Synopsis
John Womack's "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution," published in 1969, is a masterful social history that centers on the agrarian uprising in the southern Mexican state of Morelos during the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1919. Rather than offering a conventional biography of Emiliano Zapata, the book portrays him as the embodiment and leader of the villagers' fierce determination to reclaim their lands, water rights, and traditional way of life from the encroaching sugar haciendas that had expanded under the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.
The narrative begins with the pre-revolutionary tensions in Morelos, where peasant communities faced dispossession and political manipulation by wealthy planters and local bosses aligned with the Díaz regime. Zapata, initially a modest horse trader and small farmer from the village of Anenecuilco, emerges as a natural leader when villagers rally behind Francisco Madero's call for political reform in 1910. Disillusioned by Madero's failure to deliver on land restitution, Zapata issues the famous Plan de Ayala in 1911, which demands the return of seized lands to the pueblos and positions the Zapatistas as uncompromising defenders of agrarian justice against successive national governments.
Womack vividly recounts how the Morelos peasants transformed into a disciplined guerrilla force, fighting against federal armies under leaders like Victoriano Huerta and later Venustiano Carranza, while briefly allying with figures like Pancho Villa. The book details the internal dynamics of the movement—the villagers' resilience through years of warfare, refuge, occupation of territory, and radical experiments in local self-governance and land reform—along with the betrayals, assassinations, and shifting alliances that defined the broader revolution's chaos. Zapata himself is depicted not as a mythic hero but as a steadfast, incorruptible figure rooted in the practical needs and traditions of his people.
Ultimately, the story traces the Zapatistas' survival amid relentless pressure, their partial achievements in redistributing land, and the movement's gradual dissolution after Zapata's assassination in 1919, as surviving fighters returned to a fragile peace under new regimes. Womack's compassionate yet rigorously documented account emphasizes that the revolution in Morelos was fundamentally a popular struggle by country people who simply refused to be uprooted, making it one of the most significant and enduring chapters in Mexico's revolutionary history.