Part 5

But then we entered a little cornfield in a valley where the fighting was very bad. The Zapatistas were on one hill and the Carrancistas were on another and we were in the middle, fighting hand to hand with other Carrancistas. The two armies got all mixed up, there in San Gregorio. There was a tremendous hail of bullets and the dead piled up like stones in a milpa (small plot). The man just next to me fell.... At five o'clock a bullet got the Captain who had been blaspheming the day before. In the dark we didn't know who was a Zapatista, who was a Carrancista.

The revolution swept from hacienda to hacienda, now the Carrancistas attacking, now the Colorados, now the Zapatistas, now the Villistas. After four centuries of constant bludgeoning by the Spaniards the hacienda worker was settling his score: This was his opportunity to reclaim the land that had been stolen from him, not once but many times.

Reed continues, supplying intimate details:

Tomorrow we'll move in on the Hacienda Casasano. You, José, will set fire to the stable; turn out the horses and colts first ... you know where the hayloft is so pour your two cans of kerosene there. You, Magaña, empty the chicken coop just before it gets dark, chase the chickens into the gully; we'll be waiting there. The more noise you make the better. María, open the front door and then open the kitchen door, just stroll through the house and open doors.... Give us our signal from the kitchen. We'll move in just as soon as we see your light ... pour inside and wreck the place. You can have any goddamn thing you want, you bastards, but don't hang on too long, remember the hacienda is going up in flames.

Revolutionist Emiliano Zapata attempted to destroy the haciendas in his home state of Morelos. Other radical leaders in other states worked to undermine the hacienda system. At any cost, the Zapatista/Villista wanted no more of the Díaz policy. In place of Díazism the peasants wanted freedom, dignity, land, schools, and food; to achieve these goals they would ravage the nation. Men, women, and children, intent on smashing the hacienda world, could no longer exist on tortillas and water. Singly and in hordes, they scavenged and ravaged. Peasants who understood less than ten Spanish words found themselves trying Spanish if it helped the cause.

Raiders commandeered trains and boarded flat cars and freight cars, perched on the roofs, clung to the ladders, crowding the cowcatcher of the locomotive. Soldados (soldiers) sang their cockroach songs as the train rolled, belts of ammunition across their shoulders and around their waists.

Women and children trailed the fighting battalions. Women were determined to prove themselves as resourceful as the men: They were out to avenge years of maltreatment. They robbed stores in towns and sacked hacienda wardrobes. They strutted in Parisian finery, wore silk hosiery, and elegant shawls. Women became terrorists in some regions.

Thieves' markets cropped up in León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Morelia. Women traded silverware for food, a blouse, a shirt, cigarettes. They traded Sevreware for ammunition and shoes for pistols.

The women dynamited bank vaults and shared the money--government and counterfeit. They rifled safes and destroyed documents at haciendas--land grants, deeds, notarizations. They roared into a village, waving flimsy flags, encountering dogs barking and howling. They fired their rifles and pistols; they caroused and conscripted fighters.

The horde fought, retreated, lost, and fought again, seldom aware of a victory.

When their dead piled up in cornfields and fields of maguey, too numerous to bury, they left them to be eaten by coyotes, dogs, buzzards. They learned to live as much life as possible between sunup and sundown. They copulated in the fields. They promised one another fidelity, they lost one another, they found someone else. Children, born in the field, were bundled into rebozos and lugged to the next encampment

Again and again, they robbed the government troops of ammunition, rifles, revolvers, and machineguns. It was steal or quit fighting. They perpetrated more and more dangerous raids: They spied; they used a hot-air balloon; they filtered through troop concentrations; they passed themselves off as scouts; faithfully, they followed Pancho Villa and his henchmen and they vulturized the dead in the barrancas, on the haciendas, in the towns.

Without boots or shoes they continued their barefoot war against the hacendados. Armed with machetes, men stole into enemy encampments and returned with guns. Some of the fighters believed the words of Zapata: "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

In their bravado, they carved initials and dates on trees, on the leaves of the maguey, and on the doors of churches and haciendas. "Freedom!" they cried.

Huddled around campfires, in their hideaways, they sang: "If I am to die tomorrow let them kill me right away."

By now many hacienda mansions had disappeared. Weeds had taken over farmland, irrigation systems no longer functioned, wells had dried, mills had been dismantled, and cattle had been driven away or killed and eaten. Former laborers had fled or had been conscripted, jailed, or killed. Prices had climbed 300 percent.

Zapata took "Tierra y Libertad!" ("land and liberty") as his cry, and fighting every governmental force he demanded "Land for the Landless!," "Land and Water!," "Freedom for the People!"

Zapatismo meant business everywhere and at all times. As revolutionist, Zapata was a lean, moustached young man; without more than rudimentary schooling, he led his countrymen against the hacienda system. He had promised his father, whose property was stolen by an hacendado, that he would recover it for him. When his home village of San Miguel Anonecuilco was appropriated, Zapata fled to the mountains, hoping for support from the peasantry. In time he commanded several thousand armed men.

Ideologically, the revolution was American- and European-inspired since it was focused on freedom and equality. The goal of this conflict was in a major sense Utopian. But it lacked intellectual leadership: a Napoleon, to serve as figurehead. Under a single military leadership the revolution might have been shortened, saving thousands of lives. Following the collapse of the Porfirio Díaz regime, leaders tottered like dominos, and local revolts involved years of quixotic terrorism.

Zapata, Villa, Madero, Carranza, Huerta, and Obregón attempted to form a government or attempted to attain power for the sake of power. Greed and chicanery took their toll. Almost every community felt the impact as governments failed. The Church did its best to retain the feudalism of the hacienda; hacendados, lobbying in the capital, attempted to retain their old status.

Zapata and Villa joined forces briefly, because they sought the same goal. They met in Mexico City but could not reach an accord or coordinate their military "hordes." While they held the capital under their control, they dreamed of power, and yet it is doubtful whether either man thought constructively of the future of the nine million peasants remaining on the haciendas, earning from nothing to thirty cents a day. Suspecting betrayal, both men returned to their native regions.

Villa raided most of the northern states. His armed forces sometimes had an international character with a menagerie of professional adventurers: Tom Mix, Pascual Orozco, Óscar Creighton, Guiseppe Garibaldi, Tracy Richardson, and Hector Worden, the first American barnstormer to participate in armed hostilities. Villa, as military governor of Chihuahua, stripped the fourteen haciendas of the Terrazas family, haciendas totaling 17 million acres. His cronies hanged Terrazas until he revealed where cash was concealed.

Both Villa and Zapata were known as "horse bandits"--through robbery they financed their troops or buried their loot for tomorrow. Sonorans and Chihuahuans winked at the _entierros_ (loot) they concealed in Sierra Madre caves. Villa and Zapata commanded thousands--killed thousands.

Reed, in his book _Insurgent Mexico_, describes the fighting at the Hacienda Santa Clara:

Massed columns of the army halted and began to defile to the left and right, thin lines of troops jogging out under the checkered sun and shade of great trees, until six thousand men were spread in one single front ... Bugles blared faintly far and near and the army moved forward in a mighty line.... In the center, came the cannon car; beside that Villa rode with his staff....

From Reed's reports, we learn that haciendas were headquarters for insurgents. Men were stationed at the Hacienda la Cadena: Maderistas slept on the tiled floor of the patio, saddles, bridles, sabers, rifles, and ammunition against the wall, dirty blanket rolls in a corner.

Reed writes:

Sheep were baaing to be let out of the corral; little knots of peons were gathered in front of the hacienda, pointing. A little running horse appeared on the rim, headed our way. He was going at a furious speed, dipping and rising over the rolling land. As he spurred wildly up the little hill, where we stood, we saw a horror.

A fan-shaped cascade of blood poured from the front of him. The lower part of his mouth was shot away. He reined up beside the Colonel and tried earnestly, terribly, to tell him something; but nothing intelligible issued from the ruin. Tears poured down the poor fellow's cheeks. He gave a hoarse cry and driving spurs deep into his horse, fled.

One after another, haciendas disappeared in flames or were pillaged and left to rot into windowless, doorless, roofless buildings. Trainloads of connoisseur furniture and irreplaceable antiques were sold or forsaken. A squatter, with no home of his own, claimed a room or two, patched the roof, and blocked a doorway with adobes. Cattle were fed and watered in the patio. Overnight, abandoned mill and refinery machinery was stripped and sold. The revolutionaries had stolen the horses, the thoroughbreds, the mules, donkeys, oxen, and cattle. Phaetons, buggies, wagons, and cars had vanished. Poverty moved in.

Zapata was assassinated while reconnoitering at the Hacienda Chinameca. He was shot as he entered the patio. Villa was gunned down in his Dodge, on the road near his Hacienda Canutillo, the estate given him as a political bribe.

+VII. Mexico Since the Revolution+

In the summer of 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas wrote to his American friend, William C. Townsend:

We are confident that the people and the government of the United States will be able to grasp the fact that the breaking up of the large estates is the main point in our national program for improving the living conditions of the peasants of Mexico. The ideal of giving land to the masses was written into the Constitution at the cost of much bloodshed and my government is duty-bound to comply with that mandate. All the holdings that are larger than what the Agrarian Code permits are subject to distribution if there are peasants nearby who do not have land to till. Each landowner, however, is permitted to retain 370 acres, whether he is a foreigner or a Mexican.

By 1940, approximately 45 million acres of hacienda land had been turned over to the homeless and the landless by President Cárdenas (1934-1940). Three hundred haciendas in the country could claim more than 1 million acres apiece, and then only for a brief period.

The revolution had achieved an important goal. Men and women were free to live in a more congenial environment: _Rurales_ (police) would no longer pursue them. The four-century-old illusion of a _patrón_ (master) had vanished; in its place the workers found themselves unshackled. They were hungry but no longer whipped. Mexico began to say goodbye to the culture of poverty.

President Cárdenas, traveling from village to village, from hacienda to hacienda, crisscrossing his country throughout his term in office, listened to the little man, and the little man believed what the _presidente_ said, as he promised roads, bridges, schools, clinics, water, and land. Millions of peasants thanked him for a home and independence.

By expropriating multi-billion dollar oil properties from foreign companies, Cárdenas returned to Mexico some of its lost pride and a hope for the future. Although agrarian reform came first on the nation's docket, there were other reforms to help man improve his lot. The ejidal bank aided the farmer by loaning him money for his plow, seeds, fertilizer, harvesting tools, oxen, mules, tractors.

By 1960, the last of the largest haciendas had been abolished: the Greene Cananea Ranch and the Hacienda Atotonilco had become agrarian property--millions of acres had returned to the people.

Mexico had become a Spanish-speaking nation. Out of a population of forty million people, only two million were now unable to speak Spanish. By 1960, a school teacher earned 36,000 pesos a year, instead of 400 pesos annually at an hacienda.

By the 1970s, about 70 percent of the children were attending primary grades, while at the turn of the century, in pre-revolutionary decades, scarcely 10 percent acquired an elementary education. By 1980, rural schools provided at least two grades, and cities offered the primary cycle through the sixth year. Ideally, a child can now attend school at five years of age, learn through six years of primary, three years of secondary, two years of preparatory, followed by three to seven years at the university level.

Article 3 of the new constitution prescribes that education, whether in national, state, or municipal institutions, should develop all the faculties, encourage patriotism and an awareness of international solidarity, shun religious dogma, advance science, and oppose fanaticism and slavery.

This progress was based on a past that combined two distinct traditions. Mexico's pre-Columbian culture had mastered concepts of intellectual and practical value, had a knowledge of astronomy, a number system, metropolitan and temple architecture, and made advances in writing, surgery and medical skills, sculpture and mural art, irrigation, and the construction of a system of highways.

The other tradition was based on the methods and knowledge that the sixteenth-century Iberian brought Mexico: the wheel, sophisticated tools, steel, industrial know-how, marine architecture, navigational skills, and gunpowder. But the Conquistadors also destroyed much. Although many of the pre-Columbian societies were warlike, the Monte Albán temples in the state of Oaxaca appear to represent a local culture that had fostered peace for some fifteen hundred years. The Iberian invaders were not familiar with such ancient traditions and often failed to appreciate their values. They destroyed towns and cities, burned books, disrupted the ecology, spread disease, and diminished the arts, crafts, and culture of the new world.

It was not until the twentieth century that Mexico came to the forefront internationally. Respect for the country grew as Mexico undertook to restore its pre-Columbian sites, assembled comprehensive anthropological collections, and established a University City and a dynamic, original metropolitan architecture. Famous artists contributed to this period of awakened cultural awareness: Roberto Montenegro, Covarrubias, Orozco, Rivera, O'Higgins, Tamayo, and Siqueiros. A folkloric ballet, a national symphony, and entertainers like Conchita Cintrón, Dolores del Río, and Cantinflas broadened the cultural landscape.

Among contemporary writers, Luis Spota, Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Galino, Luisa Hernández, Augustín Yañez, Octavio Paz, and Antonio Haas have interpreted Mexico for a large public. Leopoldo Zea and Ramón Xirau have added to Mexico's philosophical thought. Silvio Zavala has contributed to Mexican history.

The radio and television media are following American footsteps--eager to keep pace. There is no hacienda nostalgia in Mexico--only frenetic pressure for industrialization and overall capitalism. Most renowned haciendas are only memories: they are _cascos_, _recuerdos_.

The 1529 Hacienda San Gabriel de Las Palmas, in Morelos, has become an American luxury residence; other mansions house millionaires; still others have become motels, dairies, factories, schools, posh restaurants, subdivisions with an hacienda office. But hundreds of hacienda homes have been totally abandoned. They are piles of rubble--no more than place-names.

In the struggle to eliminate the hacienda system, more than eight hundred thousand men, women, and children died.

Forces that held together a dubious past seek to achieve an enlightened future. Education continues to enrich more and more lives. Mexico's present-day inflation and political corruption have halted the country's advance, but these unfortunate conditions cannot last.

+Bibliography+

+General Works+

Ajofrín, Francisco de, _Diario del Viaje en el Siglo XVIII_ (Madrid, 1958).

Beals, Carleton, _Mexican Maze_ (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951).

Brenner, Anita, _The Wind that Swept Mexico_ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943).

Butler, William, _Mexico in Transition_ (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1892).

Chase, Stuart, _Mexico, A Study of Two Americas_ (New York: Macmillan, 1931).

Chevalier, Francis, _Land and Society in Colonial Mexico_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

Cline, Howard F., _Mexico, Revolution to Evolution, 1940-1960_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

Crow, John A., _The Epic of Latin America_ (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1946).

Ewing, Russell, _Six Faces of Mexico_ (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966).

Gage, Thomas, _A New Survey of the West Indies_ (New York: Broadway Travellers, 1929).

Gruening, Ernest, _Mexico and its Heritage_ (New York: Appleton Century, 1928).

Haring, Clarence H., _The Spanish Empire in America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).

Jones, Oakah, _Santa Anna_ (New York: Twayne, 1968).

Kubler, George, _Mexican Architecture in the Sixteenth Century_ (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972).

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, _Brevíssima Relación de la Destruction de las Indias_, trans. H. Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, 1974; originally published, 1552).

Leonard, Irving A., _Colonial Travelers in Latin America_ (New York: Knopf, 1972).

Lewis, Oscar, _Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963).

McHenry, J. Patrick, _A Short History of Mexico_ (New York: Doubleday, 1962).

Madariaga, Salvador de, _The Rise of the Spanish American Empire_ (New York: Free Press, 1965).

Mansfield, Edward D., _The Mexican War_ (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1849).

Mayer, Brantz, _Mexico As It Was and As It Is_ (Hartford, Conn.: S. Drake, 1853).

Meyer, Michael C., and Sherman, William, _The Course of Mexican History_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Miller, Robert, _Mexico: A History_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

Ober, Frederick A., _Travels in Mexico_ (San Francisco, 1884).

Parkes, Henry Banford, _A History of Mexico_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

Prescott, W. H., _The Conquest of Mexico_ (New York: Henry Holt, 1922).

Redfield, Robert, _Tepotzlán--A Mexican Village_ (Chicago, 1930).

Reed, John, _Insurgent Mexico_ (New York: International Publishers, 1970).

---- _I Saw the World Burn_ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

Roeder, Ralph, _Juárez and His Mexico_ (New York: Viking, 1947).

Scholes, W. V., _The Diego Ramírez Visita_ (Columbia, Mo., 1946).

Simpson, L. B., _The Encomienda in New Spain_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H., _The Colonial Heritage of Latin America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Strode, Hudson, _Timeless Mexico_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).

Tannenbaum, Frank, _The Mexican Agrarian Revolution_ (New York: Macmillan, 1929).

---- _Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread_ (New York: Knopf, 1951).

Townsend, William C., _Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexican Democrat_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: G. Wahr Publishing Co., 1952).

Whetten, Nathan L., _Rural Mexico_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

Womach, John, _Zapata and the Mexican Revolution_ (New York: Knopf, 1969).

Zavala, Silvio, _De Encomiendas y Propiedad Territorial en Algunas Regiones de la América Española_ (Mexico, 1940).

---- _El Mundo Americano en la Época Colonial_ (Mexico, 1967).

---- _New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America_ (London, 1943).

Zorita, Alfonso de, _Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico_ (New Brunswick, 1963).

+Works on the Haciendas of Mexico+

Bartlett, Paul Alexander, "Haciendas," with photographs by the author, _Mexico This Month_, Vol. IV, No. 12, December 1958, pp. 16-21.

---- "Haciendas of Mexico," with illustrations by the author, _Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly_, Vol. 1, Nos. 3/4, 1962-1963, pp. 18-23.

---- "The Hacienda Mansion," with illustrations by the author, _Mexican Life_, Vol. 4, No. 46, 1970.

---- "La Vida en una Hacienda," with Illustrations by the author, _Américas_ (Organization of American States), Vol. 34, No. 3, May-June 1982, pp. 12-17.

Bazant S., Jan, _Cinco Haciendas Mexicanas: Tres Siglos de Vida Rural en San Luis Potosí, 1600-1910_ (Mexico, D.F.: Colegio de Mexico, 1980).

Bellengeri, Marco, _Las Haciendas en Mexico: El Caso de San Antonio Tochatlaco_ (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1980).