Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940-1962
288
Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940-1962
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Overview
The peasants known in popular memory as Jaramillistas were led by Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962). An agrarian leader from Morelos who participated in the Mexican Revolution and fought under Zapata, Jaramillo later became an outspoken defender of the rural poor. The Jaramillistas were inspired by the legacy of the Zapatistas, the peasant army that fought for land and community autonomy with particular tenacity during the Revolution. Padilla examines the way that the Jaramillistas used the legacy of Zapatismo but also transformed, expanded, and updated it in dialogue with other national and international political movements.
The Jaramillistas fought persistently through legal channels for access to land, the means to work it, and sustainable prices for their products, but the Mexican government increasingly closed its doors to rural reform. The government ultimately responded with repression, pushing the Jaramillistas into armed struggle, and transforming their calls for local reform into a broader critique of capitalism. With Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Padilla sheds new light on the decision to initiate armed struggle, women’s challenges to patriarchal norms, and the ways that campesinos framed their demands in relation to national and international political developments.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389354 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Tanalís Padilla is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College.
Read an Excerpt
Rural Resistance in the land of Zapata
THE JARAMILLISTA MOVEMENT AND THE MYTH OF THE PAX PRIÍSTA, 1940-1962By TANALÍS PADILLA
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2008 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4337-0
Chapter One
The Ghost of Zapata
In 1979 President José López Portillo (1976-82) attempted to move Zapata's remains from Cuautla, Morelos, to the mausoleum of the revolution in Mexico City. There Zapata's body was to lie alongside that of Venustiano Carranza, the general who ordered him killed. Morelenses, especially campesinos, insulted by the very idea, organized protests in which they stood guard day and night at Zapata's tomb. Zapatista and Jaramillista veterans were among the most visible participants. Longino Rojas, for example, declared, "Not now, not ever will they take [his] remains to Mexico City. They want to take away our only treasure, the symbol of the countryside, and forever bury agrarian reform." It was enough that the state had appropriated his image and staged official ceremonies to a hero whose ideals it consistently betrayed, but, continued Rojas, "To take him to Mexico City? Carranza defended the millionaires, the hacendados, that's why the fought against Zapata." The public outcry ultimately prevented the president from carrying out his plans.
Such challenges are an important manifestation of Zapata's living legacy. Fifty years after the government initiated the appropriation of the agrarian leader's image, campesinos throughout Mexico still operated with the historical memory of the significance of Zapata's battle and were not willing to let the government take their patrimony. Across Mexico, campesinos would challenge the government in Zapata's name, an example of the limits in the government's mystification of the revolution. This legacy was especially significant in the case of the Jaramillistas, given the number of Zapatistas who participated in the movement and the fact that the struggle unfolded in Zapata's homeland. In fact, one of the most significant elements of the Jaramillista movement was the way in which the Zapatista legacy shaped the modalities of the later struggle. When Jaramillistas relate the history of their movement, Zapata appears time and again as a legitimizing framework. Also present, however, is a continuous appeal to Mexican law, a link Jaramillistas made based on their understanding that the Zapatista struggle had bequeathed to them certain constitutional rights. In this sense, the battle waged by the Jaramillistas was a continuing strand of the tensions and contradictions set forth by the revolutionary compromise. This compromise, Alan Knight notes, "was ambivalent and unstable; yet it was at least grounded on the broad shared assumption that a revolutionary regime was in power committed to a variety of reforms." Popular sectors still had to mobilize to achieve these reforms, and in the countryside they would do so in Zapata's name. As Jaramillo and his followers hearkened back to the Zapatistas, they both drew legitimacy from that struggle and nourished its legacy.
Jaramillo's early life, ideals, and leadership qualities took shape in a state alive with the memory of the Zapatista struggle. The territory that today comprises Morelos had long been a political hotbed. Its population played a significant role in the major insurgencies of the nineteenth century, including the independence movement (1810-21), the War of the Reform (1858-60), and the national fight to oust the French emperor Maximilian that finally succeeded in 1867. But it was during the revolution that Morelenses waged the most remarkable and strong-willed battle, one centered around agrarian reform and local self-governance. The Zapatistas held these two interrelated ideals to be sacred and fought for their implementation-first against the Díaz regime, then against Francisco Madero, who only sought limited reform in his fight against the dictatorship, and eventually against the Constitutionalists-the northern hacendados who led the triumphant faction of the revolution. As the Zapatistas waged a war against better equipped outside armies, redistributed land, and ousted the local elite, their forces and support base acquired a regional cohesion unequaled in other parts of the nation. Even though the Zapatistas were defeated, this experience had a long-lasting effect on regional identity, and campesino ideals of community, later reinforced through memory, ritual, and myths, were passed on to future generations. The spirit of Zapata was kept alive in religious festivals, community rituals, and in the many legends that described how he had not actually been killed at Chinameca, but instead continued to ride through the countryside watching over campesinos. To do away with these myths, acknowledged news accounts of the time, would require the elimination of the injustices that had produced Zapata. Indeed, the power of Zapata's enduring legacy is best understood through an exploration of Morelos's history and the rebellion he led.
Morelos: A History of Resistance
Located just south of Mexico City, the state of Morelos was constituted in 1869, taking its name from independence leader José Maria Morelos y Pavón. Although it is a small state, Morelos is geographically diverse. To the north, the forested Sierra del Ajusco provides a natural border between Morelos and the Valley of Mexico. Towering at 17,883 feet, the Popocatéptl volcano exerts an imposing presence throughout the northeastern part of the state, the region known as tierra fria (cold land). The cool and heavy moisture keeps this area lush and green year round, and the pines, cypress, and cedar are more reminiscent of Mexico's colder regions than they are of the warm terrain for which Morelos is so well known. The mountainous northwest and northeast contours of the state descend quickly to the warm Cuernavaca and Yautepec valleys, where vineyards, vibrant bougainvilleas, and orchards begin to replace the forest. This is the most fertile area of the state, and aside from maize and fruit trees, tomatoes, onions, chile, squash, walnuts, and avocadoes also grow well here. The climate becomes increasingly arid as one travels south, towards the state's border with Guerrero, the region known as tierra caliente (hot land). The vegetation in this terrain is sparser, characterized mostly by shrubs and thorny scrub. The area's high temperatures cause rainwater to evaporate quickly, but the irrigated sugarcane, maize, and rice fields provide extensive green patches. This geography influenced hacienda-village settlement patterns, as large estates imposed a solid control over lowland population, incorporating them in the sugar production process as dependent laborers and residents. Highland communities, on the other hand, were able to maintain a certain degree of autonomy, since even when they worked as hacienda laborers, they could still maintain small plots of land to cultivate products for subsistence or for sale in local markets.
Since the colonial period, Morelos had been one of the most important centers of sugar production in Mexico. The favorable climate, access to indigenous labor, and proximity to the Mexico City market all contributed to its formation and growth. Under the mandate of Hernán Cortés, the first refineries in Morelos were established in the sixteenth century, and their numbers expanded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sugar haciendas relied on seasonal indigenous labor and managed to coexist in relative peace with village communities until the eighteenth century, when these estates exerted increasing pressure on campesino land, water, and autonomy. As Morelos's hacendados diversified production and cultivated maize, indigo, and vegetables, they competed with villagers for both land and water. Hacendados argued that the social order was best served by having villagers reside as laborers on estates, a position that would be echoed after independence by Morelos's Liberals, who justified their economic privilege in social Darwinist terms.
In dispute with the local population, hacendados had a strong advantage in court, since the judges deciding their claims often owned large estates themselves. When silenced in court, communities frequently turned to acts of sabotage: for example, damaging hacienda water sources and thus placing a dent on profits. And while large landholders tried their best to pit communities against one another, the battles waged by these pueblos often fortified them internally. Still, while conflict marked the relationship between village and haciendas, the possibility of employment at these estates, as well as Morelos's climate (which did not produce the same droughts as in other parts of New Spain) mitigated the extent of popular discontent. Morelenses did join the independence movement, but their support was more tempered than that of regions such as the Bajío, whose population had been hard hit by famine.
Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 did not fundamentally alter the social landscape of Morelos. However, a national merchant bourgeoisie soon replaced the old Spanish landholders in sugar production and solidified their political control of the region. Sugar production became increasingly lucrative, as growing urban centers such as nearby Mexico City continually fueled demand. With the help of new legislation that overturned political autonomies dating back to the colonial period, large-scale production quickly overtook peasant cultivation. Communities became increasingly surrounded by private property, and federal authorities restricted the political identities these villages could lay claim to, thus limiting their ability to defend themselves as collective entities. Indian communities would suffer an additional blow during the mid-nineteenth century, as the government granted political recognition more readily to ethnically mixed villages and bypassed the century-old claims of Indian ones.
But elite greed did not proceed unchecked. Seeking to recover what had been theirs, campesinos waged battles through other means, including invading land and destroying hacienda property. Testament to this resistance were the measures the hacendados took to combat peasant protest, including the creation of mercenary forces, groups later fortified by the national government. In their efforts to secure vast landholdings, hacendados frequently betrayed their national loyalties in favor of class allegiances. For example, during the series of foreign invasions that Mexico suffered in the first half of the nineteenth century, hacendados often called on these foreign armies to help "liberate" their properties from peasants who took advantage of a weakened national authority to recover their land. While hacendados may have been able to protect some of their holdings by siding with foreign armies, their country would lose half its territory to the invasion by the United States in 1846. Mexico had little time to recover, for in 1862 the French would arrive and occupy Mexico for a period of five years. Although Emperor Maximilian initially allied with Mexico's Conservative Party, during this time he also attempted to mitigate resistance to his rule by making some concessions to rural dwellers, who continued to push for recognition of their land rights. Ultimately, however, any nod to villagers' rights undermined the power structures of the emperor's allies, and thus even the limited progressive legislation he approved remained unimplemented. But as peasants continued petitioning, they expanded their repertoire of struggle, creating a solid foundation for the "forms of local emancipatory discourse" which would be such a mainstay of Zapatismo.
Amidst the foreign invasions, Mexico also suffered a civil war, as Liberals and Conservatives battled over what national project to undertake. Conservatives looked longingly to Mexico's colonial past and sought to retain clearly demarcated privileges for the upper class and a strong role for the Catholic Church. Liberals, on the other hand, embraced, at least in rhetoric, the principles of individual rights and the sanctity of private property. They sought a strong separation of church and state, believing that colonial institutions such as the Catholic Church and corporate landholdings were preventing Mexico's emergence as a modern nation. Both groups viewed the poor, especially the indigenous population, as an obstacle to modernity and sought to institutionalize their exclusion from political life. But the poor, "often illiterate, but not inarticulate," Paul Hart writes, "effectively adapted elite-inspired ideas and language to meet their own needs and defend their interests, and they changed the debate in ways that neither the Conservative nor Liberal leadership anticipated." Despite elite efforts to graft onto the poor a national project that had at its core their exclusion, popular sectors proved adept at grasping at the moral fibers extant in these conceptions of nationhood.
This process was keenly evident in Morelos, where campesinos took Liberals at their word and began implementing liberalism's egalitarian principles in a fashion that one scholar characterized as eerily similar to the Zapatistas' land distribution during the revolution. When combatants in Morelos supported the Liberal cause during the War of the Reform, as the civil war between Liberals and Conservatives became known, they did so under the conviction that such a leadership would help bring them justice. But for Liberals some were more equal than others, and when villagers in conjunction with hacienda peons insisted on their rights and in 1856 began to cultivate disputed land, the liberal government called in the National Guard. To its dismay the government encountered the soldiers' equally progressive interpretation of justice. Soldiers refused to take action against mobilizations that protested useless laws and unresponsive authorities, arguing that they would effectively be acting against their own rights, since "we all belong to the popular class." It is because of this popular conception of liberalism that the Zapatistas' Plan de Ayala would appeal to the principles of the Liberal Reform Laws, which many Morelenses understood as unjustly applied, rather than unjust in principle.
Indeed, as national projects were drafted from above, villagers, hacienda laborers, and campesinos adopted and adapted state rhetoric to local conditions. They appealed to the Liberals' proclaimed doctrine of equality and individual rights and in so doing actually revealed a greater adherence to enlightened principles than much of the elite. For example, although hacienda owners usurped village land based on the argument that they would make more-modern and efficient uses of it, the labor relations that characterized such private estates displayed a seigniorial mentality that included the desire to wield "correctional powers over their dependents" in order to "moralize" their workers. Laborers were not blind to such contradictions and protested against the revival of "the days of feudalism." When the state ruled time and again in favor of hacendados, villagers extended their appeals, originally based on Liberal laws, to broader moral principles of citizens' rights, in the process questioning the social stratification that undergirded rural society.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
1. The Ghost of Zapata 26
2. Jaramillo, Cárdenas, and the Emiliano Zapata Cooperative 55
3. The Agrarista Tradition 85
4. "Like Juárez, with Our Offices on the Run" 108
5. "They Made Him into a Rebel" 139
6. Gender, Community, and Struggle 161
7. Judas's Embrace 184
Conclusion: The Jaramillista Legacy 211
Notes 225
Bibliography 263
Index 279