Word: booked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...occasionally a book appears which chronicles for an illiterate people what they could not record themselves. With great pain and diligence and scholarship John Womack Jr. has wrested the story of the agrarian revolution captained by Emiliano Zapata from the reports of the literate and the educated, and has managed to give their history back to the people...
Zapata and the Mexican Revolution is a vast achievement, not only because the civil war in the state of Morelos and Zapata himself are important to the Mexican Revolution, but because it is hard to imagine a historian, especially a gringo historian, writing a book which comprehends so deeply the spirit and desires of the men who made the events...
Although Womack holds very tight reins on his subjects matter, for me his book is suggestive of certain principles concerning the nature of any agrarian revolt. He offers an understanding of the nature of a populist leader and what the goals and limits of a populist uprising...
CERTAIN documents--Womack's book and films like Potemkin and The Battle of Algiers--lead me to ask what may be a naive question: do the people, because they are right, always...
...that all rural people hate the land from which they grab their living. Land is fickle, he said, yielding some years and not others. Why then were the campesinos of Morelos willing to give up their lives to secure tiny fields for their children? I get from Womack's book the same feeling I have gotten from watching campesinos in other parts of Mexico talk about land. It is not something you love or hate, it is a part of you, and as you would fight to stay alive, so you would fight to protect you land from dismemberment. Only...