That was the image used at the end of Viva Zapata! — the white horse riding in the mountains. And it is the image employed by Diego Rivera in his portrayal of Zapata in the great mural on the balcony of the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca. The town was rebuilt after the revolution, its sumptuous homes serving throughout the 1940s and ’50s as refuge for the Mexican and foreign rich. Today it’s a gritty city of about a half-million people, with some good language schools, a few wonderful restaurants, and what appears at first sight to be 200,000 auto parts shops, staffed by the great-grandchildren of the Zapatistas. Zapata and his wonderful white horse live on in music, too. You hear the legend in the corridos sung in a thousand towns about the years of the revolution. And you sense the presence of Zapata in the towns of Morelos, where he and his followers fought and prayed and died.
“I saw him the year of the comet,” another old man told me one day (Halley’s Comet streaked through the skies in 1910). “I was a boy and I knew he was a great man. He came here with his soldiers and they stayed right over here. In the convent.” He was pointing at the 16th-century Dominican convent that is the largest building in the center of Tepoztlán (a smaller building houses a lovely collection of pre-Columbian art donated by the Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer).
History tells us that during several periods, the convent did serve as Zapata’s temporary headquarters, with guards posted on its rooftops, the horses tethered in the great walled yard. Today, the convent is the property of the state. It remains an imposing structure, with walls two feet thick, its stone hallways and dim cells recalling an era of chilly asceticism in spite of the lustier graffiti of the present. Some fine frescoes made by Indian artists have been scraped, defaced, or whitewashed over many years; their old visions, expressed in black and gray and terracotta, are slowly being retrieved through the tedious craft of the restorers. The artists and their models are long gone, but their faces live on in the halls of the convent.
From the second floor of this old structure, Zapata surely must have looked out over this same valley. Like so much of Morelos, it was part of the original 25,000-square-mile land grant that was awarded to Hernán Cortés after the conquest of Mexico in 1521. After Cortés died, the land fell to others, speculators and adventurers, most of them iron-willed exploiters, some actually men of decency and taste. The conqueror’s son, Martín, lived in Tepoztlán for years after his father died and is said to have had a private chapel built so that he would not have to leave home to hear Mass. Other families stayed for many generations. During the long, peaceful centuries of New Spain, in a place of fine climate and great natural beauty, they had no reason to leave.
At its lower altitudes the valley was planted with sugar cane imported from Cuba. In the early years of New Spain, many Indians died of European diseases to which they were not immune. The Spaniards then imported black slaves, whose number in all of Mexico eventually rose in the mid-17th century to 150,000. But the Spaniards were always afraid of slave revolts because they would have been much more difficult to suppress on the mainland than in their island colonies in the Caribbean. Eventually they stopped importing Africans, and sent away the troublemakers. Those who remained were absorbed in the Mexican mestizaje. But they did leave traces of the old African religions in places like Tepoztlán.
The town is known today as one of the major centers in Mexico for brujos (witches) and curanderos (crudely, a kind of witch doctor). They are said to be capable of casting and removing spells, causing and curing illness, and helping with all the infinite complexities of love. Much of the witches’ lore remains secret, but is apparently a mixture of pre-Columbian belief, transformed Christianity, and aspects of Afro-Cuban religions. I asked several times if I could meet with one of the curanderos; as a foreigner I was refused with a polite blank look. But when I asked if the curanderos do, in fact, exist, one man laughed out loud. “Oh yes,” he said, “they exist. Yes. Yes.”
So, in spite of television, radio, newspapers; in spite of daily bus service to Cuernavaca and Mexico City and the arrival of city dwellers on weekends, the pre-Christian past remains powerful. Time is simply not measured here the way it is measured in, say, Miami. The town of Tepoztlán (like many of its neighbors in Morelos) has existed since about the time of Jesus, and was dominated by the Aztecs for a century before the arrival of Cortés. The zocalo, or main plaza, through which both Cortés and Zapata strolled is located on exactly the same spot as the pre-Conquest Aztec market, and today is still laid out on the same basic design. The great mounds of chiles, corn, beans, tomatoes, and chocolate; the great slabs of beef being cured by sun and flies; the ceramics and masks: All were sold in virtually the same way in Aztec times, under the same colorful arrangements of tents and poles.
Also surviving from the pre-Conquest days is the monument to Tepozteco on top of the mountain of the same name, rising a thousand abrupt feet above the village. This was built by the Aztecs on a familiar pyramid base to honor the god of drunkenness, the inventor of pulque, a white, slightly sweet brew made from the maguey plant. The old tales insist that when the Spaniards arrived, they hurled the idol off its pedestal into the valley below. But to the delight of the inhabitants, it did not break. The conquerors were forced to attack it with hammers and saws, breaking it into chips and dust. Today, the base of the old pyramid remains on top of the mountain, badly eroded, but with some of the ancient decorations still visible; you can reach it on a hiking trail. The view of the valley from the peak is glorious. But Tepozteco is more than a view. In September of each year, a fiesta honors the old idol, and much pulque is drunk by nominal Catholics, and many dances danced. Here, human beings hold on to sensible gods.
In the slow afternoons in Tepoztlán, moving through the amber torpor of the sun, you can still see those small powerful women, built like tree trunks, pounding fresh tortillas on three-legged metates as their ancestors did for centuries. You can buy chickens killed that morning. You can see boys negotiating the cobblestones of Avenida de la Revolución on burros, comic books jutting from their back pockets. There are a few good restaurants, but most people here eat at home, as they always did. They seem entirely indifferent to the groups of city people who own second homes here as refuges from the horrors of modern Mexico City: writers and painters, businessmen and intellectuals, and a few American expatriates. This is a proud town in a state of proud people. They don’t kowtow to strangers but they almost never descend to rudeness either. At the same time, you witness none of the fawning theatrics of those who live in tourist towns. And you see no beggars.
What you do sense, if you read the history and allow the town’s layered past to seep into you slowly, is the eventual triumph of Zapata. The agrarian reform for which he lived and died came slowly. In the early years, the campesinos were given the worst land: on untillable mountain slopes, in places devoid of water or topsoil. The new politicians, the thick-fingered hustlers of the revolution, grabbed the best land for themselves.
Irony was without limit. In Anenecuilco, where Zapata was born, the worst abuser of the campesinos in the 1940s was a man named Nicolas Zapata. He was 13 when his father, Emiliano, was killed. Everywhere, human beings have a gift for outrage. But during the presidency of Lázaro Cardenas (1934-1940), the worst abuses were ended. Schools and hospitals were opened, transportation made easier, farmers helped with credit and supplies. Eventually, Nicolas Zapata was hustled out of Morelos.