahler

1879 - 1964

Symon Petliura

Francis Picabia

1879 - 1953

Ottorino Respighi

1879 - 1936

Others Deceased in 1919

Theodore Roosevelt

1858 - 1919

Ernst Haeckel

1834 - 1919

Karl Adolph Gjellerup

1857 - 1919

Emil Fischer

1852 - 1919

Karl Liebknecht

1871 - 1919

Alfred Werner

1866 - 1919

Gojong of Korea

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

1842 - 1919

Andrew Carnegie

1835 - 1919

Ruggero Leoncavallo

William Crookes

1832 - 1919

Carl Larsson

1853 - 1919

Among people born in Mexico , Emiliano Zapata ranks 6 out of 585 .  Before him are Frida Kahlo (1907) , Anthony Quinn (1915) , Diego Rivera (1886) , Moctezuma II (1466) , and Geronimo (1829) . After him are Carlos Slim (1940) , Pancho Villa (1878) , Carlos Santana (1947) , La Malinche (1502) , Octavio Paz (1914) , and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (1946) .

Others born in Mexico

Frida Kahlo

1907 - 1954

Anthony Quinn

1915 - 2001

Diego Rivera

1886 - 1957

Moctezuma II

1466 - 1520

1829 - 1909

Carlos Slim

1940 - Present

Pancho Villa

1878 - 1923

Carlos Santana

1947 - Present

La Malinche

1502 - 1529

Octavio Paz

1914 - 1998

Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo

1946 - Present

Among SOCIAL ACTIVISTS In Mexico

Among social activists born in Mexico , Emiliano Zapata ranks 1 .  After him are Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753) , Subcomandante Marcos (1957) , Ricardo Flores Magón (1874) , Leona Vicario (1789) , Miriam Rodríguez Martínez (1967) , Lydia Cacho (1963) , Guadalupe Campanur Tapia (1986) , and Xiye Bastida (2002) .

Mexican born Social Activists

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla

1753 - 1811

Subcomandante Marcos

1957 - Present

Ricardo Flores Magón

1874 - 1922

Leona Vicario

1789 - 1842

Miriam Rodríguez Martínez

1967 - 2017

Lydia Cacho

1963 - Present

Guadalupe Campanur Tapia

1986 - 2018

Xiye Bastida

2002 - Present

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The Zapatistas: History and Current Role in Mexico

An Indigenous Movement That Inspired the World

 Bernard Bisson / Getty Images

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• Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, University of California Berkeley
• M.A., Ethnomusicology, University of California Berkeley
• B.M., Music, Barnard College

The Zapatistas are a group of mostly indigenous activists from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas who organized a political movement, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Front, more commonly known as the EZLN), in 1983. They are known for their fight for land reform, advocacy for indigenous groups, and their ideology of anti-capitalism and anti-globalization, specifically the negative effects of policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on indigenous communities.

The Zapatistas initiated an armed rebellion in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, on January 1, 1994. The most visible leader of the Zapatista movement until recently was a man who went by the name of Subcomandante Marcos.

Key Takeaways: The Zapatistas

• The Zapatistas, also known as the EZLN, are a political movement made up of indigenous activists from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
• The EZLN led an uprising on January 1, 1994 to address the Mexican government's indifference to the poverty and marginalization of indigenous communities.
• The Zapatistas have inspired many other anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements around the world.

In November 1983, in response to longstanding indifference by the Mexican government to the poverty and inequality faced by indigenous communities, a clandestine guerilla group was formed in the southernmost state of Chiapas. The state was one of Mexico's poorest regions and had a high proportion not only of indigenous people, but of illiteracy and unequal land distribution. In the 1960s and 70s, indigenous people had led non-violent movements for land reform, but the Mexican government ignored them. Finally, they decided that armed struggle was their only choice.

The guerilla group was named the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Front), or the EZLN. It was named after Emiliano Zapata , a hero of the Mexican Revolution. The EZLN adopted his slogan "tierra y libertad" (land and freedom), stating that although the Mexican Revolution had succeeded, his vision of land reform had not yet been achieved. Beyond his ideals, the EZLN was influenced by Zapata's stance on gender equality. During the Mexican Revolution, Zapata's army was one of the few that allowed women to fight; some even held leadership positions.

The leader of the EZLN was a masked man who went by the name of Subcomandante Marcos; although he has never confirmed it, he has been identified as Rafael Guillén Vicente. Marcos was one of the few non-indigenous leaders of the Zapatista movement; in fact, he was from a middle-class, educated family in Tampico, in northern Mexico. He moved to Chiapas in the 1980s to work with Mayan peasants. Marcos cultivated an aura of mystique, always wearing a black mask for his press appearances.

1994 Rebellion

On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA (signed by the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) went into effect, the Zapatistas stormed six cities in Chiapas, occupying government buildings, freeing political prisoners, and expelling landowners from their estates. They chose this day because they knew the trade agreement, specifically the exploitative and environmentally destructive aspects of neoliberalism and globalization, would harm indigenous and rural Mexican communities. Crucially, around one-third of the rebels were women.

The EZLN exchanged fire with the Mexican military, but the fighting lasted only 12 days, at which point a ceasefire was signed. More than 100 people were killed. Indigenous communities in other parts of Mexico led sporadic uprisings in the following years, and many pro-Zapatista municipalities declared themselves autonomous from the state and federal governments.

In February 1995, President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León ordered Mexican troops into Chiapas to capture Zapatista leaders in order to prevent further rebellions. The EZLN and many indigenous peasants fled to the Lacandón Jungle. Zedillo targeted Subcomandante Marcos in particular, calling him a terrorist and referring to him by his birth name (Guillén) in order to strip away some of the rebel leader's mystique. The president's actions were unpopular, however, and he was forced to negotiate with the EZLN.

In October 1995 the EZLN began peace talks with the government, and in February 1996 they signed the San Andrés Peace Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture . Its goals were to address the ongoing marginalization, discrimination, and exploitation of indigenous communities, as well as give them a degree of autonomy in terms of government. However, in December, the Zedillo government refused to honor the agreement and tried to alter it. The EZLN rejected the proposed alterations, which didn't recognize indigenous autonomy.

Notwithstanding the existence of the accords, the Mexican government continued to wage a covert war against the Zapatistas. Paramilitary forces were responsible for a particularly horrific massacre in the Chiapas town of Acteal in 1997.

In 2001, Subcomandante Marcos led a Zapatista mobilization, a 15-day march from Chiapas to Mexico City, and spoke in the main square, the Zócalo, to a crowd of hundreds of thousands. He lobbied for the government to enforce the San Andrés Accords, but the Congress passed a watered-down bill that the EZLN rejected. In 2006, Marcos, who changed his name to Delegate Zero, and the Zapatistas emerged again during a presidential race in order to advocate for indigenous rights. He stepped down from his EZLN leadership role in 2014.

Zapatistas Today

Following the uprising, the Zapatistas turned to non-violent methods of organizing for indigenous people's rights and autonomy. In 1996 they organized a national meeting of indigenous people across Mexico, which became the National Indigenous Congress (CNI). This organization, representing a wide variety of distinct ethnic groups and backed by the EZLN, has become a crucial voice advocating for indigenous autonomy and self-determination.

In 2016, the CNI proposed the establishment of an Indigenous Governing Council , which would represent 43 distinct indigenous groups. The Council named an indigenous Nahuatl woman, Maria de Jesús Patricio Martínez (known as "Marichuy") to run in the 2018 presidential elections as an independent candidate. They didn't receive enough signatures, however, to get her on the ballot.

In 2018, the left-wing populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president, and he promised to incorporate the San Andrés Accords into the Mexican constitution and to repair the federal government's relationship with the Zapatistas. However, his new Maya Train project, which seeks to build a railway across southeastern Mexico, is opposed by many environmentalists and indigenous groups, including the Zapatistas. Thus, the tension between the federal government and the Zapatistas is ongoing.

The Zapatistas and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos have had an important influence on anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, and indigenous movements across Latin America and the world. For example, the 1999 Seattle protests during the World Trade Organization meeting and the more recent Occupy movement that was kicked off in 2011 have clear ideological links to the Zapatista movement. In addition, the Zapatistas' emphasis on gender equality and the fact that many leaders have been women has had an enduring legacy in terms of the empowerment of women of color. Over the years, the dismantling of patriarchy has become a more central goal for the EZLN.

Notwithstanding this impact, the Zapatistas have always insisted that each movement needs to respond to its own communities' needs, and not simply emulate the methods or goals of the EZLN.

• " Subcomandante Marcos. " Encyclopedia Britannica. 29 July 2019.
• " Zapatista National Liberation Army. " Encyclopedia Britannica. 31 July 2019.
• Klein, Hilary. "A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On." NACLA. https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/spark-hope-ongoing-lessons-zapatista-revolution-25-years , 29 July 2019.
• "New Era for Mexico's Zapatista Army 25 Years After Uprising." Telesur. https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/New-Era-for-Mexicos-Zapatista-Army-25-Years-After-Uprising--20181229-0015.html , 29 July 2019.
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