Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  To narrow the focus on the Mexican Revolution, comparative analysis is useful. All true revolutions, as opposed to mere transfers of power between elites (the `American Revolution', say) must at some stage threaten the status quo in a seismic way and portend root and branch change. Usually what happens is that there is a political first stage, which is then utilised by genuine revolutionaries who wish to push on to an entirely new form of society. Either the second stage is achieved or, more usually, counter-revolutionaries intervene, destroy the true revolutionaries and pull society back to the first stage. The successful `dual revolution' can be observed in China (with the Kuomintang as the first stage and Mao's communists as the second), in Russia (with Kerensky as the first stage and Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the second) and in Cuba, where Castro himself went beyond the overthrow of Batista within two years to an embrace of full-blooded Marxist-Leninism. The unsuccessful attempts to take society in the direction of wholesale change can be observed in the case of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, when Cromwell, victorious over Charles I, slammed on the brakes and turned on the Levellers and the Diggers; in the French Revolution, when the men of Thermidor arrested Robespierre's radical revolution in 1794; and in France in 1871 when the men of the Third Republic bloodily repressed the Paris Commune.

  Because even the possibility of radical change requires the virtual destruction of the existing state apparatus, almost invariably the trigger for revolution is the weakening of the state in external warfare and the creation of an interim situation where for once radicals and conservatives compete on roughly equal terms. It was the defeat of Charles I that enabled the Diggers and Levellers to challenge Cromwell and the Army; it was defeat by Japan that triggered the abortive 1905 rising in Russia and defeat by Germany which ushered in the successful revolution of 1917; it was French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War that made possible the rise of the Paris Commune; it was defeat by Japan that finished the Kuomintang and handed the revolutionary baton to Mao and the communists. Even the French Revolution of 1789 was triggered by the consequences of warfare, for it was the dissipation of French treasure in the American War of Independence that eventually led Louis XVI to summon the Estates-General.

  Students of Latin American history have long been aware that Cuba is an exception to the `revolution through warfare' rule. Even more surprising is that fact that in Mexico both our general propositions fall down. It was not warfare but a seemingly trivial political issue over the presidential election which detonated the Revolution in 191o; and in Mexico there was no `dual revolution'. Mexico after 1910 did not evince a pattern of purely political transfer of power followed by a bid for socioeconomic transformation by genuine revolutionaries. In so far as the second element was present, in zapatismo, it was there from the very beginning: Zapata's radical prescriptions for society proceeded part' passu with Madero's reformism. The sceptics have seized on this idiosyncratic nature of the Mexican Revolution to query whether it was ever a revolution in the true sense. Was it not after all merely a struggle of one caudillo against another, a sustained dance of death involving Madero, Huerta, Villa, Zapata, Carranza and Obregon? The last four in particular were the killer sharks of the Revolution, and in their wake swam the remora fish, the Fierros, Benjamin Hills, de la Huertas and Lucio Blancos.

  It is possible to discern three main strands in the Mexican Revolution. First, there were the improving hacendados and progressive capitalists spearheading the rise of an emerging industrial bourgeoisie: in this category we may place Madero, Carranza and Obregon. Ranged against them were the reactionary elements, who saw no reason to replace the hacienda as the premier economic institution in Mexico; here we may locate Diaz, Huerta and duplicitous figures like Maytorena. Secondly, there was the entire village movement of free peasants in communal pueblos demanding the return of their ancestral lands; clearly the key figure here is Zapata. Thirdly, there is the least clear-cut category of all, where an alliance of cowboys, miners and other marginal peoples of the northern states aimed at the overthrow of jefes politicos, cientificos and hacendados. Because political conflict in the north so often resulted in plunder, looting and destruction, this face of the Revolution has often been dismissed as mere banditry; its profile is formless and its adherents legion but its name is villismo.

  Without any doubt it was the Madero strand, especially in the form of the obregonistas and carrancistas, that emerged triumphant from the Revolution, while Villa and Zapata won at best partial victories. The larger categories will not do: the Revolution was not a transition from feudalism to capitalism or even from the `comprador bourgeoisie' to a `national bourgeoisie'. To a large extent the Revolution was a conflict within an existing bourgeoisie, between `ins' and `outs'. Much argument has centred on the hacienda and whether this is the key to the whole matter, with the hacendados as a `fetter' on the development of Mexico as a modern capitalist state. Some say the hacienda could have evolved peacefully, that the events of igio-ii bear no large-scale meaning but were purely political and contingent. Others say that the Porfiriato had to be overthrown before progress could be made; whether you identify the problem as the hacienda as institution or simply the person of Diaz as caudillo, a modern economy was impossible while this political and economic system continued in being.

  It is sometimes said that a golden opportunity was missed in 1910-20, and that the real ideals of the Revolution were betrayed by Carranza and Obregon, but, even with Zapata, socialist ideals were never on the agenda. The Constitution of 1917 - especially articles 27 and 123 - is often cited as the beginning of a leftward path not taken, but in many ways these articles were a purely adventitious result of last-minute compromises in smoke-filled rooms. The constitutional conference at Queretaro did not witness even the limited ideological conflict in evidence during the framing of the US constitution at Philadelphia in 1787, and Alan Knight is right to suggest that Mexico acquired its own Magna Carta in a fit of absence of mind. If we put a bracket around Zapata's village utopia and Villa's military colonies, it becomes very clear that modern capitalism was always the aim of the influential figures in the Revolution. Obregon's achievement is sometimes said to have been that he accomplished in Mexico what Chiang and the Kuomintang failed to accomplish in China. Obregon mobilised the masses to promote a modern state and a modern economy, destroying, co-opting or placating all dissident elements in such a way that no door to communism opened up on the Left; and because he had to carry the masses with him, he could not swing hard Right into fascism.

  So, apart from making Mexico safe for capitalism, did the Revolution change anything? Except in the south-east, it is safe to say that the Revolution broke up the old political monopolies and replaced a brittle gerontocracy with a new elite of thrusting and ambitious younger men. Much as in Napoleonic France, there were many residues of the past - with kinship, compadrazgo and corruption still prominent features of the political landscape. As with Napoleon, again, there was a wider circle of co-optation, more meritocracy, more careers open to talents and thus a faster circulation of elites. Sociologically, there was real change. Most of the old landowning aristocracy never returned to their pre-igio positions of power and influence. Most of them did not lose their lives, as their counterparts did in the French and Russian revolutions, but they lost their estates and their families were permanently weakened. Creel, Terrazas and the other big landowners took no part in the Revolution and were thus able to die in their beds. Most of them fled to the USA where they lived comfortably on the cash and portable property they had taken across the border; in this respect their fate was unlike that of the White Russians, who ended up in France as waiters and taxi drivers. There were similarities, though, with the emigres after the French Revolution in that many of the oligarchs were proscribed and under sentence of death if they returned to Mexico.

  However, proscriptions were never as savagely implemented as in the French and Russian revolutions. Many oligarchs were able to make deals with Carranza a
nd Obregon to get their lands back; Maytorena in Sonora, officially a villista, blatantly handed back confiscated estates to their former owners. Special pleading on grounds of kinship or compadrazgo also saved many aristocrats. Villa himself protected the Zuloaga family in Chihuahua against expropriation because of their kinship ties with his beloved `Maderito'. The venal George Carothers made several fortunes by brokering other `special circumstance' deals involving many unworthy beneficiaries from the old hacendado class.

  What changed most in 191o-2o were popular attitudes. The Revolution opened the eyes of the downtrodden to a world of possibilities they could not have imagined before. The first casualty was deference, and the first signs of increasing civic consciousness came as people tended to dress in the same clothes, with oligarchs deflecting envy by wearing simple outfits, while the peasantry traded up to reflect their new, selfassigned, status. No longer was there sartorial inequality between the classes as if in obedience to some unwritten sumptuary law. Once the old customs, folkways, mores and morality became a casualty of the Revolution, sexual morality in particular became freer, and losses in battle made women more eager to compete for the remaining males. Promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease were rampant in the years of the Revolution, and the revolution of rising aspirations also found expression, as it invariably does in all societies, in higher levels of crime. Geographical mobility destroyed the old willingness to endure the unendurable. The Mexican people were on the move in these years - not just the tramp, tramp of the armies (notably Obregon's 7,200-kilometre trek), but the flock of fleeing refugees. Apart from losses in battle and from disease, Mexico had to endure a population drain through a voluntary human exodus: between 19io and 1919, 170,000 Mexicans entered the USA legally and at least another 8o,ooo illegally.

  The paradox is that while Carranza, Obregon and what they represented were the victors in the Revolution, its heart and soul, its profound resonances and its archetypal significance all derive from Villa and Zapata. Mythical icons both, the subject of innumerable corridos and motion pictures, the two of them live on in folk memory as Obregon and Carranza do not. These latter are the Butcher Cumberland of the Revolution, victorious but forgotten by almost everyone but professional historians; Villa and Zapata are the Bonnie Prince Charlie, forever haloed in a golden nimbus. In a real sense Villa and Zapata were the Revolution. Villa was no mere landlord but the kind of independent warrior who thrives when the structure of the state is weak or non-existent. One thinks of such parallels as Pugachev in eighteenth-century Russia, Tippu Tip in nineteenth-century central Africa and Salvatore Giuliano in twentieth-century Sicily. Although the oft-made comparisons with Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ are hyperbolic, Zapata, with his mystical relation to the land, his fanatical incorruptibility and his martyrdom, aligns with those rare warrior saints in history like John Brown and Che Guevara.

  The two men were natural allies, although they approached the problems of Mexico from very different perspectives. The man of the south, Zapata, operated in a social milieu of plantations, sugar mills and ejidos, while Villa, the man of the north, lived in a world where cattle, slaughterhouses and ranches were the salient economic factors, and proximity to the USA the overriding political one. This divergence, and the fact that each was interested only in the patria chica, meant that when their great opportunity to become masters of Mexico came in December 1914, they muffed it. The failure was due to lack of genuinely national ideas, but it was not helped by the very different personalities of the two men. Zapata was cerebral, reflective and humourless; Villa was impulsive, visceral and buffoonish. There were no manic-depressive scenes of weeping followed by laughter in Zapata's biography.

  None the less, the gulf separating the two should not be overstated, for their similarities were as striking as their differences. Roughly the same age, both were great horsemen, both suffered grievously from unsatisfactory brothers, both took a polygamous attitude to women, and both fell to assassins' bullets as the result of conspiracy. Both leaned on a core of intellectual advisers and, in adversity, both were liable to fall into paranoid fantasies of betrayal. Each had a `shadow' in the form of a hated figure in the bureaucratic-military mainstream: Zapata detested Carranza, while Villa's bete noire and eventual nemesis was Obregon. In the shortterm, Villa was the more important, as he won a string of victories and fought half a dozen pitched battles. Long-term, Zapata took the palm, as his agrarian reforms struck deep roots in the Mexican collective unconscious and he became a role model for all other Latin American peasant revolutionaries.

  More than almost any other historical figures, Villa and Zapata had careers that were coextensive with the great events they lived through; they scarcely seemed to have lived at all except in and through the Revolution. Even more than other great men, both are psychologically opaque. The excessive womanising might give a clue to the unconscious in a society less macho than Mexico, but most attempts to fuse their philandering with other significant clues - Zapata's view of the land as a person with a soul, Villa's teetotalism - founder for lack of cogent evidence, even of the indirect kind. Villa's mood swings seem to betray a deeply disturbed personality, one in which great compassion and tenderness could coexist with the utmost cruelty and ruthlessness. The phasic nature of his outbursts indicates not so much a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality as a lack of integration, with no central core of identity strong enough to control the peripheral elements. Zapata could be cruel and ruthless, but only for raison d'etat. Unless betrayed by a trusted associate - for him the ultimate nightmare - he always mastered emotion with reason. Villa was called the Centaur because he seemed half man and half horse, but perhaps the Revolution's true centaur was the revolutionary amalgam formed by the fusion of Villa and Zapata. They were great men, and their biography is also the biography of the Mexican Revolution.

  SOURCES

  Abbreviations:

  HAHR = Hispanic American Historical Review

  JLAS = Journal of Latin American Studies

  Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

  THE MEXICO OF PORFIRIO DIAZ

  Carleton Beals, Porfirio Diaz: Dictator of Mexico (Philadelphia 1932) is still the standard biography in English but there is a veritable cascade of works by Mexican historians: Francisco Bulnes, El Verdadero Diaz y la Revolution (Mexico City 1992); Angel Taracena, Porfirio Diaz (Mexico City 1983); Jose Lopez Portillo y Rojas, Elevation y caida de Porfirio Diaz (Mexico City 1927); Ralph Roeder, Hacia el Mexico moderno: Porfirio Diaz, 2 vols (Mexico City 1985); Jorge Fernando Iturribarria, Porfirio Diaz ante la historia (Mexico City 1967). Work by Daniel Cosio Villegas is fundamental: El Porfiriato: Vida politica interior (Mexico City 1985) and El Porfiriato: Vida economica (Mexico City 1985). Two useful collections are edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan, Documents on the Mexican Revolution, Vol is The Madero Revolution (1976); Vol a: The Madero Revolution to the Overthrow of Diaz (1976).

  For Santa Anna see Enrique Gonzalez Pedrero, Pais de un solo hombre: El Mexico de Santa Anna (Mexico City 1993); W. H. Calcott, Santa Anna: The story of an Enigma Who Once Was Mexico (1992); Frank C. Hanighen, Santa Anna: The Napoleon of the West (1934); Rafael Munoz, Santa Anna: el dictador resplandeciente (Mexico City 1976); Jose Fuentes Mares, Santa Anna el hombre (Mexico City 1982); Agustin Yanez, Santa Anna: espectro de una sociedad (Mexico City 1982). For Juarez, the Reforma and the struggle with the French see Charles Allen Smart, Viva3uarez (1964); Jasper Ridley, Maximilian andJukrez (1993); Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855-1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (Austin 1979); Charles R. Berry, The Reform in Oaxaca, 456-1876: A Microhistory of the Liberal Revolution (Lincoln 1981).

  For more detail on the social and economic history of the Porfiriato there is: Francisco Xavier Guerra, Mexico: del antiguo regimen a la Revolucion (Mexico City 1988); Justo Sierra, Obras completas, 15 vols (Mexico City 1991); Lucas Aleman, Historia de Mexico, 5 vols (Mexico City 1985); Karl Schmitt, `The Diaz Conciliation Policy on State and Local Levels, 1876-1911
', HAHR 40 (i96o), pp. 182-204; F. Gonzalez Roa, El problema ferrocarrilero (Mexico City 1919); John H. Coatsworth, El impacto economico de los ferrocarriles en el Porfiriato, 2 vols (Mexico City 1976); Marvin D. Bernstein, The Mexican Mining Industry i88o-ig5o: A Study of the Interaction of Politics, Economics and Technology (Albany 1965); Charles W. Hamilton, Early Days: Oil Tales of Mexico (Houston 1966); William D. Raat, El positivismo durante el Porfiriato 1876-1910 (Mexico City 1975); William D. Raat, `Los intelectuales, el positivismo y la cuestion indigena', Historia Mexicana 20 (1971); David M. Fletcher, Rails, Mines and Progress: Seven American Pioneers in Mexico, 1867-1911 (Ithaca 1958); Alfred Tischendorf, Great Britain and Mexico in the Era of Porfirio Diaz (Durham 1961).

  Travellers' tales and eyewitness reports by foreigners add a dimension to Mexico's troubled history. Particularly valuable for the Porfiriato are the following: Frederick Starr, The Indian Mexico: A Narrative of Travel and Labour (Chicago 1908); Hans Gadow, Through Southern Mexico, Being an Account of the Travels of a Naturalist (1908); C. Arnold and F. J. T. Frost, The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in Yucatan (New York 1909); Henry Harper, A Journey in South-Eastern Mexico (New York 1910); Hudson Strode, Timeless Mexico (New York 1944); Leone B. Moats, Thunder in their Veins (1933); John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago 1910); George Creel, The People Next Door (New York 1926); Donald Brand, Mexico: Land of Sunshine and Shadow (New York 1966); Graham Hutton, Mexican Images (1963); H. Hamilton Fyfe, The Real Mexico (1914); Edward Bell, The Political Shame of Mexico (New York 1914); Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley 1952) and no less than three volumes by Mrs Alec Tweedie, Mexico As I Saw It (1902); Porfirio Diaz (1902); Mexico from Diaz to the Kaiser (1917).