Revolutions - 9.07- Morelos

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Welcome to Morelos. I'd like to introduce you to your host, Emiliano Zapata.  Sponsor: HelloFresh.com/revolutions60 Tour Dates! Oct 15 -- Toronto -- Ben McNally's Oct 16 -- NYC -- The Strand  Oct 17 -- Nashville -- Parnassus Books Oct 18 -- Atlanta -- The Carter Library (hosted by A Capella Books) Come! It's fun!  

and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.7, Morales. I will start today by continuing my promotional plugging because I just have to keep at it. The storm before the storm comes out in paperback on October the 16th, 2018. It's a great gift for yourself. It's a great gift for everyone you know. I will be in Toronto on October the 15th at Ben McNally's. On October the 16th in New York City at the Strand.

on October the 17th in Nashville at Parnassas Books, and then finally October the 18th in Atlanta at an event at the Carter Center hosted by Acapella Books. I also wanted to mention that a few of you have asked if there are any foreign language versions of the book available, and yes, yes there are. There's a Korean version, two Chinese versions, and one in Turkish. Now, foreign publishers are notoriously difficult to keep track of, and I honestly have no idea how to get any of those copies. But there is a Spanish language translation that just hit the shelves on September the 18th.

And the good people at that publisher, Ariel, have been great about promoting it and getting in touch with me about how to promote it. And so it's actually out there. I've got a link up for the Spanish language version of the storm before the storm. They are calling it Asia la Tormenta, or just into the storm. It looks really cool. And if you've got any Spanish language friends or you want a Spanish language copy of the book, by all means, go get it. So last time, we got into the effects of the infamous Creelman interview on Mexican national politics. At Porfirio Dias's explicit invitation, opposition parties started to form to challenge the existing regime.

This opposition coalesced first around Bernardo Reyes, and then when Reyes meekly accepted political exile, they moved on to Francisco Madero. But by the end of last week's episode, we saw that Dias had never meant a word of it. elections were still too important to be left to the voters, and the presidential election of 1910 skidded into a pile of intimidation, harassment, fraud, and ultimately the mass arrest of opposition leaders, including Francisco Madero himself. Well, today what I want to do is increase our level of magnification and focus on the single state of Morelos, a state which was a microcosm of everything that we've been talking about, really, since episode 9.4. All the successes, failures, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Porfirio existed in concentrated form in the tiny state of Morelos. In fact, as we'll see later in today's episode, the Morelos governor's race of 1909 was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the presidential

election of 1910. And the fact that Morelos was a concentrated microcosm of the Porphyriado put that little state on course to be one of the two great centers of the Mexican Revolution. The other was, of course, the northern periphery, which we'll get back to next time when Francisco Medero, native son of the northern periphery, goes into rebellion. Today, though, we are going to talk about Morelos and its most famous native son, Emiliano Sapata. Morelos is located in south central Mexico, less than 100 kilometers from Mexico City.

And the first thing I want to say here is that there were, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, 27 states in Mexico, and Morelos was the 27th and last of these states to be created. It was carved out of the larger state of Mexico in 1869. Now, we'll get to that here in a second, but I just want to say that I'll be saying Morelos this and Morelos that for the next little bit, but I'm talking about the geographic region. Morelos, the state, doesn't exist until very late in the game. But even though Morelos, the state, was young, the region had deep historical roots. Archaeological signs of habitation date back to 6,000 BC, with settled agricultural communities appearing around 1,500 BC.

Many of the indigenous villages in Morelos, thus predated not just the Spanish conquest of the early 1500s, but the Aztec conquest of the early 1400s. But despite the fact that Morelos was located less than 100 kilometers to the south of Mexico City, the infamously difficult terrain of Mexico kept the region isolated. Morelos straddles two major mountain ranges, keeping a steep geological barrier to getting to and from the central plateau upon which Mexico City sits. Rising anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, Morelos is an almost even mix of steep mountainous terrain, flat valleys, and rough hill country in between. And while you will get alpine meadows up in the high country, almost 75% of Morelos is warm and heat. humid and wet, mostly subtropical rainforest, which means that when the Spanish arrived, one of the first things they noticed was how great the region would be for growing sugar cane.

Now, the arrival of the Spanish was a demographic catastrophe for the indigenous inhabitants of Morelos, as it was for the rest of the Americas, and it took centuries to rebuild the population. But on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Marilos was one of the most densely populated rural areas in all of Mexico. Most of the agricultural produce of pre-Columbian Morelos was maize and cotton for local consumption, but the Spanish looked around and said, aha, we can grow sugar here. And so sugar became the crop most immediately identified with the region. But though this, of course, led to the creation of large sugar asciendas.

During the colonial period, there was a pretty stable equilibrium between those large estates and the free indigenous villages who owned and farmed their own communal lands. This local population provided a flexible workforce for the Asciendas, while meeting most of their own basic survival needs through their own work on their own lands. By the end of the colonial era, all of them, in fact, had written promises, titles and deeds, drawn up by various vice regal officials over the years, guaranteeing the villages, their collective possession of this orchard or that field, claims, which were, get this, even upheld in Spanish courts. But that does not mean that the peasants and villages, of Morelos liked the Spaniards or the Ascendados. When Father Idago let forth the cry of Dolores, men and women in Morelos enthusiastically joined the call to arms. So much so, remember,

that after Idaulgo and the other original leaders from the Bahia were executed in 1811, the main theater of the Wars of Independence moved to South Central Mexico. And Morelos was at the center of all that, where the terrain and the character of the population led to guerrilla armies operating successfully against the vice regal forces for years. And those armies were now under the direction of the man who would later give his name to this little state, Jose Maria Morales, who we talked all about in episode 9.2. And the fact that this region, again, right at Mexico city's doorstep, remained for so long unpacified, was a source of great frustration for the vice regal officials. After independence, Morales was caught up in a larger struggle between

federalists and centralists, liberals and conservatives that we talked about in episode 9.3. The old vice regal capital of Kornavaka tended to be conservative and centralist. It was practically a suburb of Mexico City and plenty of rich families had second homes there. Meanwhile, the more interior city of Kwautla tended to be federalist and liberal. Generally speaking, though, the population was always fertile recruiting grounds for rebel fighters. Rebelling against what? whatever you got. So, for example, Morelos became one of the main bases of rebel support for Juan Alvarez, when he launched his great liberal revolt against Santa Ana in 1854. When this temporary triumph of the

liberals gave way to the war of reform, the region was divided between the conservatives who held Kornavaka and liberals who held Kwautele, and bloody, destructive chaos reigned in between. This dynamic continued as the reform war gave way to the patriotic war against the France. French, with Kornavaka again being the main base of conservative imperialist support. In fact, after Maximilian arrived, he took a second home in Kornavaca, which led to great improvements to the roads linking Mexico City to the region, as well as the first telegraph lines being installed. When the French were expelled and Maximilian was executed, the triumphant president Benito

Juarez decided to peel off this still mostly isolated chunk of the state of Mexico and create a new state in 1869. So what had once been a large sub-provence of Mexico became the second smallest state in Mexico, checking in at just 5,000 square kilometers. Juarez named the new state Morelos after the great hero of the wars of independence. Its first governor was a local liberal war hero named Francisco Leba. That's Leba with a V. He had fought all through the war of reform and the patriotic war against the French. And in that first governor's race, Leba actually defeated another young and ambitious hero of the wars, Porfirio Diaz. We'll talk way more about that in a second. The ascendancy of the liberals would have profound consequences for the population of the new state of

Morelos. Remember, one of the big things the liberals wanted to do was end the corporate ownership of property, whether it was owned by the church or by a village. They wanted to divide it up into individually owned plots of private property as a way to stimulate economic growth. This also came with reforms in how land titles would be assessed and validated. The move to modernize and rationalize the real estate laws led many ancient village grants, drafted sometimes hundreds of years ago by some random vice regal official, to be increasingly ignored by the courts. There also began, under the liberals, a major push to identify all previously unclaimed national

with public land and auction all that off too. The villages of Morales would bear the brunt of these efforts particularly hard. It was a densely packed region with 120 recognized pueblas in the small 5,000 square kilometer area, much of which was uncultivatable mountain land. So with only so much land to go around, a lot of villages needed everything they own to be viable. And even the simple loss of access to what had once been unclaimed public land might be the difference between life and death for a village. In spite of this, though, individual villages were able to maintain through persistence their claims to communal property. But because there was a lot of intervillage rivalry, there was never any larger coordinated response to the threat, even if they all faced

the same threat. But despite this liberal push, beginning in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it was not until the triumphal accession of Porfirio Dias to the presidency in 1876. that things accelerated. And as I said at the beginning of this episode, Morales is a concentrated microcosm of what was happening throughout Mexico as order and progress became the law of the land. In Morelos, order and progress meant the mass expansion of sugar cultivation. First, the introduction of rail lines connecting Morelos to Mexico City linked the heretofore isolated region instantly to the urban metropolis. As the railroad spread throughout Mexico, It did two things for the sugar planters.

First, it allowed them to import new, efficient modern machines and steam-driven mills to extract and refine sugar ever more efficiently. And then second, it gave them access to a larger national market, eventually maybe even an international market. So, given every Porphurian encouragement to expand and modernize and profit, the sugar ascendados of Morelos expanded and modernized and profited. railroads brought in new technology and carried away mountains of newly produced sugar. Sugar production increased fivefold, and the ostendados started looking for ways to expand their operations. Once the unclaimed national land had all been sold off by the Ministry of the Interior, there was only one other place to acquire new land, and that was to take it from the villages. Starting in the 1880s, the villages of Morales came under sustained assault from expanding asciendas,

With the help of friends on the courts and in key interior ministry posts, Oscendado started challenging the claims of various villages. They said ancient titles were invalid, or that the land under dispute was actually vacant and up for grabs. Out in the countryside, Asienda managers started throwing up fences and enclosures and simply asserting ownership of orchards and fields and grazing land that had been used by a community for literally centuries.

A hundred acres here, a thousand acres over there, was claimed and parceled out until some villages were reduced to merely their own town boundaries, with no land of their own to sustain themselves. Over the next few years, the villages began to disappear from the map. In 1876, there were about 120 recognized pueblos in Morelos. By 1910, that number was down to a hundred. In one infamous case, an ostendado angry resistance from a local village directed his irrigation into a nearby lake. The lake overran its shores.

It flooded the village. Only the church spire was left visible above the waterline. The ancient populations were thus broken into dislocated relocation. Most of them were forced to take jobs as resident wage workers on the very assyenda that had just enveloped their village. Now, the village leaders and councils fought all this in court all the time, but they were rebuffed. They were ignored. Their titles were declared too ancient to be valid and recognized. By 1908, the 36 largest asciendas, owned by just 17 families, covered fully 25% of the total land in Morales, and by all accounts, had 100% of the good land.

An illustrative anecdote of how this process played out concerns a village that bordered one of the asciendas owned by the rich and powerful Eskandon family. The Eskandon family were old Mexico City conservatives, and it's a wonder they were even still around, as the family, in fact, shows up in the ranks of the imperial administration of Maximilian, rather than the patriotic rebel armies that were trying to expel him. In 1903, Pablo Escondon ordered a manager to enclose about 3,500 acres of disputed land that had been used by the villagers for grazing. The villagers got mad when they ran into these new fences. They tore them down and went back to grazing, as they always had.

In retaliation, the herds were confiscated and fines were issued for trespassing. So the villagers tapped an educated farmer they trusted to take their case to the magistrates. They had ancient titles and claims to the land that this Ascienda was now trying to claim. The farmer agreed. He took the case to the district court, but was rebuffed. He took it to the state court, but was rebuffed. So he appealed to the federal Supreme Court in Mexico City. So now it's 1904.

It's like a full year later. And this guy is leading a small delegation to plead their case. He even got a meeting with President Dias himself, who listened sympathetically and said, Oh, that's not right. I'm sure this will all work out in your favor. But the farmer never got to plead his case before the Supreme Court. Just before the trial, he was arrested, and all his papers, documents, and evidence were seized. Then he just disappeared. In June of 1904, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Escondon family.

A few months later, the farmer's family finally got a letter. He had smuggled it out of a district. jail cell in Veracruz, where he was awaiting deportation to the infamous labor camps in Quintana Roe. That was the only letter they ever got. The farmer died in those camps in November 1905. And that is what Porfarian order and progress meant to the peasants of Morelos. So these enclosures were creating a bit of an angry powder keg. So let us turn now to the political side of things, where we will find the spark to light that angry powder keg. We saw a Last week, how a host of socioeconomic grievances were unleashed by a political crisis,

mostly revolving around the issue of the presidential succession. Well, here in Morelos, again, a microcosm of Mexico, the same thing was happening on a smaller scale. A political succession crisis over the winter of 1908 and 1909 was going to open up the first crack of what ultimately became a violent social revolution. The succession crisis was kicked off by the death of the long-serving governor, Manuel Alarcon, who had been in office since 1894, and who had just been re-elected for the fourth time. In mid-December 1908, the governor unexpectedly died, and so a new governor had to be found.

About a week after the death of the old governor, Dias met with the prominent Ascendado families of Morelos to work out who the next governor should be. And despite a half-dozen names that would have been perfectly fine, the planters decided to insist upon elevating Pablo Eskandon. The guy who I just mentioned kick-starting that horrible story about the farmer getting sent off to the labor camps. Eskandon was at that point serving as the president's chief of staff. He was one of the heirs of the great Eskandon estates. He had been educated at Stonyhurst in England, and when he returned to Mexico in the 1880s,

he spent all of his time powing around with his buddies in the elite circles of Mexico City. Pablo joined the army as an officer, but that was mostly just for the social. social benefits. He wasn't actually like a soldier. Dias brought Escondone onto his staff, but politics was not really his thing. He was a glorified social secretary, and Eskandon excelled at organizing state events and parties. But he was not much interested in the hard work and cut and thrust of real politics. So when the Morelos planters approached him about running for governor, he tried to say no. Though his family was one of the largest landowners in Morelos, he himself had practically never been there, and by his own admission, knew nothing about the state. Being governor,

not only meant having to do real work, it also meant he would actually have to live there, which kind of turned his stomach. Indeed, it has been observed that even though Escondon and his social circle were all Native Mexicans, they had a very colonialist outlook on everything outside of Mexico City. Eskandon basically self-identified as a civilized European, while everyone one out there was a sandal-wearing, hut-dwelling, native savage. Still clinging to the old caste system mentality, Escondone was pretty much a straight-up racist. But the planters insisted on elevating him, because they knew he was one of them, and that he would not get in their way. That was supposed to be the end of it.

The powerful Oscendado families had spoken. Escondone would be elected in a Democratic charade scheduled for February 1909, and that would be that. Except that was not that. as was the case all over Mexico. The triumph of the Perfriato had only obscured the existence of a political opposition. It had not eliminated it. In Morelos, there were families, some of them quite rich and influential, who had accepted the negotiated detente offered by Diaz as he built up his stable, quasi-futal authoritarian system back in the 1880s. These were the families who had agreed to mostly stay out of politics, as long as Diaz did not try to micromanage.

their affairs. In Morelos, we are talking about the Leba clan. The old patriarch of that clan was Francisco Leba, whose name I just dropped a couple of minutes ago. Now 73 years old, he was an old liberal veteran of the Reform War and the war against the French. But Laiba had been a partisan of the Benito Juarez and Miguel Laredo faction of the Liberals, against whom Porfirio Diaz had launched his rebellious challenges in the early 1870s. Laba's brother, in fact, had been killed fighting rebels during Dias' abortive Noria rebellion in 1872. So there was no love loss between these two. And when Dias came to power in 1876, Laba was forced out of power. But though Laba was kept out of the statehouse, Dias looked the other way when families in the state continued to take their

cues from the Lava family. This detente between Lava and Dias lasted all the way to the end of 1908, when the old long-dormant opposition in Morelos came to Leba, then living in Mexico city, and asked him to run for governor. Leba, in something of a subtle dig at Dias, said he was too old to run, but he gave his blessing for his son Patricio to challenge Escondon. Just to make sure this was all cool, though, Laba scheduled a meeting with Dias about a week after the president met with the planters. Leba asked Dias directly what he thought of his son running, and Dias said, oh yes,

sounds great, don't you know? I'm all about democracy now. So on January the 7th, a little convention got together of village leaders, along with some middle class types, teachers and merchants and storekeepers, and they nominated Patricio Leba for governor. The primary was scheduled for February the 7th, 1909, and then a second vote of the electors was scheduled for February 21st. Both of these votes were supposed to be mere formalities. There had been other state and local elections in 1908, since the Creelman interview had happened, and those had gone smoothly for the regime. But that was just because it had taken a little while for opposition types to really stick their necks out. By 1909, the coast really did look clear. Dias kept saying all the right things.

So here we go. Let's challenge the election. And one of the things that made the Morelos election different is something we talked about last week, the formation of that Rayista-leaning Democratic Party. right now at this very moment in January 1909. Having just come together, the Morelos election was the first opportunity for these guys to go get in on some action, and various agents were sent into the state to work the election. That election turned out to be a preview of the presidential election that would precede the following year. At first, there was a lot of surprising popular support for labor. Meetings and rallies had a lot of energy and passion that made the local Hephaes Politico,

very nervous. So the supporters of Escondone tried to bolster his popular image by having him parrot some liberal reformist talking points that were actually written by a Reista member of the Democratic Party, but nobody was really buying it, and Ascandon wasn't exactly selling it. Things came to a dramatic head on February the 1st. With about a week left in the election, a trainload of pro-esqueandone speakers came through Kuwaitla. When they got off the train to make their speeches, they were heckled by the crowd. So the speakers got mad and they yelled back at the crowd. Then the crowd threw some rocks. And then in came the police. Now, no shots were fired, but arrests were made and the whole place was cleared. After this little quote-unquote riot,

the Le Bistas intentionally backed off some of their more rabble-rousing rhetoric because they wanted to avoid getting jailed for inciting rebellion. But the local Hefe's Politicos were way over all of this. When Election Day came on February the 7th, they broke out every trick in the book. Police were out intimidating voters and controlling access to the polls. Voting locations and times were changed at the last minute. Ballots pre-filled out for Escondone were distributed widely. And then, of course, the cherry on top was right before the election. They went out and arrested or drove into hiding any prominent Le Vista they could find. So in this tightly controlled atmosphere, the quote-unquote, opposition Dias had personally welcomed

was swamped by fraud and violence, and so Escondone won the governor's race in a rigged blowout. He was sworn in his governor on March the 15th, 1909. By all accounts, Eskandon was a terrible governor. For one thing, he never wanted the job, and certainly did not want to actually live in Morelos. He wanted his country club in Mexico City, and he constantly requested permission to leave the state on a variety of pretexts. So the land of absentee landlords now had an absentee governor. This allowed the local hefees politicos to just kind of do whatever they wanted. And what a lot of them wanted to do was go out and get vengeance on those who had defied them during the election.

So they targeted families and villages who were strong le Bistas. And then even when he was in Kornavaka, Escondone was just a cipher for the ascendados. He put through legislation in June 1909 aimed at artificially deposition. pressing real estate value so that the planters could pay lower taxes. But this shift the burden mostly to those few middle-class town types, the merchants and the lawyers and the shopkeepers. It engendered a lot of resentment. Then near the end of 1909, Escondone demanded changes to the state constitution, which would allow for even more executive control and authority, basically erasing whatever thin checks the state legislature still had on the governor. The entire administration and

bureaucracy of the state was then converted into being a relentlessly and uniformly supportive machine for the assandados. They opposed the villagers at every front. Now, Ascendant's predecessor had at least occasionally ruled for the villagers or reigned in flagrant abuses of power. But that was all over now. And the thing is, had it not been for the aggressive greed of the Oscendados, they might have avoided the revolution, because they were helping provoke it right now. Faced with total envelopment and the complete destruction of the free villages and their ancient way of life, the people of Morelos were well primed for a revolt. What did they have to lose? All they needed was a spark and a leader. And who would that leader be? Why, Emiliano Sapata, of course.

Emiliano Zapata was born on August 8, 1879. In the village of, okay, I think this is my 12th take, Ananaquilco. Close enough. The village was located a bit southwest of Kwautele, and at the time of his birth, the village was over 700 years old, predating even the Aztec conquest. Now, being born in 1879 meant that Zapata is among that generation of men and women I mentioned last week, who could not remember any president but Porfirio Diaz. Sapata also knew of no other life than the post-1880s massive encroachment and enclosure campaigns. And there's an apocryphal story that at the age of nine, he watched his father break down sobbing as they watched an orchard being enclosed, and young Emiliano swore that day to always be the enemy of Rome. Oh, wait, that's a different apocryphal story of

youthful vengeance swearing. Sorry, I get them mixed up sometimes. Anyway, the sabatas were well-known in a well-respected Mistezo family. As a child, his maternal grandfather had helped Jose Mare Murelos in the War of Independence. Two of his uncles had been liberal partisan fighters in the War of Reform and the French War, and the Zapata's were not dirt-poor peasants. They were, in fact, at least moderately prosperous by the standards of the village. Emiliano grew up in a house, not a hut. He had decent clothes and shoes. He got a rudimentary education. He was illiterate, and he could do math. And though, of course, he worked for a living, neither he nor his brothers and sisters were ever mere wage laborers.

His parents died less than a year apart when Emiliano was still in his late teens, so he inherited a bit of property and took it over with an entrepreneurial spirit. He worked some land as a tenant farmer, growing at one point watermelons at a decent profit. He also bought a team of mules that he ran during the off-season, carting corn from farm to town, and bricks from town to hacienda. He got to be well-known and trusted, even though he was still in his early 20s. But Sapata really made his local reputation with horses. He was a natural rider. He was gifted and fearless. He competed in races and rodeos and bullfights. And his preternatural understanding of horses made him one of the most sought-after trainers in Morelos. He was much in demand on the asciendas in

the area. So by the time he was in his mid-20s, Sapata had some money coming in and his prospects looked pretty good. And he did too. The image that a lot of of people have of Sapata is him as this like ascetic peasant warrior. He ate bread and drank water, bare feet and a pure heart. But that was not Emiliano Sapata at all. He was actually quite a snappy dresser. It was one of the few things he used his disposable income on. He had spit-polished boots, sharp, creased pants, good-quality shirts. He loved silver buckles and spurs and ornamented saddles. And of course, he paid particular care and attention to his illustrious muscle. which he took enormous pride in. And Zapata's glorious mustache is definitely one of history's

most famous mustaches. But all that said, in his biography of Sapata and the Zapatistas, John Womack makes the point that though Sapata was this like fancy pants dandy, he literally had fancy pants, there was never an air of condescension or superiority about him. Nobody ever called him Don Emiliano. The people of Morelos looked at Zapata and said he is one of us. and despite his fancy clothes, he really was. Part of this affection and trust comes from him taking an early interest in village politics. At the time, village politics meant defending the village's claims against the encroaching assyendas. As early as 1906, he was sitting in on delegations as a junior member to learn the ropes and get used to what being a village leader was like.

He spent the next three years sitting on these meetings, making the rounds to district, state, and now. officials. He conferred with other tribal leaders about their shared grievances. And when the election of 1909 came around and was unexpectedly contested, Sipata naturally threw his lot in with labor. And so he spent even more time traveling around, meeting people, and then back home, receiving visitors. He got to know allies in the opposition, and they got to know him. But after the election, the village council of, okay, let's see if I can do this, Ananaquilko, could see how much tougher the fight was going to be now that Escondone had been elected. And in September of 1909, they announced that they were going to step down and give way to the next generation.

In the brief subsequent discussion and vote, Emiliano Zapata, just a few days past his 30th birthday, was elected president of the village council. He was entrusted most of all with the collection of ancient documents that spelled out the village's claims and rights, which he would keep as his sacred labor for the rest of his life. All through the revolution, Sopata took enormous care to ensure the safety of these precious village documents. For the next few months, he carried on with the standard game of petitions and meetings and demanding legal redress of their grievances, and Sipata proved troublesome enough that he was hit with one of the standard Perfarian tactics used to punish opposition. He was drafted into the army. But Sopada only served a brief stint in the

cavalry in early 1910 before somehow managing to secure a discharge, very possibly through some well-placed bribes. By the spring of 1910, he was back home, very frustrated and ready to change tactics. And very possibly, the old village elders had anticipated the need for this kind of change of tactics, and that's why they had stepped aside to let a younger man like Zapata take the lead. With the rains approaching and planting needing to start, the villagers had been told by the neighboring Ascendado that if they tried to farm on a disputed hillside, that they would be run off, by force if necessary. So the villagers appealed to the state government for permission to farm this hillside, but the bureaucrats dragged their feet. They delayed. They asked for additional information,

and they were basically stalling until the rain started and it would be too late. Then the Oscendato brazenly brought in workers from other villages to come do the planting, and Sapata had had enough. He led about 80 men, some of them, armed out to the field and demanded the workers' leave. He told them, look, we don't want any trouble with you, but you know this is our land, not the Asiendas. So get out of here. And so they did. Now amazingly, the Ascendado actually backed down from this confrontation, though Zapata himself had to go into hiding for about three months after being denounced as a bandit and an outlaw and a highwayman, which is where he was, laying low in the summer of 1910 when Francisco

Madero's campaign ran into the wall of repression that it now, in retrospect, always seemed destined for. Madero's movement had never penetrated much into Morelos. It was mostly centered in the north and in the coastal cities. But the people of Marillos knew it was going on. They were thrilled that somebody was challenging Diaz. And then they muttered with resigned frustration when the repressive regime kicked in and all hope seemed to be snuffed out. But all hope had not been snuffed out. and next time we will pick back up with Madero as he decided the time had finally come to give Diaz some of his own probably very old and expired medicine. But I say next time because revolutions will be taking next week off.

Until then, please mark your calendars for my tour dates in October, and then we will be back here in two weeks when the Mexican Revolution officially begins. Music