Word: peasant
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...image on a television screen. A brusque man, a stolid face, the body of a peasant. He descended the airplane ramp and kissed the asphalt of East Boston. And through the cluttered landscape of eyes and ears and signs that viewed him, he smiled warmly and told them all to condemn abortion, to uphold marriage, to aid the weary and the poor. He looked at masses of well-to-do's, of down-vested students all packed off to Business and Law and Success School and told them to forsake "possessions" and to forsake themselves, for Christ...
Faith has provided the motive force for mankind's checkered odyssey. But how does one dream in a technocratic age? How do a people regain the faith that caused small peasant societies to build cathedrals with spires reaching toward the heavens, edifices that it would take centuries to complete, enshrining in stone a testimonial to the perseverance and sweep of their aspirations...
...indirectly. If a President leans too far to the left, as did López Portillo's predecessor, Luis Echeverria, businessmen can express their displeasure by withholding investments; if he leans too far to the right, as did Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who ruled from 1964 to 1970, labor leaders and peasant organizations can protest with crippling strikes. To accommodate such pressures, Mexican Presidents usually swing away from the direction of their predecessors, in an effort to appease whatever faction was left most dissatisfied by the previous administration. Echeverria, for example, was considered a conservative before assuming office; but he launched...
...disparity between P.R.I, proclamations and performance is nowhere more glaring than in Mexico's long heralded land redistribution program. Since the 1910 revolution, about 38 million acres have been expropriated from huge haciendas and given to 25,000 communal ejidos (peasant associations) composed of families who have occupied the land for centuries. Nevertheless, there are still 4.5 million landless campesinos. The gap is partly attributable to the fact that the rural poor are among the fastest-growing segments of Mexico's population. But the plight of the campesinos has been made worse by government support of agribusiness. Only about...
...STORY, what there is of it, revolves around four peasant families who toil for the same landowner in the Lombardy section of Italy. Their homes, stables, most of their livestock, and the land they work belongs to the landowner, for which he gets two-thirds of their crops. The rest of the world barely exists for these people. The political unrest of the time goes by practically unnoticed--the families are touched by the outside world only twice during the year or so the film portrays, once when a newlywed couple journeys to nearby Milan where troops march a group...