Pete Hamill - Piecework

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.