Emiliano Zapata Salazar (1879–1919) was a Mexican agrarian leader and guerrilla fighter. The inspiration and champion of the agrarian revolution called Zapatismo, he fought in guerrilla actions during and after the Mexican Revolution 1910–20.
Born in Anenecuilco, Morelos state, Zapata was the son of a Mestizo peasant. He became a sharecropper and local peasant leader. At the onset of the Mexican Revolution, Zapata occupied estates by force and expanded a program to return the land to the Indians in the areas he controlled.
Zapata initially supported President Francisco Madero. But his failure to meet Zapata’s demands for radical agrarian reform, such as the return of haciendas (great estates) to native Mexican communal ownership, led to the Mexican Revolution. Along with Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Zapata then fought the regimes of General Huerta and Venustiano Carranza. He also implemented agrarian reforms in the southern area under his control, building impartial commissions responsible for land distribution and setting up the Rural Loan Bank. The federal army tricked him to his death at the Chinameca hacienda in Morelos by fabricating a defection.
Latin America historian John Womack, Jr.’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1969) provides the essence of Zapata and the spirit of Zapatismo. Zapata’s ideas stimulated the neo-Zapatista movement in southern Mexico during the 1990s.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Emiliano Zapata
Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
—Emiliano Zapata
Topics: Courage
Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny.
—Emiliano Zapata
One of the happiest days of my life is when I made five or six hundred pesos from a crop of watermelons I raise all on my own.
—Emiliano Zapata
Topics: Farming