VI. The Revolution
Hacienda cattle brand
John Reed, an American journalist who covered the campaign of Pancho Villa, described in Insurgent Mexico the revolution at an hacienda in northern Mexico in 1913-1914:
We crept close to the line and when we were almost upon them we opened fire. There were three detachments and we pushed right into their encampment and set fire to their shelters. Their corn and beans were laid out on blankets to dry in the sun and we even destroyed that.
The Carrancistas fled from us and we chased them through very rough country. We believed we were winning, but man! It wasn't that way at all! We followed them without knowing where we were going. They stopped on the other side of a hill, at the entrance to Hacienda San Gregorio, and there a fourth detachment withstood us so we pulled back and joined our forces. There were five thousand of us but we were extended from San Gregorio to Topilejo. Our guides were local peasants and they sent General Chon and his men through the mountains. He was from Guerrero and he didn't know these mountains so they sent him to the worst peaks. His men were stopped but we weren't. We were sent along the side of the highway and General Teodor's men went on the highway because they were all on horseback. The Carrancistas had artillery but the shots passed over us because we lay down in the ditches....
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. MarÃa, 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 DÃaz policy. In place of DÃazism 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 PotosÃ, 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 DÃaz 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.