Emiliano ZapataEssay Preview: Emiliano ZapataReport this essayEmiliano Zapata, born on August 8, 1879, in the village of Anenecuilco, Morelos (Mexico), Emiliano Zapata was of mestizo heritage and the son of a peasant medier, (a sharecropper or owner of a small plot of land). From the age of eighteen, after the death of his father, he had to support his mother and three sisters and managed to do so very successfully. The little farm prospered enough to allow Zapata to augment the already respectable status he had in his native village. In September of 1909, the residents of Anenecuilco elected Emiliano Zapata president of the villages “defense committee,” an age-old group charged with defending the communitys interests. In this position, it was Zapatas duty to represent his villages rights before the president-dictator of Mexico, Porfirio DДaz, and the governor of Morelos, Pablo EscandДÑ-n. During the 1880s, Mexico had experienced a boom in sugar cane production, a development that led to the acquisition of more and more land by the hacienderos or plantation owners. Their plantations grew while whole villages disappeared and more and more medieros and other peasants lost their livelihoods or were forced to work on the haciendas. It was under these conditions that a plantation called El Hospital neighboring Zapatas village began encroaching more and more upon the small farmers lands. This was the first conflict in which Emiliano Zapata established his reputation as a fighter and leader. He led various peaceful occupations and re-divisions of land, increasing his status and his fame to give him regional recognition.
In 1910, Francisco Madero, a son of wealthy plantation owners, instigated a revolution against the government of president DДaz. Even though most of his motives were political (institute effective suffrage and disallow reelections of presidents), Maderos revolutionary plan included provisions for returning seized lands to peasant farmers. The latter became a rallying cry for the peasantry and Zapata began organizing locals into revolutionary bands, riding from village to village, tearing down hacienda fences and opposing the landed elites encroachment into their villages. On November 18, the federal government began rounding up Maderistas (the followers of Francisco Madero), and only forty-eight hours later, the first shots of the Mexican Revolution were fired. While the government was confident that the revolution would be crushed in a matter of days, the Maderista Movement kept gaining in strength and by the end of November, Emiliano Zapata had fully joined its ranks. Zapata, a rather cautious, soft-spoken man, had become a revolutionary.
During the first weeks of 1911, Zapata continued to build his organization in Morelos, training and equipping his men and consolidating his authority as their leader. Soon, Zapatas band of revolutionaries, poised to change their tactics and take the offensive, were known as Zapatistas. On February 14, Francisco Madero, who had escaped the authorities to New Orleans, returned to Mexico, knowing that it was time to restart his revolution with an all-out offensive. Less than a month later, on March 11, 1911, “a hot, sticky Saturday night,” the bloody phase of the Mexican Revolution began at Villa de Ayala. There was no resistance from the villagers, who were mostly sympathetic to the revolution, being sharecroppers or hacienda workers themselves, and the local police were disarmed quickly. Not all battles that followed were this quick, however. The revolution took its bloody course with the legendary Pancho Villa fighting in the northern part of Mexico, while Zapata remained mainly south of Mexico City. On May 19, after a week of extremely fierce fighting with government troops, the Zapatistas took the town of Cuautla. Only forty-eight hours later, Francisco Madero and the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Ciudad JuДЎrez, which ended the presidency of Porfirio DДaz and named Francisco LeДÑ-n de la Barra, former ambassador to Washington, as interim president.
Under different circumstances, this could have meant the end of the Mexican Revolution. Maderos most important demands had been met, DДaz was out of office, and regular elections were to be held to determine his successor. LeДÑ-n de la Barra, however, was not a president to Zapatas liking. While of great personal integrity, his political skills were lacking. The new president could not assuage the peasants, especially since his allegiance was clearly with the rich planters who were trying to regain control of Mexico, aided by the conditions of the Treaty of Ciudad JuДЎrez. Even though Zapata had been ordered to cease all hostilities, he and 5,000 men entered and captured Cuernavaca, the capital of his native state of Morelos.
In 1911, Madero was elected president of Mexico, and Zapata met with him to discuss the demands of the peasantry. The meeting was fruitless and the former allies parted in anger. The only joy those days held for the thirty-one-year-old Zapata was his marriage to his bride Josefa, only six days after the ill-fated meeting with the president. Officially, the Zapatistas were disbanded and Zapata himself was in retirement. The police forces, in disarray after fighting the revolutionary forces, were no match for the new wave of bandits that were now roaming the land. The situation in Mexico deteriorated, assassination plots against the new president surfaced, renewed fighting between government and revolutionary forces ensued, and the smell of revolution was once again hanging over the cities of Mexico. In the “Plan of Ayala”
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On January 10th, 1911 Zapata accompanied Manuel Pabana to Mexico City, where he met and fell in love with Maria Aguilar, a forty-year old school teacher, who was living in Mexico City and with which she lived with the family. A month later, after the government had been forced to give Zawahir to one of the communist members of the Peña Nieto family, Zapata took it out for a few hours to go to Los Angeles. His trip to Mexico City took him to the Los Angeles area, where he met in California, then in California, to see his mother-in-law during their visit. The trip to Los Angeles, according to the authorities, took less than twelve hours, but he arrived just in time for his Mother’s appearance, which was to include a speech by the new president of Mexico in Los Angeles, Elie Ocho Cruz, the new minister for agriculture at the State Department. On his return to Mexico City, Zapata accompanied Ocho Cruz to Mexico after learning the news that Miguel Cazador would be leaving Mexico for Spain to live with his two sisters, who live in California. He went into exile in Spain, where he worked as a petty thief living with his brother Fernando. Zapata and his wife, Ana Ocho, then went to the United States to meet with the then president of Mexico for the first time in his life, Richard B. Fennell Jr. Zapata’s final trip as the president to Mexico took him to Austin, Texas, in the beginning of October 1911, only to be stopped at the border with Mexico after a Border Patrol agent shot him in the leg. His second appearance in Austin involved a talk at the Austin World Congress which turned out to be an accident. The FBI found no sign of Zapata, but he spent two years in the US, whereupon he was arrested again. The man they had suspected of taking him from Spain in San Francisco was apprehended by the local police. In September of 1912 the US government released him from custody on $30,000 bail, but when he was taken to Texas he remained in Texas illegally for more than 20 years until 1913, when he finally got custody of his papers. The first act in his case was to attempt to extradite the president to the US; Zapata accepted, but the government denied that it would. (The second action he took against the Mexican President, and of any other president, is unknown.)
By 1900, it appears that the Zapatistas were finally able to build a political presence in America. After several years of opposition and an absence of power to rule the country because of their support from the government, as well as the government’s reluctance to allow their membership of the US Congressional delegation to consider a bill to legalize voting, Zapata eventually became an appointed delegate of the Democratic party. This led him into the fight against