Word: womacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Reading Womack's account, I can't help believing that there were several crucial moments when, if Zapata himself could have transcended his background, he could have have explained the urgency of his followers' needs. But such an unraveling of the misunderstanding never took place because Zapata, the excellent guerrilla tactician, was unable to wheel and deal at conferences. He bucked himself up for his important meeting with Pancho Villa by masquerading as part charro, an elegant cowboy, and part gypsy, rings and scarves and a lavender shirt. All through the meeting, Zapata hardly spoke. Glowering and slumped...
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...
Films of Socialist realism, because they promote a particular ideology, always answer in the affirmative. Womack's answer is less biased, but strangely equivocal. He shows how, when Carranza was overthrown, the remaining Zapatista leaders won pivotal roles in the government of Obregon. The ejido program of the early twenties, which granted previously-claimed land to villages, was a Zapatista victory. The boost given the ejidos by Cárdenas in the thirties nearly satisfied the revolutionary goals of the Morelos villagers...
...returning to Zapata's own village today, Womack finds that though the campesinos survive in the sixties, they do not prosper. They have been bypassed, shunted aside by the industrialized Mexico which began under Cárdenas, the man who protected their interests. In Five Families, Oscar Lewis draws a similarly dismal picture--a day in the life of a family in Tepotzlan, one of the Morelos villages, and a day in the life of a Tepotzlan family which has moved to a working-class barrio in Mexico City. Both families continue to exist as their revolutionary ancestors did--marginally...
Were you to ask Womack whether the campesinos of Morelos triumphed, he would say, "well, they survived...