230 Western American Literature Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. By John Womack, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1969. xi + 435 pages, illus., index, $10.00.) In Zapata and the Mexican Revolution John Womack Jr. has reached a remarkable level in scholarly writing by his ability to keep to a chronological path through a wilderness of letters, diaries, articles, editorials, manifestos, official reports, and both masters’ and doctoral theses. The guide whom Womack has chosen to lead the reader down this path is a paradoxical figure, Emiliano Zapata. He is a paradox because he is at once down-to-earth, humble, direct, uncomplicated, and predictable, and at the same time shadowy, symbolic, and mysterious—a charismatic image rather than a man. One wishes for more details about Zapata’s life. The book is less a biography than a history with a golden thread of a significant life running through it. The character of Zapata is central to the account, and the reader feels a growing admiration for the granite-like toughness of the opposition which this man erects and maintains against planters, politicians, and countless federal soldiers as he seeks to protect the ancient rights of the villagers of Morelos to live their own lives on the lands that their forefathers have held and worked for generations. Zapata was born sometime in the late 1870’s in the village of Anenecuilco in the state of Morelos. He had been in trouble with the district authorities when he was only seventeen, something to be expected, for “in the countryside troubles with the police were almost a puberty rite.” From that time on he had been one of the young men active in village defense, signing protests, organizing opposition candidates for governor, and helping to keep up village morale. By the time he was thirty he was elected president of the Anenecuilco village counsel. His family had a reputation for integrity and unambitious courage. People knew that he would not change and abuse their trust. At the time Zapata was growing up, the basic social problem in Morelos was the conflict between sugar planters and village leaders. The sugar planters naturally had the ear of the politicians, nicknamed cientijicos, “who believed that the nation could progress only through their control and for their benefit.” Such an attitude had stirred up resistance among common country people of Morelos, for, as President Porfirio Diaz himself had said, “those tramps in the South are tough.” By 1909 bitterness over gubernatorial elections had reached the point of rioting in Cuatla, the heart of Morelos. The riot meant a war of the classes, the “saloon element” against the “decent people”, a struggle of sandal against shoe. For many months the planters had the best of the struggle. Plantations became company towns, and the villagers, gradually losing their lands to the avarice of the planters, became field hands for the planters, fell deeply into Reviews 231 debt, and evolved as a dependent labor force, practically without hope of ever becoming free. Womack’s book is a sympathetic account of the agrarian revolution in Mexico, in which Morelos was the key state in the South and Zapata the key figure. Zapata’s quiet, manly ways and unswerving loyalty to the idea of land for the villagers gradually won him the support of the village leaders in neigh boring states as well as in Morelos. He led the rebellion against the armed cruelties of Huerta, Juvencio Robles, and Pablo Gonzalez, eventually winning the respect of Obreg6n and helping to make him president of the republic. As dashing a figure as Pancho Villa, when leading his Zapatistas, Zapata was without the vanity or personal ambition of the bandit general of the North. Distrustful as he was of politicians and city men in general, Zapata could not have become president. Yet without his firm faith in the rights of villagers and his capacity to rally the country people to their cause, they probably would have waited long to win their agrarian revolution. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution is written with great compassion and insight and is destined to be a classic in the record of Mexico’s struggle for equal human...