Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  AMERICAN FILM,

  July-August 1984

  IN ZAPATA COUNTRY

  Each day after lunch, we walked under the hot, scoured Mexican sky to the center of the town of Tepoztlán. Off to the left were the sour remains of old cane fields where shirtless kids played soccer in the dust. Down the broad valley behind us, we could see men riding horses and the sudden glint of sun on a machete. In the town’s graveyard, tiny cones of dust whirled among the headstones. On both sides of the valley were the mountains of Morelos.

  Those mountains, surrounding this town about 60 miles south of Mexico City, are a spectacular sight: sheer cliffs, sudden crags, rocky formations that seem split by some cosmic ax. Behind them, other mountains rise, big and broad-shouldered, with the dark purple silhouettes of still more beyond — all part of the Sierra Madre, the primordial spine of Mexico. Each day, as my wife and I walked to town, they became as familiar as the road itself.

  A half mile from the house where we were staying, the modern two-lane blacktop abruptly gave way to 18th-century cobblestones and rose steeply into the town. Here, visiting automobiles slowed to a crawl in a tenuous and losing negotiation with the colonial past. At the top of that steeply terraced hill, sitting in doorways, wearing the familiar white pajamas of the campesino — the countryman — their eyes cloudy with the past, their faces gullied by time, were the last old soldiers of the man who once was the revolutionary master of these mountains: Emiliano Zapata.

  “Si, fue un Zapatista,” an old man told me one afternoon. Yes, I was a Zapatista. Then he paused, in modest clarification: “We all fought. In Tepoztlán, we were all Zapatistas.”

  The sight of these old men moved me in complicated ways. I’ve been going to Mexico since the mid-1950s, when I was a student there on the GI Bill. In 1956, on the Transportes del Norte bus heading south from Laredo, I carried Zapata in my psychic baggage, or at least the version of the great revolutionary leader that Marlon Brando played in Viva Zapata! In that fine, tragic 1952 movie, directed by Elia Kazan, Brando gave Zapata a muted and melancholy grandeur. For once, the movies got it right; over the years, as I studied the history of this great, tormented country, it became clear that Viva Zapata! might be of limited use as literal history, but was absolutely true as legend.

  Here in the village of Tepoztlán, among the mountains of Morelos, was the proof. The legend lived. But for these old men, Emiliano Zapata wasn’t simply a character in a movie, a figure in a mural, or a name, in the history of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. He had lived, he’d fought, he’d died here. Or in places within a day’s horseback ride or three days’ walk. These men saw him, heard him speak. “All of Morelos followed him,” one man said. “Right to the end.”

  Even today, many decades after his death, the spirit of the Zapatista struggle seems to permeate Morelos, while haunting Mexico. “He is one of our legendary heroes,” wrote the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz. “Realism and myth are joined in this ardent, melancholy, and hopeful figure who died as he had lived: embracing the earth.”

  That earth was, above all, the earth of Morelos, where Zapata was born in 1879 in Anenecuilco, a village whose name in Aztec means “place where the water moves like a worm.” And though as a young man Emiliano was a master horseman, not a tiller of the soil, his ancestors had lived and worked the land for generations. Much of that land was communal — the grazing fields, the rivers — and was theirs according to land grants that went back to the earliest days of the Spaniards. But over the centuries, and increasingly under the dictator Porfirio Diaz, who took power in 1876, the common lands were taken from the men of Morelos by the owners of the expanding haciendas. Stolen village cornfields were planted in sugar, rivers diverted to irrigate the lands of the rich. Guns proved more powerful than paper. Those who protested were humiliated, jailed, sometimes killed; after the turn of the century, when the Diaz regime was in full power, those who protested were often sent off to penal slavery in the henequen plantations of distant Yucatan. More and more, the men of Morelos whispered about revolt; someday, they said, they would have to fight for the land with guns.

  In Anenecuilco in 1909, the 400 citizens turned for help to 30-year-old Emiliano Zapata, electing him their leader. He was a proud, tough man who did not toady to the rich. He spoke Spanish and Nahuatl — the language of south-central Mexico — and had traveled beyond the valleys, beyond even Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos; he had even lived in Mexico City, la capital, where he had handled horses for a rich family. And he had demonstrated his love for Morelos by coming home. “Uneasy and depressed,” wrote John Womack Jr. in his classic 1968 biography, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, “he was soon back in Anenecuilco, remarking bitterly how in the capital horses lived in stalls that would put to shame the house of any workingman in the whole state of Morelos. …”

  For more than a year, Zapata and the men of Morelos tried to use the law to settle their grievances. Basically, they wanted the return of the ejidos, the communal lands that had been theirs since before the Conquest. They pleaded with the owners of the haciendas; they sent letters to the governor. They were ignored. Finally, in 1910, initially over the narrow issue of reelection of the dictator, Mexico exploded into full-scale revolution. And with Zapata as its leader, Morelos was the most revolutionary state of all.

  Although he never learned to read (in 1910, 77 percent of all Mexicans were illiterate), Zapata soon proved to be a more daring and intelligent commander than the well-read graduates of the military schools. He was quick when they were slow; he was patient when they were not; above all, he had the respect and support of his people (who supplied food, information, and troops), while they had only the heavy artillery.

  “Seek justice from tyrannical governments,” he said, “not with your hat in your hands but with a rifle in your fist.” For the next decade, with a rifle in his fist, Zapata made clear that he wanted nothing for himself. He was offered haciendas, land, power. He turned them all down, remaining true to the basic Zapatista demand: “Tierra y Libertad”- land and liberty — for the people who worked the land.

  This was, of course, a conservative vision; Zapata offered no blurry Utopian future. He asked only that stolen land be returned to its owners, the campesinos, and that they be allowed to work that land in peace. Now, before the planting. That, plus the freedom to speak what they felt and elect whom they wanted. The troops of his army marched under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, not Karl Marx.

  There was fighting all over Mexico, of course, but Morelos suffered more than any other state. Hundreds of villages were damaged; Cuernavaca, the state capital, was reduced to rubble; the state’s economy was destroyed, as was the sugar industry. The people suffered horrendous losses; almost half the population was killed or driven away by the war. That’s why here, of all the regions of Mexico, the hope and pain of the revolution remain so vivid.

  You drive down a side road near Cuautla, where there is a monument to Zapata, and off to the right is the chimney of a destroyed house, the smashed bricks and beams of a church, and more often the oddly splendid ruins of a once more splendid hacienda. The last always evoke images of Mexico’s anden regime, when men in tight chamois pants and silver spurs built grand mansions they thought would last forever. In 1910, 30 haciendas owned 62 percent of the total surface area of Morelos and almost all of the arable land. Their ruins are also monuments to Zapata. “The land free, the land free for all,” he said. “Land without overseers and without masters, is the war cry of the revolution.”

  From that, Zapata never deviated, even in 1918, the worst year of the long struggle, when the ruthlessness of the Carranza government combined with an influenza epidemic to devastate his Army of the South. Morelos was the grinder; Carranza’s troops burned crops, drove off cattle, raped and murdered women and children. The widespread hunger and misery, combined with sheer human exhaustion, probably led Zapata into the trap that would cost him his life.

  In March 1919, a colonel in the
government army named Jesús M. Guajardo agreed to join forces with Zapata, defecting with guns, ammunition, and more than 500 men. The colonel was stationed in the hacienda of San Juan Chinameca. From his mountain hideout, Zapata was suspicious but intrigued — and possibly desperate. He asked for proof of Guajardo’s sincerity. The colonel appeared to supply it, attacking a Carranza garrison (blanks were supposed to be used, but 19 men were killed anyway), and executing 59 soldiers of a Zapatista officer who had defected. Zapata was convinced; no plotter could be that ruthless. He met with Guajardo, made arrangements for the delivery of the arms and men, and told the young colonel that he soon would be a general in the Zapatista army. Guajardo then invited Zapata to a fiesta at the hacienda in Chinameca, where they could celebrate the new alliance. Ignoring rumors of a trap, Zapata came down from the mountains on April 10.

  Leaving most of his troops standing guard down the road, Zapata entered the hacienda with 10 of his officers. As historian William Weber Johnson described the scene: “Guajardo’s men were standing at attention in the patio, their weapons in the present-arms position. A bugle sounded three times just as Zapata passed through the gate into the patio, and on the third note Guajardo’s men raised their rifles and fired at Zapata and his followers. Zapata turned his horse, his pearl-handled pistol still in its holster. He stood in the stirrups with his arms outthrust and then crashed to the ground. His companions fell with him. …”

  The bullet-riddled body of Zapata was then draped over a horse and taken to Cuautla, where it was unceremoniously dumped on the floor of the Municipal Palace for all to see. But almost from the beginning there was skepticism among the people. It was not his body. No: Zapata was taller. Or shorter. He had a crescent-shaped scar on his face that was not on this face. And where was the mole above the mustache? No, they said: Zapata was alive. He was said to have gone to Arabia — or to Nicaragua in the 1920s — where, they said, he fought with the guerrilla Augusto Sandino. Most placed him closer to home. As Johnson wrote in his book, Heroic Mexico: “For years afterward, they insisted that on dark nights ‘Miliano could be seen back in the hills, dressed in white peasant clothes and riding — not the sorrel on which he had been killed — but a fine, white horse of the earlier, happier days.”

  That was the image used at the end of Viva Zapata! — the white horse riding in the mountains. And it is the image employed by Diego Rivera in his portrayal of Zapata in the great mural on the balcony of the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca. The town was rebuilt after the revolution, its sumptuous homes serving throughout the 1940s and ’50s as refuge for the Mexican and foreign rich. Today it’s a gritty city of about a half-million people, with some good language schools, a few wonderful restaurants, and what appears at first sight to be 200,000 auto parts shops, staffed by the great-grandchildren of the Zapatistas. Zapata and his wonderful white horse live on in music, too. You hear the legend in the corridos sung in a thousand towns about the years of the revolution. And you sense the presence of Zapata in the towns of Morelos, where he and his followers fought and prayed and died.

  “I saw him the year of the comet,” another old man told me one day (Halley’s Comet streaked through the skies in 1910). “I was a boy and I knew he was a great man. He came here with his soldiers and they stayed right over here. In the convent.” He was pointing at the 16th-century Dominican convent that is the largest building in the center of Tepoztlán (a smaller building houses a lovely collection of pre-Columbian art donated by the Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer).

  History tells us that during several periods, the convent did serve as Zapata’s temporary headquarters, with guards posted on its rooftops, the horses tethered in the great walled yard. Today, the convent is the property of the state. It remains an imposing structure, with walls two feet thick, its stone hallways and dim cells recalling an era of chilly asceticism in spite of the lustier graffiti of the present. Some fine frescoes made by Indian artists have been scraped, defaced, or whitewashed over many years; their old visions, expressed in black and gray and terracotta, are slowly being retrieved through the tedious craft of the restorers. The artists and their models are long gone, but their faces live on in the halls of the convent.

  From the second floor of this old structure, Zapata surely must have looked out over this same valley. Like so much of Morelos, it was part of the original 25,000-square-mile land grant that was awarded to Hernán Cortés after the conquest of Mexico in 1521. After Cortés died, the land fell to others, speculators and adventurers, most of them iron-willed exploiters, some actually men of decency and taste. The conqueror’s son, Martín, lived in Tepoztlán for years after his father died and is said to have had a private chapel built so that he would not have to leave home to hear Mass. Other families stayed for many generations. During the long, peaceful centuries of New Spain, in a place of fine climate and great natural beauty, they had no reason to leave.

  At its lower altitudes the valley was planted with sugar cane imported from Cuba. In the early years of New Spain, many Indians died of European diseases to which they were not immune. The Spaniards then imported black slaves, whose number in all of Mexico eventually rose in the mid-17th century to 150,000. But the Spaniards were always afraid of slave revolts because they would have been much more difficult to suppress on the mainland than in their island colonies in the Caribbean. Eventually they stopped importing Africans, and sent away the troublemakers. Those who remained were absorbed in the Mexican mestizaje. But they did leave traces of the old African religions in places like Tepoztlán.

  The town is known today as one of the major centers in Mexico for brujos (witches) and curanderos (crudely, a kind of witch doctor). They are said to be capable of casting and removing spells, causing and curing illness, and helping with all the infinite complexities of love. Much of the witches’ lore remains secret, but is apparently a mixture of pre-Columbian belief, transformed Christianity, and aspects of Afro-Cuban religions. I asked several times if I could meet with one of the curanderos; as a foreigner I was refused with a polite blank look. But when I asked if the curanderos do, in fact, exist, one man laughed out loud. “Oh yes,” he said, “they exist. Yes. Yes.”

  So, in spite of television, radio, newspapers; in spite of daily bus service to Cuernavaca and Mexico City and the arrival of city dwellers on weekends, the pre-Christian past remains powerful. Time is simply not measured here the way it is measured in, say, Miami. The town of Tepoztlán (like many of its neighbors in Morelos) has existed since about the time of Jesus, and was dominated by the Aztecs for a century before the arrival of Cortés. The zocalo, or main plaza, through which both Cortés and Zapata strolled is located on exactly the same spot as the pre-Conquest Aztec market, and today is still laid out on the same basic design. The great mounds of chiles, corn, beans, tomatoes, and chocolate; the great slabs of beef being cured by sun and flies; the ceramics and masks: All were sold in virtually the same way in Aztec times, under the same colorful arrangements of tents and poles.

  Also surviving from the pre-Conquest days is the monument to Tepozteco on top of the mountain of the same name, rising a thousand abrupt feet above the village. This was built by the Aztecs on a familiar pyramid base to honor the god of drunkenness, the inventor of pulque, a white, slightly sweet brew made from the maguey plant. The old tales insist that when the Spaniards arrived, they hurled the idol off its pedestal into the valley below. But to the delight of the inhabitants, it did not break. The conquerors were forced to attack it with hammers and saws, breaking it into chips and dust. Today, the base of the old pyramid remains on top of the mountain, badly eroded, but with some of the ancient decorations still visible; you can reach it on a hiking trail. The view of the valley from the peak is glorious. But Tepozteco is more than a view. In September of each year, a fiesta honors the old idol, and much pulque is drunk by nominal Catholics, and many dances danced. Here, human beings hold on to sensible gods.

  In the slow afternoons in Tepoztlán, moving through the amber
torpor of the sun, you can still see those small powerful women, built like tree trunks, pounding fresh tortillas on three-legged metates as their ancestors did for centuries. You can buy chickens killed that morning. You can see boys negotiating the cobblestones of Avenida de la Revolución on burros, comic books jutting from their back pockets. There are a few good restaurants, but most people here eat at home, as they always did. They seem entirely indifferent to the groups of city people who own second homes here as refuges from the horrors of modern Mexico City: writers and painters, businessmen and intellectuals, and a few American expatriates. This is a proud town in a state of proud people. They don’t kowtow to strangers but they almost never descend to rudeness either. At the same time, you witness none of the fawning theatrics of those who live in tourist towns. And you see no beggars.

  What you do sense, if you read the history and allow the town’s layered past to seep into you slowly, is the eventual triumph of Zapata. The agrarian reform for which he lived and died came slowly. In the early years, the campesinos were given the worst land: on untillable mountain slopes, in places devoid of water or topsoil. The new politicians, the thick-fingered hustlers of the revolution, grabbed the best land for themselves.

  Irony was without limit. In Anenecuilco, where Zapata was born, the worst abuser of the campesinos in the 1940s was a man named Nicolas Zapata. He was 13 when his father, Emiliano, was killed. Everywhere, human beings have a gift for outrage. But during the presidency of Lázaro Cardenas (1934-1940), the worst abuses were ended. Schools and hospitals were opened, transportation made easier, farmers helped with credit and supplies. Eventually, Nicolas Zapata was hustled out of Morelos.