Emiliano Zapata | Encyclopedia.com (2024)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leader of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, Emiliano Zapata was born on August 8, 1879, in Anencuilco in the southern state of Morelos and died in an ambush on April 10, 1919. Zapata was the revolutions leading advocate of agrarian issues and one of Mexicos most renowned and mythological heroes. The iconic image of Zapata dressed in a broad sombrero with a black mustache and cartridge belts across his chest appears commonly across Mexico. Contemporaries and subsequent scholars have alternatively interpreted Zapata as a bandit or a social revolutionary. The division between rural supporters who viewed Zapata as their champion and urban dwellers who denounced him as the Attila of the South points to persistent social divisions that run through the country.

The Zapata family had long been privileged leaders of their community, but under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz they had begun to lose their lands and their class status eroded. Recognizing Zapatas organizing skills, his community elected him to a leadership position in 1909. When legal negotiations for land titles with landowners collapsed, Zapata led community members to occupy haciendas. He had become an armed revolutionary, and his followers were known as Zapatistas.

Zapata initially joined forces with Francisco Madero, who launched a revolution against Díaz in 1910. When Madero disposed the dictator in 1911, Zapata asked the new president to return communal lands. Madero, however, insisted on following institutional procedures and demanded that Zapatas Liberation Army of the South disarm. Zapata refused, arguing that they could gain their goals only through the pressure of armed force. This led Zapata to break from Madero and demand more radical reforms. On November 25, 1911, Zapata issued his Plan of Ayala (named after his local municipality), which denounced Madero as a tyrant and dictator worse than Díaz unwilling to make the necessary deep-seated changes that the revolutionaries demanded. Zapata called for a continued revolution to overthrow Madero.

The Plan of Ayalas most important thrust was a demand for agrarian reform, including a return of communal lands and expropriation of hacienda landswithout payment if the owners refused to accept the plan. The plan led to Zapatas most famous slogan Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty), which was borrowed from and reflected the ideological influence of the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Over the next decade the plan became the guiding principle for Zapatas forces.

In February 1913, when General Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero in a military coup, Zapata allied with Venustiano Carranzas Constitutionalist Army to defeat the new dictator. After Huertas disposal, Zapata unified forces with Pancho Villa at a convention in Aguascalientes to continue the battle against the more moderate Carranza. Together, Zapata and Villa occupied Mexico City. Zapata, however, was more interested in local issues in Morelos than governing the country. His alliance with Villa quickly broke down, and Carranza recaptured the capital. Carranza convoked a constitutional assembly that elected him president. Even though he did not invite Zapata to the assembly, the latters Plan of Ayala influenced Article 27 of the progressive 1917 constitution that codified an agrarian reform program. No significant distribution of land occurred, however, until Lázaro Cárdenass populist government in the 1930s.

Zapata fought on despite overwhelming odds. With his prospects for victory declining and desperately short of weapons, Zapata was lured into an ambush on April 10, 1919, at the Chinameca hacienda in Morelos. Revealing their fear of Zapatas leadership and symbolism, government troops riddled his body with bullets and then dumped his corpse in Cuautlas town square. Supporters refused to accept Zapatas death, claiming that someone else had taken his place and that he had escaped to the mountains. With Zapata gone, the Liberation Army of the South began to fall apart.

After his martyrdom Zapata was incorporated into the pantheon of Mexican revolutionary leaders, even though he most certainly would oppose the policies of many subsequent political leaders. Although over the years Zapatas name was invoked for a variety of political causes, his name and image gained renewed interest in 1994 with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) uprising in Chiapas. Although Chiapas was isolated from the Mexican Revolution and Zapata never organized in that area, the neo-Zapatistas fought for many of the same issues that their namesake had almost a century earlier. Paralleling the situation in Morelos, indigenous communities in Chiapas had lost their lands to large landowners and faced a corrupt and repressive regime with a political stranglehold on local communities. Zapatas slogan Land and Liberty summarized their ongoing struggle and pointed to how few of Zapatas dreams had been realized.

SEE ALSO Chiapas; Mexican Revolution (19101920); Villa, Francisco (Pancho)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brunk, Samuel. 1995. Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

McLynn, Frank. 2001. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Carroll and Graf.

Womack, John, Jr. 1968. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Knopf.

Marc Becker

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

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views updated May 11 2018

Emiliano Zapata (ca. 1879-1919), Mexican agrarian leader and guerrilla fighter, was the symbol of the agrarian revolution.

Emiliano Zapata was born in Anenecuilco, Morelos, to a landless, but not poor, family which dealt in livestock. Orphaned at 16, he sharecropped and traded horses in his birth-place. During the closing years of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship Zapata took part in local opposition politics, with a 6-month interruption while he served as a soldier.

In September 1909 Zapata was elected president of the group in Anenecuilco designated to reclaim the community's ejidal lands. He backed the unsuccessful opposition gubernatorial candidacy of Patricio Leyva. In March 1911, after several months of contact with the maderistas, Zapata joined the rebellion against Diaz. The major effort of the zapatistas was an attack on Cuautla.

With the fall of the Diaz regime Zapata initiated his recurring demands—land for the peasants, removal of federal troops from Morelos, and designation of an acceptable commander of state forces. The efforts of the interim De la Barra regime, endorsed by Francisco Madero, to discharge the revolutionary forces irritated Zapata, who became incensed when during the Madero's pacification efforts Francisco de la Barra ordered Victoriano Huerta to march into Morelos in August 1911.

Zapata's view of revolutionary goals was quite parochial, and he was unwilling to await patiently the results of Madero's dreamed-of democratic processes to effect land reform. Nineteen days after Madero assumed the presidency, Zapata revolted under the Plan of Ayala. Waging guerrilla warfare, as he had before and would again, Zapata began distribution of ejidal lands in Puebla in April 1912 and followed with other distributions in Morelos and Tlaxcala. Agricultural students were employed in the formation of agrarian commissions. Program and strategy for the moustached and almost illiterate Zapata were formulated by a group of intellectuals, including Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama and schoolteacher Otilio Montaño.

After Madero's death, Zapata joined with Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza in an uneasy alliance to defeat Huerta. However, it was the carrancistas who occupied Mexico City, and the First Chief (Carranza) sought to control the situation through the Convention of Generals. Villista and zapatista opposition forced removal of the gathering to Aguascalientes, where the representatives of Zapata had the first public and national hearing of their cause.

The Plan of Ayala was accepted in principle, and the convention government was established, resting on the armed support of Villa and Zapata. Their joint armies occupied the Mexican capital in December 1914. However, cooperation in subsequent military operations was another matter. As Álvaro Obregón led his Constitutionalist army back toward Mexico City, Villa withdrew to the north and Zapata turned back southward into Morelos.

From 1915 on Zapata waged defensive guerrilla warfare against the Constitutionalist. Forces under Gen. Pablo González sought, as others before, to wipe out the zapatistas without success. Finally, González sent Col. Jesús Guajardo to trick Zapata into receiving him as an ally. Zapata was ambushed and killed at Chinameca on April 10, 1919. However, there were those who insisted that he was not dead, that he had been seen riding his horse in the sierra watching out for his peasants. A little more than a year later the demands of the zapatistas were being met by the Obregón government.

Further Reading

The excellent, scholarly work by John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1969), catches the essence of Zapata and the spirit of zapatismo. Edgecumb Pinchon, Zapata: The Unconquerable (1941), is a romanticized study, and H. H. Dunn, The Crimson Jester: Zapata of Mexico (1933), is a more sketchy and less sympathetic account. Ronald Atkin's competent review of the factors that contributed to the uprising, Revolution: Mexico, 1910-20 (1970), contains a good portrait of Zapata and of other major figures of the time. Robert P. Millon, Zapata: The Ideology of a Peasant Revolutionary (1969), is a Marxist interpretation. Also useful are Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (1929), and Eyler N. Simpson, The Ejido (1937). □

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Zapata, Emiliano (1880–1919) Mexican revolutionary leader. His Indian peasant army supported Francisco Madero's successful coup (1910) against Porfirio Díaz. Madero's failure to meet his demands for radical agrarian reform, such as the return of haciendas (great estates) to native Mexican communal ownership, led to the Mexican Revolution. In pursuit of “land and liberty’, Zapata captured much of s Mexico. Allied with ‘Pancho’ Villa, he opposed the regimes of Victoriano Huerta and Venustiano Carranza and captured Mexico City (1914–15). Zapata was murdered by an agent of Carranza.

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Emiliano Zapata | Encyclopedia.com (2024)

FAQs

Emiliano Zapata | Encyclopedia.com? ›

Leader of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, Emiliano Zapata was born on August 8, 1879, in Anencuilco in the southern state of Morelos and died in an ambush on April 10, 1919. Zapata was the revolution's leading advocate of agrarian issues and one of Mexico's most renowned and mythological heroes.

Why is Emiliano Zapata a hero? ›

Emiliano Zapata was an accomplished guerrilla leader during the Mexican Revolution, and he strongly opposed the hacienda system that characterized much of rural Mexican life. Partly because of his efforts, fundamental land reform was enshrined in the Mexican constitution of 1917.

What is Emiliano Zapata famous for? ›

As a revolutionary, he commanded the Liberation Army of the South, an important brigade on a mission to force the Mexican government to return lands taken by the elite ruling class to local peoples. Zapata was known as an unrepentant champion of equality for the poor.

Did Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata get along? ›

Emiliano Zapata and Villa became formal allies in this period.

What was Emiliano Zapata main goal? ›

Zapata's main goal was the political and economic emancipation of Mexico's peasantry. Land reform was not an end in itself but a means to achieve this popular independence.

How did Pancho Villa get assassinated? ›

After the overthrow of Carranza's government in 1920, Villa was granted a pardon and a ranch near Parral (now Hidalgo del Parral), Chihuahua, in return for agreeing to retire from politics. Three years later he was assassinated amid a barrage of gunfire while traveling home in his car from a visit to Parral.

How many wives did Zapata have? ›

After various attempts on his life, Zapata began sending a double to public events. 2. Zapata is believed to have had nine wives, 16 children and 42 grandsons. Other historians say he had 15 wives throughout his life.

How many languages did Emiliano Zapata speak? ›

The Zapata family were mestizos--a mix of Nahua and Spanish. Emiliano grew up speaking both languages fluently. He was the 9th of 10 children and, as you can see above, was shorter and darker than his brother Eufemio. His education was limited, although it was probably superior to that of many of his contemporaries.

How was Carranza assassinated? ›

Answer and Explanation: Rodolfo Herrero is the man most responsible for Carranza's death. Herrero was a general and first rebelled against Carranza, and then in early 1920 turned coat in exchange for remaining a general. Just a few months later he escorted Carranza and then had him assassinated with his troops.

Who won the Mexican Revolution? ›

The northern Constitutionalist faction prevailed on the battlefield and drafted the present-day Constitution of Mexico, which aimed to create a strong central government. Revolutionary generals held power from 1920 to 1940.

Who did Emiliano Zapata ally with? ›

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata agreed to ally with the Conventionists against former senator Venustiano Carranza, known as the First Chief, and his general Álvaro Obregón.

Who defeated Pancho Villa? ›

Following his costly defeat in a series of battles with the forces of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza commanded by the capable General Alvaro Obregon, the influence of the once mighty Villa had waned.

What race was Emiliano Zapata? ›

Emiliano Zapata, (born Aug. 8, 1879, Anenecuilco, Mex. —died April 10, 1919, Morelos), Mexican revolutionary and champion of the rural poor. A mestizo peasant, he was orphaned at age 17 and took responsibility for his brothers and sisters.

How tall was Pancho Villa? ›

Villa, who stood only 5 feet and 1 inch (154 cm) tall and never weighed more than 114 pounds (51 kg), despite the racial discrimination of that time, rose from obscurity to become the first Asian to win the World Flyweight Championship in 1923, earning the reputation in some quarters as one of the greatest Flyweight ...

Where is Pancho Villa buried? ›

Where is Zapata buried? ›

He was buried in the Cuautla Municipal Pantheon. With Gregoria Zúñiga Benítez, he had María Luisa Zapata Zúñiga, born in Quilamula, Morelos, on June 21, 1916, and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving no descendants.

Biography of Emiliano Zapata, Mexican ...ThoughtCohttps://www.thoughtco.com ›

Emiliano Zapata was the greatest idealist of the Mexican Revolution. He led a rebel army and championed land reform until he was assassinated.

Emiliano Zapata

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Emiliano Zapata was born in Anenecuilco, in the Mexican state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City. It was in this region that Zapata would spend his life. His...
8, 1879, in Anenecuilco, Mexico and died on April 10, 1919, in the state of Morelos, Mexico. He was a Mexican revolutionary, champion of agrarianism, and fought...

How is Emiliano Zapata remembered? ›

In the long run, he has done more for his ideals in death than he did in life. He came to be viewed as a martyr to the cause of land reform after his murder. Even though Mexico still has not implemented the sort of land reform he wanted, he is remembered as a visionary who fought for his countrymen.

Why is Emiliano Zapata important in Mexican political history quizlet? ›

Emiliano Zapata was a leader of the Mexican Revolution; he organized an army to fight for land reform and the return of lands that had been taken from the peasants in the south. The Zapatistas were Zapata's army who fought opposing rebel groups and local landowners.

What motivated Zapata? ›

Marxists want to claim Zapata as their own but the historical evidence is that in no way can he be construed as being a Marxist. He was a farmer and an entrepreneur who was driven to rebellion in defense of propery rights and in defense against central government oppression.

Who was Emiliano Zapata fighting against? ›

After the revolution began in 1910, he raised an army of peasants in the southern state of Morelos under the slogan “Land and Liberty.” Demanding simple agrarian reforms, Zapata and his guerrilla farmers opposed the central Mexican government under Francisco Madero, later under Victoriano Huerta, and finally under ...

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