Serious scholarly works are seldom reviewed widely outside the professional journals in the field. Not so with John Womack, Jr.’s first published contribution to Mexican revolutionary historiography. Journalists, literary critics, and professional reviewers in a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, and nonhistorical reviews have received the book well. Many have admonished their readers that undoubtedly some academic type concerned with the trivial will unsheath his erudite sword and leave nothing but ribbons. Without the slightest deference to the frame of reference underlying the admonition, this reviewer must decline the tempting invitation, for Womack has written a fine book.
The initial decade of the Mexican Revolution was so chaotic as almost to defy description. Using the most conservative of several differing counts, the presidential chair had seven occupants between 1910 and 1919: Díaz, de la Barra, Madero, Huerta, Carbajal, Gutiérrez, and Carranza. Emiliano Zapata holds the distinction of having called his peasant army to war during each of these administrations. But this work is less a conventional exercise in historical biography than a history of the agrarian revolution in southern Mexico. Zapata, the personification of the agrarian ideal, is the thread which holds the narrative tightly together.
Because Womack has so effectively used an impressive assortment of public and private archives, as well as the voluminous secondary literature, one can forgive his failure to consult the pertinent sections of Isidro Fabela’s impressive multi-volume Documentas históricos de la Revolutión Mexicana. It is obvious that many tedious but worthwhile hours were expended in the manuscript sources. The documentary evidence extracted has been thoroughly digested, organized, and rendered into good narrative form.
Womack is at his best describing the spectrum of pressures which motivated the Morelos peasants—the rank and file—to fight after fight. The weaknesses of each successive regime are examined meticulously and at times brilliantly from the Zapatista point of view. But in this strength lies also the book’s greatest weakness. On occasion the author becomes so involved with the political and social convulsions of Morelos that he slights significant contemporary developments at the national level. For example, although Womack devotes many pages to the period of time covered by the Convention of Aguascalientes, the name of Eulalio Gutiérrez, the president of Mexico designated by the convention, is never mentioned, even obliquely.
One of the most heartening features of this study, at least from the professional point of view, is that the author has not been taken in by the incessant stream of prorevolutionary propaganda. To be sure, Womack’s sympathies lie with Zapata, but neither the leader of the southern movement nor his followers emerge unblemished. As one of many examples, the excesses committed by General Juvencio Robles during his Huertista campaigns in Morelos are not exaggerated to the complete exclusion of Zapatista depredations. A small step? Only if one is not acquainted with the nature of Mexican revolutionary historiography. It is significant when a sympathetic study need not be categorized as belonging to the prorevolutionary genre.
A few minor additions and corrections would have made this good book even better. A map of Morelos tops the list. We non-Morelenses get along just fine with Cuernavaca, Cuautla, and even Yautepec and Jojutla but where are Telixtac, Yacapixtla, Huitzilac, Tetecala, and Xochitepec? The hyphenation of Spanish words was based on English patterns of syllabization and therefore is generally incorrect throughout. And finally even a commercial publisher as mammoth as Alfred A. Knopf should not take it upon itself to tamper with and establish its own criteria for correct professional format. To the stodgy professional the numbering of the footnotes (refusing ever to pass the sacred number nine) is as cruel as stripping Linus of his security blanket.
While this book may not be, as Ernest May proffers gratuitously on the dust jacket, “the best piece of narrative history that has been written about modern Latin America in any language,” it is, nevertheless, a solid piece of scholarship. Womack spotted a significant gap in the published literature and filled it admirably.
