by Frank McLynn
Zapata carried his superb equestrian skills into bullfighting. One of the tricks was for a horseman to lasso the hind legs of a bull in the arena. When the bull had been tripped a mass of men descended on the stricken animal to put a halter on him. Once the bull was bridled, the horseman was summoned back to ride the bull as if it were a bucking bronco. An even more flamboyant trick was coleando or `tailing' a bull. A young bull was driven out into the ring, and the rider rode up to it, challenging the bull to catch him. As the chase quickened, the rider would lean over, grab the tail of the steer, wrap it round his legs and then ride off at an angle so that the hindquarters of the animal were pulled crosswise. The trick required exceptional strength and dexterity but, if successfully executed, the bull would stumble and roll over on the ground. The rider would then leap from his horse before the bull recovered and throw a loop around its hind legs. Though not as expert in this as in the wild horse riding, Zapata was still rated among Morelos's best at coleando.
Such was Zapata's fame as a horseman that his reputation extended beyond the state. His prowess brought him not just the admiration of men and the conquest of women but tangible economic rewards. Some time before i9o9 he was invited to be personal trainer and manager at the Mexico City stables of Ignacio de la Torre. De la Torre had a string of thoroughbred Arabian horses and his stables in the capital were magnificent, built like palaces, with feed mangers of marble and floors of tiny cobblestones laid in patterns. Elegant carriages were parked against the walls, their wheels always gleaming with fresh paint, their seats made of tapestry or quilted silk. Like all Morelos planters, an exponent of vulgar and meretricious `conspicuous consumption', de la Torre shod his horses with silver and had silver tyres on his carriages. Zapata discovered, however, that de la Torre ran his `town house' - a vast millionaire's mansion, complete with courtyard and extensive grounds - as a miniature hacienda: his peons lived in squalor in noisome hovels hard by the splendid stables and it was obvious that the patron held his horses in much higher regard than his luckless employees. Disgusted, Zapata made polite excuses, left after a month and returned to Morelos. The experience left him with a conviction, never to be extinguished, that the city was a place of corruption and that goodness was to be found only in the countryside.
The role of horsemanship in Zapata's life partly explains his taste for gaudy clothes. The traditional charro costume consisted of a huge, broad, peaked felt hat; tight-fitting black cashmere trousers with silver buttons or a kind of silver fin down the outer seam; a white silk or linen shirt and jacket; a tight waistcoat ornamented in silver; and a scarf round the neck. Boots, spurs and a pistol at the belt would complete the ensemble, and in addition he would possess a highly ornamented saddle, a machete and a silver whip, usually made from a bull's penis, dried and twisted into rawhide with a spring in it like whalebone. Later it became the fashion for the charro's jacket also to be embroidered, but this was not the custom in Zapata's time. Dandyism was usually regarded in Morelos as a manifestation of the effete hacendados, with their well-known taste for building `follies', for polo ponies and landscaped gardens, but for a charro like Zapata an obvious exception would be made. The people of Anenecuilco were proud of their Emiliano and confident that he would make his mark as village chief.
The first task Zapata set himself was to study all the historical documents relating to the village and its lands. Among the other young men elected to village offices was Francisco Franco, the pueblo secretary, and together with Franco Zapata he spent eight days `brainstorming', stopping only to eat and sleep, absorbing the history and legends of Anenecuilco almost through his pores. Finding that many of the documents were written in Nahuatl - a tribe related to the Aztecs but by now mightily reduced in numbers and concentrated in just six villages where they made up about io per cent of the state's population - Zapata sent Franco to the village of Tetelcingo to hire a priest to decipher the Nahuatl writings; the priest was himself one of the last literate members of this once flourishing tribe. When all the documents, maps, title deeds, charters, legal opinions and notarised translations had been completed, Zapata put the contents in a tin box and buried it, so that his enemies could never destroy the evidence of Anenecuilco's rightful claims. Zapata had an almost fetishistic feeling about this strongbox and its contents. He told a later secretary, Serafin `Robledo' Robles, that if the box was ever lost he would hang Robles high on a cazahuate tree.
Sure of his ground after such exhaustive research, Zapata now felt confident enough to confront the administrators of the Hospital hacienda. After taking the precaution of getting yet another favourable and up-todate legal opinion, he rode to the hacienda. The manager of the Hospital was unaccommodating and answered Emiliano's petition harshly: `If the people of Anenecuilco want to sow their seed, let them sow it in a flowerpot, because they will get no land, even on the barren slope of a hill.' Perhaps not coincidentally, Zapata was almost immediately afterwards drafted into the Army. From i i February to 29 March 1910 he served as a private in the 9th Cavalry Regiment stationed at the state capital of Cuernavaca. Why he was demobilised after such a short time remains a mystery, but we may speculate that money played a part in such a rapid `mustering out'.
The Hospital hacienda, evidently in collusion with governor Escandon, took advantage of Zapata's absence to put pressure on Anenecuilco, to destroy the village as a community. On his return Emiliano tried one last time for a peaceful settlement of the dispute; he wrote to Escandon for a definitive decision on ownership, knowing that he held all the trump cards in his strongbox. When Escandon failed to reply, he wrote to Diaz himself, who predictably passed the buck back to the governor. The village then decided to beard Escandon in his lair and, finding one of the rare occasions when he was in Cuernavaca, sent a delegation there. Cornered, Escandon continued to stall and asked that he be sent a complete list of all persons harmed by the actions of the Hospital hacienda. Tired of this prevarication, Zapata finally decided he had had enough. He armed eighty men, went to the disputed fields where the hacienda's labourers were working, and ordered them to depart; he added that he had no quarrel with the men personally but they were trespassers. This was the exploit that first brought Zapata's name to a wider, nonMexican audience. An Englishwoman named Rosa King, who owned a small hotel in Cuernavaca, wrote about a `fellow over near Cuautla' who had been stirring the people up. This was the first appearance of the story of Zapata the troublemaker that would finally reach its apogee in the legend of the `Attila of the South'.
Preoccupied by Madero and the other pressing problems of the year 1910, neither Diaz nor Escandon took military action against Zapata. The Hospital hacienda took no action for several months, then sent in a claim for `rent' on `their' land. When Zapata ignored this, the hacienda appealed to the district prefect, who ordered a preliminary hearing. At the tribunal Zapata spoke eloquently for Anenecuilco. He disputed the rightness of the Hospital claim but added that, if the verdict went against him, Anencuilco would anyway be unable to pay because of the recent bad weather and poor harvests. After hearing him and realising the depth of feeling the issue engendered, the prefect decided to postpone a final decision on this hot potato. He made an interim would-be Solomonic judgment that no rent was payable by Anenecuilco in igio but that the matter would be reviewed in 1911. Determined to force a resolution before that time, Zapata sent a deputation to Diaz to get the disputed lands restored permanently to Anenecuilco.
By this time Zapata, Anenecuilco and the villages of Morelos were solidly behind Madero in his struggle with Diaz, which reached a climax in the summer of igio. Madero had a huge ideological significance for Zapata and his followers, for maderista propaganda had penetrated the far corners of Mexico, and the Morelos pueblos now realised they were not alone in their wish for reform and an end to the Porfiriato. By now alarmed at the threat from Madero, who had jumped bail and was in the United States, Diaz decided he could handle the troubles in the north only if he had peace in the south. To widespre
ad amazement Diaz suddenly ordered the owners of the Hospital hacienda to return to Anenecuilco everything they had appropriated in the last forty years and pronounced Zapata's claim to the title proved beyond question. A fuming jefe politico was forced to ride out to the Hospital hacienda to deliver this unpalatable judgement.
While the enraged hacendados met in conclave to decide how they could reverse or sabotage this bombshell announcement from Mexico City, and their trigger-happy guards glared at the jubilant zapatistas from behind the new boundaries, Anenecuilco went wild with delight. In December igio Zapata in person broke down the stone walls with which the Hospital had enclosed stolen land and carried out a distribution of the lands regained for the village; on his own land he planted a huge field of watermelons. A rodeo was held in Anenecuilco to celebrate this almost incredible triumph, but the euphoric Emiliano neglected his usual precautions in the bullriding and was gored by a steer. Making light of his wound, he joined with gusto in the alcoholic binges in the pueblo. Three centuries after the Spanish viceroy Luis de Velasco had made the original land grant to Anenecuilco (on 25 September 1607), the villagers finally got back what was due to them.
The clear-headed Zapata, however, knew this was not necessarily the end of the story. Everything would depend on the success or failure of Madero's rebellion, and Emiliano knew it had to succeed. At the turn of the year he took his first tentative step into the Mexican Revolution by sending his mentor Pablo Torres Burgos as his envoy to Madero in Texas.
THE RISE OF VILLA
The two giant states of northern Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua could in many ways have been in a different hemisphere from Morelos, instead of being in the same country. They were separated by the Sierra Madre, and it was in Chihuahua, the very largest state - a land of cattle ranges, haciendas, mining camps and isolated towns and cities - on the broad plain between the two arms of the sierra, that much of the fighting in the Mexican Revolution would take place. Most of the north was desert, so that water was a scarce resource and the struggle for control of water supplies was a prime factor in political conflict. Naturally the problem of land was crucial but, unlike Morelos, other issues were also prominent. The northern states had long-standing traditions of federalist opposition to central control from Mexico City, had a culture of anticlericalism and, most importantly, had a common border with the USA. When Diaz consolidated his power in the i88os he had two powerful henchmen in the north, governor Luis Torres in Sonora and Luis Terrazas in Chihuahua.
Everything here was different from the region south of Mexico City, except that here too there was an Indian problem, albeit of a very different kind. In the years 1876-19to Sonora was the scene of the most violent resistance to Diaz and his governors by the warlike Yaquis, whose sustained war against the whites and mestizos was second in ferocity only to Yucatan's dreadful Wars of the Caste. Warrior for warrior, the Yaquis were probably superior even to the Mayas of Yucatan, and the sanguinary rebellion unleashed by Cajeme, the great Yaqui cacique, was still simmering in the igoos. Cajeme was long dead, the victim of Ramon Corral and the ley fuga, but his successor Tetabiate continued the struggle. It was war to the knife, for the Yaqui sacred places and pueblos had been redistributed to mestizo settlers and colonists from the USA, who grew chickpeas and fruit for the Richardson Company, bound for markets in California.
By 1900 the Yaqui wars had scaled new heights of savagery, with an escalating pattern of atrocities. Federal troops dispatched north by Diaz mowed down women and children with their Mausers and sent the men off to a slow death on the plantations of Yucatan and Quintana Roo. The governor of Sonora cynically justified his actions by referring to Yaqui cruelty: they flayed their victims alive and strung them up with ropes made from their own skin. Diaz was keen to crush the Yaquis and used a variety of excuses for his brutality. His motives were likewise several: racial hatred, the `improving' ideology of the cientificos and the overriding issue of credibility - let the Yaquis alone and who knows what fresh challenger to his authority might not arise. Yet for all his efforts, the Yaquis were still undefeated when the Revolution broke out in 191o. By this time the proud Indian nation was riven by faction: there were the socalled mansos - corresponding to reservation Indians in the USA - who submitted to superior force and went to work in the fields; and there were the wild Yaquis or broncos, who remained at large as guerrillas, raiding and killing, having taken a vow to fight to the death or until the last white man had been killed. When the Revolution finally broke out in November 1910, the mansos enlisted under Madero's banner but the broncos remained in their strongholds, beholden to no man, still determined to exterminate all whites, be they revolutionaries or porfiristas.
Chihuahua, by contrast, had no remaining Indian problem of its own but had not long emerged from another deadly contest of red man against white. From the mid-eighteenth century there was a grave problem with Apache raids, as the desert warriors were pushed farther south by the Comanches, the `Spartans of the plains'. The colonial authorities of New Spain bought the Apaches off and encouraged them to settle and become agriculturalists. At first independent Mexico followed the same policy, but by the 1830s the Apache problem again became acute, partly as a consequence of Santa Anna's loss of Texas. Despairing of its northern outreaches, the government in Mexico City stopped its subsidies in food and cash at almost the exact moment (as if by a perverse kind of preestablished harmony) the Apaches sensed the military weakness of the Mexicans and went on the warpath. The hacendados of Chihuahua fled, and only the armed peasant freeholders and military colonists, who had no choice, stayed and fought.
There followed a savage fifty-year war, with multiple atrocities on both sides. Particularly during the turbulent years of 183o-67 - when Mexico faced in rapid succession the loss of Texas, the war with the United States, the civil war between Liberals and Conservatives and finally the great patriotic war against the French - Chihuahua was virtually an independent state, with no pretence that the writ of the federal government ran there. After the defeat of the French in the late 186os, the hacendados returned. Foremost among them was Luis Terrazas, founder of a powerful dynasty, an able administrator and reformer who used the tax revenues of the state to form and train anti-Apache militias instead of sending the money to Mexico City. In this he had the support of Diaz, who feared that if he did not solve the Apache problem in his northern states, the USA would use the lawlessness as a pretext to annex Sonora and Chihuahua.
The return of the hacendados and the determined policies of Terrazas did not happen a moment too soon, for from 1830 to 188o some of the great names in Apache history were active in northern Mexico. In the 183os and 1840s Cochise, the famous Chiricahua Apache chief, fought in the Apache band of Pisago Cabezon, taking part in the inconclusive battles and peace conferences with the Mexicans at the Gila River, Arizpe (Sonora) and Janos (Chihuahua). From 1847 onwards much of Sonora was laid waste in incessant Apache raids, many featuring the war chiefs Narbona and Cochise. Another widely feared Apache chief was Mangas Coloradas of the Eastern Chiricahuas, active in northern Mexico from the 1830s; such was Coloradas's hatred of the Mexicans that in 1846 he actually tried to enlist the aid of the US Army in his raids and met General Stephen Kearny for this purpose (admittedly this was during the Americans' 1846-8 war against Mexico).
One of the abiding problems with the Apaches was that they raided on both sides of the US-Mexico border, from Arizona to Texas and from Sonora to Chihuahua. This meant that a general peace, involving tripartite agreement between Americans, Mexicans and the tribes, was difficult to achieve. Mangas Coloradas did sign such a general treaty at Acomas in 1852, but it brought a lull, rather than a cessation, in the eternal cycle of murder, destruction and reprisal. In 1858 Cochise and Mangas Coloradas collaborated in a savage foray into northern Sonora to avenge the deaths of Mangas's sons and then went on to assault the Mexican fort at Fronteras Presidio. Fortunately for Mexico, the attention of both Chiricahua chiefs was taken up in subsequent years by
the `Anglos' north of the Rio Grande; Mangas Coloradas suffered a gringo version of the ley fuga in 1863 while under arrest by the US Army, and Cochise did not send his men south of the border again until 1872.
It should not be thought that Mexico ever achieved any real respite from Apache raiding, for a peace treaty signed with one tribe in the nation did not bind the others. Other feared war chiefs active in Sonora and Chihuahua in the i85os were Delgadito and Victorio of the Mimbres Apaches. In the summer of 1855 Vittorio and Juh led a small army of their warriors in a giant sweep through Sonora and Chihuahua, returning across the US border with thousands of cattle and captives. Intercepted at Namiquipa, Chihuahua, by a powerful Mexican force, Victorio and Juh defeated them and made good their escape. The Mexicans took their revenge two years later with a `peace offering' of food and whisky to the Mimbres, which was deliberately poisoned with arsenic; Victorio survived because he was teetotal.
The steady westward expansion of the United States brought Apaches into violent collision with the United States, and the bloody clash bought northern Mexico some breathing space. However, the years 1875-85 saw the worst Apache troubles to date. Victorio and the Mimbres appeared to have been tamed when they were placed on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona in 1877, but the Indian Agency made the mistake of trying to settle them alongside some of their ancient tribal enemies. In 1879 Victorio led his warriors off the reservation on one of the greatest exploits in Indian annals. Crucial to his success was a diversionary raid by Juh, directed from Mexico. Juh by this time had found a new ally in the shape of the Bedonkohe war chief Geronimo, a man who hated Mexicans with a blind passion after they had massacred his mother, wife and three children at Janos, Chiricahua, in 1850.
