REVIEW ESSAY

The Mythistory of Emiliano Zapata

William Schell, Jr.

Samuel Brunk. The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century. Austin: Univer-sity of Texas Press, 2008. pp. ix + 353.

“Zapata dies at every popular fair.” Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude.

S AMUEL BRUNK HAS WRITTEN one of those rare scholarly mono-graphs whose title—The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Za-

pata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century—perfectly de-scribes the enterprise. In one volume, handy for classroom use, he has reworked and synthesized a lifetime of previously published re-search. Those acquainted with Brunk’s work will recognize his fa-miliar themes—Zapata’s life and death, the post-mortem emergence of multiple Zapata myths, and the manipulation of those myths and the creation of Zapata cults by local and regional actors to serve their own ends. As Zapata cults proliferated, they became a source of po-litical legitimacy for a string of tri-letter parties that congealed around remnants of the old regime, culminating in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which found it useful to “mak[e] Zapata official.”(88-118) Lázaro Cárdenas employed the official Za-pata to legitimate a state-directed iteration of ejido land reform

William Schell, Jr., “The Mythohistory of Emiliano Zapata,” Journal of Historical Biography 9 (Spring 2011): 69-76, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2011. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

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which, unlike Zapata’s vision of private peasant landholding, “en-hance[d] the power of the central government in the countryside … by attaching both political and economic strings to that land.”(226) However, as the PRI turned toward state capitalism in the latter twen-tieth century, even that was taken away. In 1992, citing the potential benefits of globalism, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, simultaneously ending pro-tection of the ejido, cynically stating that it was time to “emphasize the liberty side of [Zapata’s] ‘Land and Liberty’ equation.”(226) Thus, in an almost cinematic arch, just as the PRI cast off its revolu-tionary mask to reveal its neo-liberal, neo-Porfirian persona, a revo-lution erupted in Chiapas led by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), whose university-trained non-leaders fashioned its own Zapata, a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl-Votán intended to appeal to indigenous followers.(230) Brunk’s introduction sets the theoretical underpinning of his work, but he rarely refers to it directly thereafter. Rather, it remains in the background, informing his exploration of  Zapata’s multifac-eted mythology. Brunk traces how Zapata’s myth became part of modern Mexico’s national myth, which he sees as a post-Independence blending of Mesoamerican and Hispanic elements, personified by President Benito Juárez, that reached its apogee under the modernizing regime of Porfirio Díaz. After the 1910 revolution swept Díaz aside, the new state preserved the Porfirian national pan-theon (minus Díaz), and added to it, expediently pairing Zapata with his nemesis Francisco Madero and with his ally Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Brunk then surveys the historiography of Zapata’s myth. He reviews the work of Ilene O’Malley and Thomas Benjamin, and faults both for not considering the influence of the popular classes in shaping Zapata’s myth and for overemphasizing the role of the state. He praises Lynn Stephen for broadening the “geographical range” of Zapata’s myth, and commends Claudio Lomnitz for demonstrating “how Zapata’s image … both greased the wheels of the political sys-tem (sic) and supported dissent.” Brunk then describes his own con-

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tribution as being “unlike any of the works mentioned” in that he “considers a wide variety of primary sources … [to] detail the course of revolutionary myth … taking the long view … [in order to] answer one of the fundamental questions about the revolution that scholars have not yet fully resolved.”(13-14)

Brunk uses Zapata’s myth as a vehicle to address methodo-logical and theoretical questions arising from a debate generated by Alan Knight’s thesis that the Mexican Revolution “was fundamen-tally a popular peasant rebellion.”(14-15) If Knight is correct, asks Brunk, then “why exactly were peasants and other groups willing to be demobilized, to accept the promises and pronouncements, to make the concessions and trade-offs?” (16) To address the methodological and theoretical questions that Knight’s work raises about the “the de-gree and nature of the state’s legitimacy across twentieth-century Mexican history,” Brunk constructs a dialogue between Knight and his critics, Florencia Mallon, Claudio Lomnitz, Mary Kay Vaughan and other  practitioners of New Cultural History.(18) NCH emerged as a coherent school  following the 1997 Conference on Latin Ameri-can History panel “Trends and Transformation in Mexican History: Reflections on the New Cultural History” (with Mary Kay Vaughan, William French, Eric Van Young, and adversarial comment by Steve Haber). My H-LATAM post of 8 January 1997 summarizing the panel generated a great many substantive responses which antici-pated not only the questions raised by Brunk but also those raised earlier in a special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review devoted to that panel, which Brunk inexplicably fails to cite, given its relevance to his enterprise.1 But, as Brunk reminds us, Zapata’s myths were complex and multivariate, and his place in Mexico’s revolutionary pantheon was not always secure: “During his lifetime there was no guarantee that Zapata would achieve lasting heroic stature, even in his home state; it was the nature and timing of his death that … provided the condi-

 1 “¿Una Lucha Libre?: Mexico’s New Cultural History,” Hispanic American

Historical Review 79:2 (May 1999).

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tions in which his myth could grow and spread from its regional roots” to the nation.(58) Zapata’s myth had its roots in uncertainty as to his death. Had he really been killed at Chinameca? His followers were divided, and even came to blows over the issue. Those who be-lieve he lived cited various reasons, which Brunk lists—the corpse lacked a mole, a birthmark, or facial scar, or the corpse was not miss-ing a finger that Zapata had lost in a roping accident. Brunk’s list seems to derive from John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revo-lution.2 Womack seems to have taken it from—no one; he doesn’t cite a source. One thing is certain: two of the identifying marks said to be absent—the facial scar and the missing finger—may be ruled out, as no photograph of Zapata shows either. Perhaps proof of the legend’s influence (if not of the legend itself) is that Zapata’s son Nicolas consistently maintained it was not his father who was killed at Chinameca but “some pendejo [dumb-ass] from Tepoztlan.”(53)

The state’s subsequent “forging [of] a national Zapata” was as much a cultural project as a political one; indeed it is impossible to disentangle the two. The great strength of Posthumous Career is Brunk’s weaving of his evidence, an eclectic combination of official accounts, memorias, corridos, broad sheets, oral histories, and film, to create a multi-dimensional view of a complex man who in death generated an even more complex aggrupation of often-contradictory myths. Brunk is careful to show that the outcome was not always cer-tain, for Zapata’s memory was contested on many levels and for many reasons. Not a few revolutionaries saw him as “a remarkably bloodthirsty individual”—a view found in corridos and popular broad sheets.(63) Zapata’s nemesis, Pablo González, usually identi-fied as a reactionary, vilified him in speeches, tracts, and books. An-other was suffragette Hermila Galindo, who associated herself politi-cally with González because she saw Zapata and his movement as “patriarchal and macho,” overlooking Zapatista women like Col. Rosa Bobadilla, who rose to command troops and had a voice in

 2 John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage,

1970), 300.

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council.(129-130) In the end, however, for reasons of state, the emerging ruling party embraced the pro-Zapata myth. This was due in no small measure to the efforts of the muralist Diego Rivera.

Rivera, an active Communist of privileged birth, saw Zapata as that “rare leader who authentically represented the people,” and he systematically used his art to shape both popular memory of Zapata and the ideology of Mexico’s revolutionary state.(60, 80-83) Rivera did five Zapata frescos. The best known is a reworking of a small scene taken from his immense fresco Historia de Morelos, Conquista y Revolución “commission[ed by] U.S. ambassador Dwight Morrow” to cover the walls of Cuernavaca’s Palacio de Cortes.”(60-61) In the reworking, entitled Revolutionary Hero, an indigenized Zapata, clad in calzones (campesino field clothes) stands with his left foot on the sword of a dead hacienda overseer, a sickle in his right hand (invok-ing the Bolshevik as well as the Mexican revolution?), his left hand holding his hero’s prize, the white stallion of his defeated enemy. It is important to note that it was Rivera who gave Zapata the iconic white stallion he never had; no photograph or film shows Zapata with a white mount.3 Rivera’s art helped the state “make Zapata official” by the “routinization and institutionalization of [his] charisma—memories selected, crystallized, linked to the state—making Zapata a sturdier bridge between politicians and peasants.” Yet even as the state sought to forge “a modern Zapata for a golden age… certain tensions would persist” in the struggle over Zapata’s memory and mean-ing.(117) Brunk explores these tensions in an insightful discussion of Jesús Sotelo Inclán’s Raiz y razon de Zapata (1943) in which Inclán sought to provide a “dispassionate” “impartial” evaluation of the de-bate surrounding Zapata.(119) As the revolution institutionalized it-self, the rhetoric of Zapata-day speeches by PRI officials took on in-creasingly neo-Porfirian overtones that stressed “Order … discipline and respect.”(127) The deception worked because, as Brunk ob-

 3 William Schell, Jr. “Emiliano Zapata and the Old Regime: Myth, Memory, and

Method,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 25:2 (Summer 2009): 327-65.

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serves, the PRI’s lip-service to Zapata “did not have to convince eve-ryone at all times… it had only to foster a kind of cognitive disso-nance …through the association of Zapata … with progress.” Still, “many Mexicans were unwilling to cede Zapata to the ruling party … even if they did not yet know what, precisely, they might do with him themselves.”(150-151)

Indeed, the process of making Zapata official set off rivalry among municipalities who claimed Zapata—Cuautla, Chinameca, Tlaltizapán and Anenecuilco—over which should be his final resting place. Although Zapata had been buried in Cuautla  in 1939, “many felt that Chinameca had a right to such a national … memorial [espe-cially] … given the importance of death to Zapata’s cult.”(153) Other municipalities also made their cases based upon their association with the hero, but ultimately Zapata’s body remained in Cuautla, where a new “towering statue” was erected depicting him as “a latter-day Moses … dominating, intimidating, godlike.”(217) And as Za-pata’s statues became ever larger, the PRI state became increasingly market-oriented, a shift that would open political space for the EZLN’s eventual reinvention of Zapata as Quetzalcoatl-Votán. I want to be clear: Brunk’s discussion of Zapata’s mythology is perhaps the most thorough and insightful to be found. In my opin-ion, the only real problem with his otherwise excellent book is that his analysis of Zapata’s mythology is not grounded in an accurate ac-count of the roots of the revolt. Rather, Brunk’s historical back-ground of the origin of Zapata’s rebellion replays the accepted myth, which overlooks Zapata’s privileged relationship with the old re-gime.4 This is not entirely Brunk’s fault, for what he presents is rooted in what is considered to be the definitive account of the man and his movement, John Womack’s masterpiece Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. What Brunk does not recognize, despite his ex-tensive discussion of it, is the degree to which Elia Kazan and John

 4 I describe this relationship in Schell, “Myth, Memory, and Method,” 348-358.

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Steinbeck’s film, Viva Zapata, which Womack found “subtle, power-ful and true,” influenced his history.5 

Womack’s Zapata may be the most cited work of Mexican history. This is not hyperbolae. The index of Knight’s highly re-garded synthesis of popular and revisionist historiography lists thirty-seven pages under “Zapata, Emiliano.” Womack is cited fifty-six times on twenty-three of them. Not infrequently when Knight cites other accounts of Zapata’s rebellion, Arturo Warman’s for example, Womack is the underlying source. In effect, when Brunk praises Knight, as he has elsewhere, for “put[ting] Zapatismo back into the context of the larger uprising as ‘a genuinely popular movement’” he praises Womack indirectly.6 Similarly, when Knight asserts that Za-patismo “might be extended to cover a legion of peasant revolution-aries,” it is essentially Womack’s description of the movement to which he refers. 7 Thus, Womack’s influence on scholarly (mis)understanding of the Porfirian origins  of Zapata’s movement has been profound. In his chapter “The Planters Progress,” Womack details a spe-cial relationship between Zapata and Diaz’s son-in-law, Ignacio (Na-cho) de la Torre y Mier. The exact nature of the relationship is un-clear, but polemicist Pablo González—hardly a disinterested party—called Nacho “amo de Zapata” [master of Zapata].8 It was Nacho who arranged for Zapata to be released from military service to man-age his stables temporarily. When Zapata’s service ended, he led eighty armed men to take possession of Anenecuilco village lands claimed by Hacienda Hospital. The managers of Hacienda Hospital did nothing, no doubt expecting Porfirian authorities to uphold their claims as before. Instead came two rapid rulings in favour of the vil-lage, the second by Díaz himself. From that point, Zapata enjoyed a  5 Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 127-128. 6 Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albu-

querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 237. 7 Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, Porfirians, Liberals, and Pea-

sants (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 619. 8 Schell, “Myth, Memory, and Method,” 350. 

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de facto alliance with the local jefes. When one jefe was reassigned, Zapata hosted a farewell fiesta and befriended his successor. In short, Zapata began his land reform with the permission of the Diaz regime and its agents. With the beginning of Madero’s revolt, Womack over-rules his own evidence to transform Zapata’s virtual alliance with the jefes into an anti-Díaz rebellion. In effect, Womack peers over the historical horizon to the inevitable Revolution, denying Zapata’s Por-firian consciousness and vesting him with the consciousness of a Revolution yet unformed. He commits the logical errors of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Womack’s errors are reproduced in almost every subsequent account of Zapata’s turn to revolution, including Brunk’s, something for which Brunk should not be faulted.

In the end it may be said that Brunk not only produced an ex-cellent and useful exploration of Zapata and his mythology, he pro-vided a literal textbook example of the  impact of myth upon the writ-ing of history. William McNeill famously addressed this issue in ac-cepting the presidency of the American Historical Association, when he dubbed our post-modern historical enterprise mythistory.9  While, as McNeill suggested, it may be impossible to create accurate histori-cal narratives, the pragmatic historian must act as if it were. In fash-ioning the intellectual constructs we call history, we must acknowl-edge the power of myth to shape our perceptions of the past, and deal forthrightly with it. That is what Brunk has done here and done well.

9 William H. McNeill, “Mythistory or Truth: Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1-10.