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The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-074

1527-1900

Stephen E. Lewis,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Thirteen years after writing a major biography on Emiliano Zapata, Samuel Brunk has produced a thoughtful sequel that weaves the struggle over Zapata’s legacy into the course of modern Mexican history. Brunk documents how the Mexican Revolution’s most ideologically consistent protagonist in life became its most malleable and manipulated symbol in death. Although some of the material in this book will be familiar to scholars who have followed Brunk’s output closely, this clearly written, provocative study should find its way onto many graduate and scholarly reading lists just in time for the centenary commemorations of the revolution.The dispute over Zapata’s legacy began in 1911, in the opening months of the Mexican Revolution. A hero to most campesinos in Morelos, Zapata received rough treatment at the hands of Mexico City’s dailies, which quickly labeled him “the Attila of the South.” The myth making shifted into high gear eight years later, when Zapata was gunned down. Like two other legendary Latin American heroes, Augusto Sandino and Che Guevara, Zapata was betrayed, ambushed, and died at the hands of his enemies. Or did he? A few Zapata loyalists insisted that their jefe had been warned of the ambush and sent a double to Chinameca. A constitutionalist counternarrative tried to turn the tables and deny Zapata his martyrdom, claiming Zapata had sprung a trap on them and that they had returned fire in self-defense. Zapata’s legacy was very much in dispute in 1920, when the victorious Sonorans began the arduous task of forging a new Mexican state and nation.In the early 1920s, President Álvaro Obregón’s strategic alliance with former Zapatistas had the effect of elevating the status of the “martyr of Chinameca.” The architects of Zapata’s assassination, Jesús Guajardo and Pablo González, were killed and exiled, respectively. The Mexico City press slowly came around, and by 1924 politicians began making pilgrimages to Morelos every April to commemorate Zapata’s death.In the 1920s and 1930s, Brunk notes, national agendas molded the Zapata myth. The result was often ironic. In the hands of muralist Diego Rivera, the regional caudillo became a national hero. Marxists (like Rivera) embraced the peasant leader, temporarily setting aside their faith in the revolutionary potential of the urban proletariat. Another irony: by the 1930s, Mexico’s “revolutionary” regime had largely tamed Zapata. In school textbooks, the former rebel became a symbol of order, a peaceful peasant who waited patiently for the government to satisfy his need for land.Brunk portrays a powerful Mexican state in this book, but one that ultimately could not control the myth that it had done so much to promote. Zapata functioned “as a bridge between Mexico City and Morelos, politician and peasant, precisely because the politicians could not impose their vision on him” (p. 87). At first blush, this might seem like a sign of weakness. Arguably, however, the drawn-out tussle over Zapata’s legacy is precisely what made him such a key figure in the creation of a hegemonic postrevolutionary state and nation.The trouble for Mexico’s one-party state began in 1968, when students that summer appropriated the more rebellious Zapata in their marches and demonstrations. In April 1969, 50 years since Zapata’s assassination but only months removed from the Tlatelolco massacre, the regime attempted to reclaim Zapata’s legacy by sowing dozens of statues and busts in his image throughout the country.Brunk’s narrative takes us into the 1990s, when President Carlos Salinas attempted to invoke Zapata in his bid to undo Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. As Salinas learned, the Mexican state had become “hopelessly entangled in webs it had done much to weave” (p. 254). Rural Mexico did not accept Salinas’s “new” version of Zapata without a fight. In Chiapas, an Indian Zapata became the symbolic standard-bearer of a Maya peasant rebellion, although Brunk arguably overstates the importance of Votán-Zapata, a mythical Tzeltal god that appears to be an invention of Subcomandante Marcos.Latin America is full of hero cults, but only a few have truly stood the test of time. Che Guevara, Eva Perón, and Augusto Sandino share with Zapata a tragic death and an association with martyrdom, but only Zapata has been used effectively by both the regime and its opponents. Zapata was vitally important to the hegemony of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) for several decades, but he was also instrumental in its takedown. This is an important, timely, and meticulously researched contribution to the growing literature on state and nation building and the many ironic and even self-defeating uses of national heroes in Latin America.