Viva Zapata
Maccoby, Michael
ZAPATA AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION, by John Womack, Jr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 467 pp. $10.00. JOHN WOMACK'S EXCELLENT STUDY of Zapata and his fight to protect the rights of...
...It broadened my understanding of events I have read about before, and of people in Morelos whom I have studied closely during the past eight years...
...The peculiar feature of Robles's use of this method was that he burned places he wanted the population to evacuate...
...Once the haciendas lay in ruins and the old life was gone, the peons' repressed hatred of their former masters added fuel to the explosion, which Zapata could not always control...
...The capital, Cuernavaca, is about 40 miles from Mexico City...
...In terms of myth, the haciendas were static, backward plantations owned by absentee landlords who lived in Paris on their rents and lacked interest in developing their land...
...JOHN WOMACK'S EXCELLENT STUDY of Zapata and his fight to protect the rights of Mexican campesinos in Morelos deserves the praise it has received from reviewers...
...the peasants are suspicious of cooperatives, and the landowners would resist losing control of the total operation...
...he inherited the debts of his fathers...
...A way of averting this result would have required a new form of cooperative industrial agriculture, in which small landowners maintain property rights but cooperate in buying, selling, and working the land with advanced technology...
...The peon's life was mortgaged to the estate...
...However, from an economic point of view, the hacienda was not the stagnant structure of the myth...
...The haciendas did in fact treat the peasant workers as serfs...
...He is fiercely independent, suspicious (especially of city types who cheat him), and stubborn...
...But it is clear that Zapata started out defending established legal rights, and that it was the government's cruel and indiscriminate violence which radicalized the population and increased the bloodshed...
...The small state of Morelos is directly to the south of the Federal District...
...It required first forcingranches and into concentrational camps on thethe rural pacificos out of their villages andoutskirts of larger towns, where federal supervision was easier...
...Then flying columns couldmove freely into the countryside and treatwhomever they met as "hostiles...
...To begin with, Womack authoritatively dissolves the mythological view of Zapata's revolution...
...The free campesino or peasant is very differ ent from the peon...
...Integrating a mountain of documents, Womack writes with clarity and a sensitive understanding of Mexican villagers...
...Modeled on Spanish proceedings in therecent Cuban War of Independence, and onsimilar British action in the Boer War and American action in the Philippines, "resettlement" was a deliberate definition of an indefi nite war...
...The primary goal of the Zapatistas, stated in the Plan de Ayala of 1911, was return of land that had been usurped...
...The reality is not so simple...
...Ground down by work and beatings, he became submissive...
...As Womack shows, only when the national government of Victorian Huerta radicalized the Morelos revolution by treating all peasants as Zapatistas and enemies of the state did Zapata open his armies to peons, and change his revolutionary goals to demand the abolition of the haciendas and land for all...
...THE REVOLUTION in Morelos and the reaction to it prefigured the peasant uprisings that have become increasingly frequent since 1910, and which our government still does not fully understand...
...The following question is crucial: how could the conflict between the hacienda and the free villagers have been resolved so that neither economic development nor individual rights would have been lost...
...Such a form of cooperative agriculture, in contrast to the commune where individuals lose property rights, has proved workable in Yugoslavia, in some parts of Mexico, and in Israel...
...I found the book fascinating and exciting...
...Human rights confronted the "progressive" demands of profit and technology, which could be rationhlized in terms of national development...
...On the other hand, the small landowner, conservative and wedded to traditional technology, is unable to increase agricultural production for a growing population...
...He values his rights, and he respects the rights of others...
...But today we have experienced in many parts of the world the destructiveness that results when the demands of new industrialcapitalistic organizations clash with traditional rights to land and liberty...
...The Russians and Poles discovered that many peas ants prefer death to collectivization...
...During this period the haciendas, aided by a government that abused the law concerning idle lands, dispossessed families that in some cases had held their land for centuries...
...Even if individuals are willing, such projects require education for the peasants, and strict honesty on the part of the administrators...
...This position, taken by the revolutionaries after 1920, justified breaking up the haciendas and giving the land to the peasants...
...Zapata and the Mexican Revolution is also an important source of information about the roots of peasant revolution...
...Probably, it would not have been possible in the Mexico of 1910...
...The hacienda peon who received land often lacked the training and character needed to work and administer it...
...The Mexi can hacienda owners found even earlier that the , BOOKS free villagers, the small land-owning peasants, were prepared to defend their property rights with their lives...
...Womack presents the history, but he leaves a great deal to the reader's commentary and interpretation...
...Thus, Zapata's goals were at first conservative...
...Womack writes that General Juvencio Robles put into practice a favorite policy, "resettlement...
...According to this myth, the hacienda peons, after years of semi-feudal slavery, rose up behind Zapata and overthrew their masters, demanding land and liberty...
...Thus, the revolution not only attacked dehumanizing structures, but also economically reactionary institutions...
...By 1910 it had become the standard method in the Mexican army for suppressing popular guerrillas...
...An old villager in Morelos told me that the government troops treated anyone wearing the white manta peasant dress as "hostile...
...From 1870 to 1910 sugar production in the state increased steadily from 8,748,131 kilograms to 48,531,600 kilograms...
...Yet, the new technologies are needed to feed hungry people...
...It was not the uprising that sparked the fires of revolution in Morelos, but the fact that in the 30 years preceding the Revolution many free peasants were losing their land to the haciendas and were thus being forced into the role of the landless peon...
...The peon was the most unlikely individual to start a revolution...
...The Revolution pitted traditional, small land owners against a developing, capitalistic system...
...As things turned out, the destruction of the haciendas set back the process of economic development...
...It is not easy to institute such an organization...
...Free individuals will fight for their rights...
...He is dignified and reserved (formal) . And he considers a threat to his property a threat to his life...
...Although he was not bought or sold like the black slaves in the U.S., he had no rights and could be punished at will by his master...
...In many parts of Mexico the peon has lost control of his land to new entrepreneurs who take over the role of the old hacendados...
...He had no hope of a better life, and he was too dependent to fend for himself...
...To the contrary, the haciendas had found, in 1880, new technologies, which increased their capacity to refine sugar and spurred them to grab new land to exploit...
Vol. 16 • July 1969 • No. 4
