Emiliano Zapata was no poor peasant, and his village trusted him anyway
Legend casts Zapata as a landless farmhand, but his family was well known and reasonably comfortable in Anenecuilco. In 1909 the village elders handed him leadership of their centuries-old fight to recover land. Two years later his Plan of Ayala demanded that estates be returned to peasants.
He was born on 8 August 1879 in Anenecuilco, Morelos, the ninth of ten children of Gabriel Zapata and Cleofas Salazar. His maternal grandfather had fought under José María Morelos at the siege of Cuautla. Gabriel farmed and trained horses, so Emiliano grew up close to the land and to his village's long quarrel with expanding haciendas. His schooling was limited, though it included basic bookkeeping.
Anenecuilco mixed Spanish-speaking mestizos and Nahuatl-speaking indigenous families, and its leaders kept colonial land titles, some written in Nahuatl, as proof of ownership. Under Porfirio Díaz, sugar planters were swallowing land and water across Morelos. In 1892 a village delegation won an audience with Díaz, who promised a favourable hearing and then had them arrested; Zapata was forced into the Federal Army. In 1909 the aged chief elder José Merino stepped down, and the villagers chose Zapata, barely thirty, to replace him. He declined the honorific Don, and people called him Miliano.
When the revolution of 1910 came, Zapata became the main leader of the popular uprising in Morelos. In November 1911 he issued the Plan of Ayala, calling for sweeping land redistribution. President Madero answered by sending federal troops whose generals burned villages and uprooted their people. After the revolutionaries toppled Huerta, the Convention of Aguascalientes in late 1914 failed to settle power; Zapata and Pancho Villa broke with Carranza, and the victors turned on each other. Uneasy in his alliance with Villa, Zapata concentrated on rebuilding society in Morelos.
He died on 10 April 1919. His agrarian demands shaped Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, and his name lives on both as a national symbol and in the neo-Zapatista movement.
Source: Emiliano Zapata
