Zapata’s Route (Versión en español)

In search of Zapata’s calzones or pants*

What do we really know about Don Emiliano? San Miguel Anenecuilco, Tlaltizapan, Chinameca, Cuautla. Unfortunately we haven’t done justice to our hero.
His human side, the child, the adolescent. He is an icon.
Early Sunday morning we set out, Isabel and I, on a trip through the state of Morelos. Just joking I said to Isabel (who has come from Los Angeles, California in search of objects for a traveling exhibition about the “Story of the Mexican Corrido”) and what if we find Zapata’s calzones!
A few kilometers from Cuautla, almost next to it, is Anenecuilco. Over the fragile crumbling adobe walls of the house where Zapata was born a strange roof was hung, to protect it form the inclemency’s of nature. We looked Lucio Luna up, the chronicler in charge of the museum.
On an improvised table he drew with simple lines the map of the town of Emiliano´s
childhood, only 39 families lived there and he told us that the children’s favorite hang-out was the cemetery. Don Trinidad Gutiérrez would tell them tales and legends, like the one about Chiltepec Hill, which had the power of opening itself up, and bewitching whoever would get curious and go in. Other favorite games were the top-

spinning competitions, with tops made from pirul wood, or going swimming in the Fresno pool (today completely contaminated, should be rescued urgently.)
Emiliano and his brother “skinny” Eufemio had outstanding personalities. As soon as they were able to, the town authorities gave him charge of the Calpuleque. A great distinction. Some destinies are marked out, and his first function was to recover the ancestral lands, woe to whoever gave up! “I’ll break anyone who comes back”, today we’re in for it, they’ll screw us or we’ll screw them, don’t be scared if we are up against the wall…said Eufemio, and that is how the struggle for the land in Morelos began.
In Tlaltizapan, Emiliano had his headquarters, and already with certain delusions of grandeur, he had a mausoleum built in the middle of the church. It looks like a great rectangular cake, Napoleonic, with several white and blue levels with gold curlicues, in pretty bad taste. (His remains are not kept there).
The great Christ of this parish was his favorite saint. In the headquarters, now a museum, you won’t believe this, but now, in a dusty showcase, you can see Zapata’s calzones!
The same ones he was killed in, still stained with his blood, as well as the black trousers, his beautiful hat, wide-brimmed straw, still with the holes from the fatal bullets, his spurs…and is that all?
In Chinameca Don José Correa, in charge of the group of showcases, most of them even dustier and emptier, told us that when Zapata’s last belongings, from the day he was shot down by Guajardo’s soldiers, were moved to the museum by orders of who knows who, strangely enough his saddle and pistol belt disappeared on the way!
The magnificent hacienda functioned for a time as the Agronomy School, but as usual it succumbed to the confrontations of the six-year periods of the Mexican political system and now it is abandoned, covered with horrible graffiti and used as a garbage dump, how pathetic!
Don José continued: Zapata went into the hacienda mounted on his sorrel steed “the Golden Ace”, a recent gift from Guajardo, who even as the horse entered the main doorway with his rider, patted the horse’s side; was it perhaps the signal to open fire? Curiously enough, the horse went unhurt.
Anyway, the hero died, his body was carried to the Cuautla cemetery and from there his remains were taken to the plaza which bears his name, where a magnificent statue was built out of orange stone, and not in his mausoleum, which is what he really wanted. Few know that the revolutionary who demanded “Land and Liberty” is buried there. Let’s hope that they don’t move him, may he not lose his head, like poor Pancho Villa, whose remains are buried at the Monument to the Revolution.

*Simple cotton underpinnings introduced by the Spaniards, used alone or underneath the heavy trousers.