by Frank McLynn
Without question the Mexican Indian was socially combustible material, but without leadership from outside there was no possibility of the deprivation and resentment in the villages being converted into revolutionary activity. Caciquismo - the absolute dominance of a chief or cacique - worked against this, as did the extreme factionalism and parochialism of the villages. There were over ioo,ooo of these in igio, often a few miles from each other, but each one had a totally distinctive culture. Regionalism was so intense that there was extreme localism even within a region. In the state of Hidalgo eleven neighbouring pueblos were identified, all utterly different in politics, economics and culture. Indians were devoutly Catholic in that syncretic mode that allowed them to fuse their old pagan beliefs with the teachings of the Church, and parish priests usually counselled bowing the head, except perhaps on 12 December, the greatest date in the Church calendar, when the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe was celebrated.
All other factors worked in the same quietist direction. There is some evidence of a cosmic despair inculcated in the collective Indian unconscious by race memories of the demographic disaster of the sixteenth century. When Cortes and the Conquistadors arrived, Mexico had an estimated population of eleven million but eighty years later this was down to one million, and population levels revived only in the eighteenth century. Lack of knowledge was also lack of power for the Amerindians. The levels of literacy, political awareness and education were abysmal, but this was a feature of Mexico in general. In the `advanced' north, a mine owner, thinking to educate his workforce, held a mock election for president among the miners while Diaz was having himself re-elected and discovered some surprising results: out of 300 voters, 15o had voted for the long-dead Benito Juarez, loo for a bullfighter and fifty for the local bandit leader.
Above all else, however, was the issue of land; it was no accident that the great slogan of the Mexican Revolution (equivalent to `liberty, equality and fraternity' in the French Revolution) was Tierra y Libertad - land and liberty. The core problem of the Diaz years was the way the hacienda had encroached on village lands. Most villages had enjoyed their communal lands for centuries through customary right and had not filed documentary title to the territories in Mexico City. The hacendados and their lawyers took advantage of this to assert ownership in the village lands and water. By 1910 half of the rural population of Mexico had been reduced to dependency on the hacienda and many villages were hacienda pueblos. Even where the villages were not in hacienda territory, their inhabitants were often landless and had to work in the haciendas. The free non-hacienda villages were largely Indian and these were squeezed mercilessly until only a few retained their own ancient lands. Peaceful resistance was all but impossible, since the hacendados controlled the state courts and dominated local politics, making local democracy or free elections impossible.
The villagers could in a sense count themselves lucky, for there was an even more exploited group of people: the peons who lived and worked permanently on the hacienda grounds, as opposed to the villagers who worked as day labourers. These peons were ground into the dirt by the nefarious system of debt peonage, common in the south, which made the states of Veracruz, Campeche, Chiapas and Yucatan the closest thing to the notorious serfdom of Russia and eastern Europe. The peon, indentured to the hacienda and unable to leave, toiling all day under the sun, at the mercy of brutal overseers and harsh discipline enforced by whips and riding crops, had perforce to buy all his needs at the company store, where debts were run up either honestly or dishonestly. When these debts were made heritable, so that children inherited their parents' debt, peonage became slavery in all but name. Echoing the cynical transactions in Gogol's Dead Souls, owners bought and sold each other's peons and used bounty hunters to track down fugitives, who would then be beaten to death as a bloody warning to the others.
It is difficult to overstate the cynical savagery of debt peonage. Many peons owed up to three years' wages in debt which could never be repaid, especially as their employers cynically fiddled the figures. One company storekeeper was reputed to add the date at the top of the page to each peon's debt. The hacendados liked to keep their charges in ignorance, and on many haciendas schoolteachers were expressly forbidden to teach arithmetic to the permanent workers. Since Spaniards often held positions on the hacienda as keepers of the company store, clerks, foremen or managers, the gachupines were particularly hated, and Spain was always the main target for xenophobia in Mexico. The threat to all villagers was clear: if they lost their lands to the haciendas or became economically unviable, they would face starvation unless they became permanent employees on the haciendas and thus got sucked into the maw of debt peonage.
Although the state of Morelos did not suffer from the worst excesses of the hacienda system farther south, the mind of Emiliano Zapata cannot be understood without appreciating the role of land in his mentality: both his mystical feeling for the soil of his ancestors, and his negative appreciation of what lay in store for the villagers of his state if they did not resist the big hacendados. He was born on 8 August 1879 to Gabriel Zapata and Cleofas Salazar, the second son and ninth of ten children (of whom the two boys and two of the girls survived into adulthood), in the village of Anenecuilco (literally `the place where the waters swirl'), an ancient settlement that predated the Spanish Conquest. Zapata was the ancient Indian name of the pueblo. The Zapatas were an important family in Anenecuilco, with a reputation for political activism going back to 18io: they had fought in the wars of independence and, notably, against the French in the i 86os.
Many legends have attached themselves to Emiliano's birth, but two facts seem well grounded: he was born with a cherry-coloured birthmark, the shape of a small hand; and his birth was attended by an Indian healer woman or curandera. Childbirth had a powerful mystical resonance among the people of Morelos, and it is thought that the pre-Conquest Indians of the area had a bizarre religious baby cult. Fathers were present at births, assisting their wives who bore children in the sitting position. Directing the entire operation was the curandera, who would massage the pregnant woman's body, sprinkling incense or copalli, a gum made from resinous pine wood and chanting magic formulae. When the child was delivered, the curandera cut the umbilical cord, tied it and washed the baby, leaving the mother to sleep. Once she had wrapped the child, she handed it to the father in a stylised, ritualistic way that everyone understood. All the other children would have been present at the birth. A successful live birth, in a culture that so prized children, was the occasion for setting off fireworks and rockets and drunken carousal.
Emiliano Zapata was born into a troubled land. The basic social conflict in Morelos was between the villagers (mainly small farmers) and the owners of the great sugar-cane plantations. Sugar haciendas and subsistence villages had coexisted uneasily since the sixteenth century. By 1910 Morelos produced one-third of Mexico's sugar crop and was the third largest sugar-cane producing area in the world (behind Hawaii and Puerto Rico). Seventeen owners of thirty-six huge haciendas owned onequarter of the state and all the best land. Since Diaz came to power in 1876, there had been an enormous expansion of the haciendas at the expense of the villages and the small farmers. In this conflict the Zapata family had played an important if ambivalent role; despite his reverence for his ancestors' lands, Emiliano must have realised that not all his forebears' political actions bore close investigation.
In the 1870s the family had been porfirista, and a Jose Zapata (not Emiliano's uncle of that name) had been Diaz's political fixer in the state. In 1874 this Jose Zapata, now the village chief of Anenecuilco, wrote to Diaz, then a war hero but not yet dictator, about the tyranny of the sugar mills and their owners. In 1876, when Diaz was supreme ruler, the new village chief wrote again to don Porfirio, asking for his help and mentioning that the earlier petitioner, Jose Zapata, was dead. Diaz promised to do all he could, but nothing was done. Tensions continued. In 1878 Manuel Mendoza Cortina, the owner of the hacienda of Cuahuixtla, tried to
get his hands on Anenecuilco's water supply; when the villagers learned that one of their elders was secretly helping him, they caught the man and cut off his head. In 1887, when Emiliano was eight, Cortina annexed the eastern end of the village, prompting the villagers to tax themselves to buy guns, but the Zapata family was not prominent in this initiative. At this stage they tended to align themselves with the hacendados: the owner of the giant Hospital hacienda had actually been Emiliano's godfather at his baptism.
However, in 1895, when Emiliano was sixteen, there was trouble with the new owner of the Hacienda Hospital - a name that would recur in Zapata's biography. The hacendado occupied the villagers' grazing land, killed some of their animals and put up barbed wire fences. Getting no satisfaction through local channels, at the turn of the century they hired a top lawyer, who sent to the National Archives in Mexico City for their title deeds; on receipt the lawyer confirmed that the village's title was inalienable. The young Emiliano Zapata was deeply impressed by this incident and developed something of an obsession about title deeds, which he would come to see as a living symbol of the soil of his beloved Morelos. He also developed a detestation of railways, seeing them as a sign of hacendado power.
In the burgeoning conflict in Morelos between villages and the sugar plantations, the hacendados were dealt a trump card in 1881 when a branch line of the Veracruz-Mexico City line was extended down to Morelos, giving the planters access to larger markets and allowing them to import heavy machinery to build bigger sugar mills. The role of the railways as an important and exponential, though not exclusive, cause of conflicts between villages and haciendas should never be underrated: during the 1877-84 railway building boom, fifty-five serious armed conflicts were noted by the authorities. Zapata saw that certain phenomena seemed always to go hand in hand: whenever there was rail expansion, the hacendados sent armed men to seize village land, to increase their acreage and meet the growing demand for sugar in national and international markets. His xenophobia was fed by the presence of the hated Spaniards in every stage of hacienda expansion, and he felt the force of the ubiquitous slogan: `Death to the gachupines.'
It is easy to see the influences that made Zapata acquire his political consciousness, but details of his early life are otherwise sparse. Naturally, when he became famous all kinds of legends grew up around him, many centering on the verifiable fact that he was born with a birthmark on his chest, but only a handful of early anecdotes are well grounded in fact. It seems that even as a child Zapata was a dandy, with a taste for flashy clothes. His uncle Cristino gave him a pair of trousers decorated with coins. The story was that Cristino had fought with the bandits known as the plateados ('men dressed in silver') who ravaged Morelos in the latter part of the nineteenth century and dressed his nephew in this elaborate way so that he would be reminded of his one-time comrades. Not to be outdone, Emiliano's father's other brother gave him a present of a muzzle-loading rifle dating from the same campaign.
Two other formative incidents we owe to Zapata's own recollections. He remembered seeing his father weeping when one of the orchards that had been in the family for generations was appropriated by a powerful hacienda; Emiliano vowed that one day he would regain the stolen land. On another occasion, when people in a neighbouring village resisted the fencing off of their common land by a powerful hacendado, the man sent for the rurales, who burned the village to the ground. As a boy Emiliano stood with his brother Eufemio and his father, watching the flames lick skywards. Zapata's friends later said you could guarantee to get Emiliano into a rage simply by mentioning this incident, which seemed to make his eyes glow like hot coals as he remembered it.
We know little about Emiliano's childhood and youth except that he went to an elementary school in Anenecuilco, where his education included the basics of book-keeping. However, we do know an extraordinary amount about everyday social life in Morelos in the late nineteenth century, which enables us to reconstruct his milieu. He came from a prosperous `upper peasant' family, so would have been spared the worst privations, but it was impossible for him to avoid seeing the misery around him. Although debt peonage in Morelos was not at the levels of Chiapas and Yucatan and there were no instances of the hacendado demanding droit du seigneur over the nubile women on his estate, as happened in some other states, only a humbug would have described the lot of most Morelians as happy.
Mrs Alex Tweedie, a British traveller, described conditions at the San Gabriel hacienda in Morelos in 1901, which was widely regarded as a model plantation in its treatment of its workers. Enclosed by enormous walls, as if it were a gigantic monastery, the hacienda housed nearly 3,000 souls and, with its long corridors, ornate balconies, plethora of rooms, outbuildings, church and company store, seemed like a village in its own right. Without any security of tenure, the peons were allowed to build primitive dwellings with walls of bamboo and roofs of palm-leaf intertwined like thatch. All purchases had to be made at the company stores, everything was done on a ready money basis and employees were paid in cash on a Saturday night - this alone made the San Gabriel notable, for on most haciendas the peons had to take their wages purely in goods from the store. Average wages were 50 cents a week which enabled the peons to eke out a bare subsistence, though some of them were already 400 pesos in debt.
For the independent villagers life was better though still hard. The plough had replaced the coa - a narrow, long-handled digging stick - and donkeys did the work of the traditional Indian porter or taneme. It was considered a mark of civilisation that white trousers and shirts had replaced loin cloths as the accepted clothing for working in the fields. The more prosperous houses were still usually pre-Hispanic, with adobe walls or walls made of reed grass, thatched roofs and wooden shingles. For a man of Zapata's class diet would extend beyond the traditional Indian corn, beans, squash, cacao, chilli and the occasional turkey - under the influence of the Conquistadors, the Indians, originally vegetarian, had turned carnivore - but even mestizo cuisine was primarily Indian in the standard dishes: pozole stew, mole sauces and cornmeal tortillas.
The Indians had also learned the attractions of alcohol, often with devastating results. Gone were the pre-Conquest days when drinking at times other than religious festivals was a serious crime. Now the men frequented the grog shops, drinking pulque or aguardiente, and piling up the debt to the company store in the process. When they became ill, the Indians had two choices. If they lived on a hacienda they could consult the company doctor which each hacendado was supposed to provide along with a priest on Sundays and holy days of obligation. However, a much more popular option, given that the Indians still believed in magic, animism and folk medicines, was to consult the ancient healers or curanderos (curanderas if they were female) and take the drugs they prescribed.
The curanderas were especially popular, since they were thought to be witches with magic powers. Living embodiments of Jung's `wise old women', they had the authority of doctors or psychoanalysts, though their folk remedies were more redolent of Thomas Hardy's `conjurors' than of modern medicine. Like Chaucer's Pardoner, they carried many strange samples in their `magic bags', mainly bones or organs of animals with which they practised sympathetic magic. Among the elite they had a bad reputation, for though they were the accepted midwives in Morelos, childbirth mortality was high (which some ascribed to their dubious methods) and many of their adult patients died from gangrene or bloodpoisoning. In the rapture induced by the hallucinogenic drug peyote, the curanderas would prophesy in the Nahuatl tongue. In many ways these women, as herbalists, homoeopathic healers, doctors, midwives, counsellors, fortune tellers, were the eyes and ears of a village, its true intelligence system; they were respected and feared as much as they were cherished and admired.
By the standards of late twentieth-century urban life, everyday existence in Morelos - lived close to nature and the soil, circumscribed by the Catholic Church, with villagers permanently nervous about the encroachments of the haciendas - was dull and tedious when it w
as not menacing or threatening. In common with other Morelians, the young Emiliano Zapata looked forward to the high spot on the calendar, the village's annual fair, an occasion of social, religious and economic significance. Economically, the fair was a market in more senses than one, for the Morelos villages followed a strict division of labour when it came to producing goods exchanged by barter. Each village had its own specialisation, whether pottery, leather, straw mats, saddles, blankets, clothes; Tepac, for example, specialised in black pottery, Cuautla in leather, and Iguala in silver jewellery. With so many villages and so many fairs, traders in these goods lived an itinerant life, often travelling ioo miles from one fair to another.
Socially, the annual fairs were designed as a gigantic, week-long fiesta, reaching a climax on the Sunday nearest the feast day of the village's patron saint. The atmosphere was carnival, with all that that connotes: exotic costumes (usually a different jester's `uniform' from each village), elaborate dances, the singing of folk songs or corridos, gourmandising, drunkenness, letting off fireworks. The bars and pulquerias opened around midday and closed at dawn the next day, when the clientele were either in jail for disorderly conduct or sleeping it off at home. The village plaza would echo to the peculiar yip-yipping, high-pitched scream or carcajada of inebriated Indians. While the men were getting drunk, the women and children would amuse themselves on the fairground, complete with acrobats, primitive ferris wheels and freak shows.
Religiously, the celebrations gathered pace on Friday and climaxed on Sunday, when the priest would say Mass in a church so packed that worshippers spilled out on to the plaza. Devout Indians filed past statues of the crucified Christ, then lined up inside the church to kiss the feet of the Saviour on a gigantic wooden crucifix. The bizarre week-long synthesis of God, Mammon and the Flesh would finish, suddenly and mysteriously, on Sunday night. Nobody blew a whistle to end proceedings, but by a kind of pre-established harmony the revellers seemed to know the exact time to drift away and resume their normal lives. By Monday morning back-breaking toil and the everlasting struggle between villages and haciendas would be resumed.
