"Viva Zapata," film by Elia Kazan, 1952
In the U.S.
we don’t talk much about revolution. If
we do, it’s always in its counter-revolutionary form. You know, the "Tea Party Revolution." (Actually a counter-revolution.) When Russell Brand recently told an obnoxious
BBC interviewer that he wanted a left revolution, and wouldn’t vote, naive American
commentators were stunned and confused.
Really? What’s wrong with
Russell?
In fact, just south of us across the border, Mexico
had a revolution. Not in 1776, but
starting in the early 1900s. Emiliano Zapata
was involved from 1909 until 1919, when he was assassinated. This black and white film covers Zapata’s
life as the most upright revolutionary of that long, confusing period of
warfare that culminated in the social reforms of Cardenas in the late 1930s.
Marlon Brando plays Zapata in a great performance for a
gringo. John Steinbeck wrote the script,
which does not always adhere to historical truth. Elia Kazan, a leftist who later denounced reds
in the film industry before the McCarthy committee, directed Brando in this and
“On the Waterfront.” The volcanic
Anthony Quinn plays his brother Eufemio, and Jean Peters his long-suffering
and beautiful wife. The film’s graphic quality is
almost documentarian and photographic, reminiscent of Italian neo-realism. The story centers around Zapata’s unwavering
position to give land back to the poor campesinos of Morelos and every other state. In order to do that, the farmers had to oppose the dictatorial hand of the federal government and the troops who
back up the local landlords and hacienda owners. Zapata's first revolutionary act was to lead a land occupation,
after much time spent in frustrating negotiations with lying landlords.
Steinbeck’s script makes several left political points, then backs off and makes some liberal clichés about the inevitable corruptions
of power or uselessness of warfare. The script does show the need to meet violence with defensive violence, how giving up weapons can be fatal, and to stick to your principles even after you 'win.' It is not specific as to the actual
nature of Zapata’s position on land.
Zapata supported Indian communal ownership of land and older village rights
to lands, forests, and water, and the breakup of the hacienda system. Zapata,
after all, spoke fluent Nahuatl, the native language. His Ayala plan is not mentioned, nor is
Zapata’s work on an agrarian party, a land bank or sugar cooperatives at the
federal level. He could read and later
became familiar with anarchism, neither of which the film indicates. Zapata is portrayed only has an honest, romantic,
instinctual rebel.
Madero, who was the titular head of the first wave of the
revolution that overthrew Porfirio Diaz, is shown as a clueless liberal in bed
with the bloody military head, Huerta.
Huerta eventually imprisons, then kills him. This made a strong impression on me, as many
bourgeois liberals, like Castor and Pollux, have a military yang to their ‘yin’
- Obama/ Petraeus; Johnson/ McNamara; Carter/ Brezezinski; Clinton/ Cohen;
Nixon/ Kissinger; Kennedy/ McNamara - all have their deadly doubles.
Huerta is later defeated in battle by Zapata and Villa in
1914, but both refuse to take national leadership. The famous photograph of the two of them is
reenacted in the film, with them humorously running away the second after it is taken. In a completely literary scene, Zapata is
supposedly acting as President of Mexico in Mexico City after this victory. There he responds to one Morelos farmer about
abuses by his brother in the same way he was addressed by Diaz earlier. In the film's initial
scene Zapata and a group of Morelos farmers talk to Diaz and Zapata makes the same objection about the lack of time as the young man he has just put down. Zapata realizes his hypocrisy and rushes back
to his hill-side shack to avoid the 'corruptions of government.' In Morelos state for
several years after that the federal government did not dare to tread, and the
campesinos and poor farmers were the power.
One sinister character in the film is the Madero
representative, who might be a guy named Robles Dominguez. This character encourages Zapata to stay true
to land reform, even in the face of Madero’s hesitations, and later becomes a
traitor. He sets up Zapata’s assassination at the courtyard of the hacienda of San Juan Chinameca, this by the forces of the liberal/conservative
president Carranza. I’m not sure if this
person is a creation of Steinbeck’s or a real person, but he makes little
sense.
The emotional issue in the film is the relationship between
Zapata and his wife Josefa, again probably a creation of Steinbeck’s. Zapata falls in love with the daughter of the
richest businessman in his town of Anenecuilco. Yet both father and daughter look down on
Zapata, who at this time supposedly didn’t have any farm or property, even
though he was a famous horse trainer. These scenes
reflect poorly on the grasping money-love of the local businessman. When Zapata is named a ‘general’ by Madero, they
suddenly grow fond of the stiff love-sick man with bandoliers. Actually by this time Zapata had been elected
head of the town council. Josefa ends up
marrying him, then living in his dusty house on a hillside that her father warned would be her
fate, fearing for Emiliano’s death, which she quite correctly divines. Zapata is shown as refusing land given him by
Madero as a bribe, so he never got rich by being a general of the southern
army.
At the end of the film, the ‘spirit’ of rebellion in the
form of his great white horse escapes to the mountains. The farmers insist that Zapata is not dead,
as you ‘cannot kill an idea’ – he is waiting in the hills to be called on
again. However it was another 20 years before land reform of any kind came to Mexico. The Zapatista indigenous rebellion against
corporate/landlord/military power in Chiapas
in 1994 shows that this might be true, because the land question is still not solved.
Adolfo Gilly’s great history of the confusing stages of the
Mexican Revolution indicates that in 1914 the Mexican proletariat was not
strong enough to hold power, and that Zapata’s campesino/farmer revolution was
limited in that regard. Given the
development of the Mexican working class both in the U.S.
and in Mexico
since then, that is no longer true. Where
is our proletarian Zapata?
Red Frog
October 27, 2013
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