The Silver Coinage of Zapata, 1914-1915 Open Access

The Mexican Revolution caused enormous economic dislocation, of which one aspect was the collapse of the money system. The Mexico City mint, which had suspended gold coinage in 1910, ceased to strike the pesos fuertes in March, 1914, and the subsidiary silver in September. Federal gold and silver coin presently disappeared from circulation. Throughout the country masses of paper money were issued, of irregular circulation and precarious value; it was widely counterfeited, and even the genuine paper might be declared invalid overnight. Some coins were produced locally and unofficially—as far as the Federal government was concerned—in an attempt to stabilize values and provide small change. These coinages exist in great quantity and disparity, differing from the Federal and from each other in alloy, weight, types, legends and denomination.

This material is by now well arranged,¹ yet historians have largely ignored its potential for studying monetary policies at the time. The Zapatista coinage is particularly useful, since it is the richest of all the revolutionary coinages; it issued from at least ten mints which produced an abundance of silver and bronze over a period of four years. Many of these coins still exist, and upon examination reveal some otherwise unknown aspects of (and problems within) this revolutionary regime. They also corroborate in an interesting way how conventional was the Zapatista attitude toward property.

Zapata’s silver $1 and $2 pieces, the subject of this paper, were first struck in Guerrero in 1914; fractional bronze did not appear until the following year. The two silver denominations were proportionately smaller, and contained less silver, than the Federal coinage, but their acceptance was encouraged by the announced presence of an amount of gold in each. The peso bears the legend “ORO: 0,300 [grams]”, the two pesos, “ORO: 0,595”.² It must have been intended that the adjection of gold offset the diminution in silver, so that the coins would be as acceptable as those of the Republic. This seems to be the sense of Guerrero when he writes, “Se acuñaron entonces las monedas de plata con ley de oro, que se conocieron con el nombre de pesos zapatistas, cuyos valores de uno y dos pesos estuvieron en relación con la moneda nacional que circulaba”³—though “valor” is ambiguous: face value or intrinsic value? At any rate the one chemical analysis of four coins of this series raised real doubts about the quality of the gold content, and therefore the sincerity of the whole endeavor.⁴

We have undertaken to reexamine the question by dealing with a much larger sample, which was subjected to neutron activation so as to leave the coins unharmed. The silver content of each coin was determined by two methods.⁵ The entire coin was irradiated in the neutron howitzer, yielding an absolute percentage of silver content to an accuracy of ca. ± 1.5-2.0%. In addition a streak sample was irradiated, with a result accurate to about ± 1.0%. In the latter case it was assumed that the coin was composed entirely of silver, copper and gold; in fact slight additional impurities are always present. From these two results a weighted silver result was calculated by averaging the howitzer result plus twice the streak result, to an accuracy of about ± 1.3%. The percentages of copper and of gold were calculated from the streak sample by determination of the ratio of their activation to that of silver. The percentage of error in the copper reading is about ± 0.1%. The three percentages of gold, silver and copper do not necessarily total exactly 100%, because of the method used for averaging the silver data from the two sets of analyses. However, the total of readings for the entire population produces an average of 99.5% for the three major metals, which indicates that the presence of other elements can be ignored.

The accompanying table presents the averages of the analyses of 13 out of 15 varieties of the $1 in this series, and all varieties of $2. All bear the state name, “Guerrero”; in addition the local mint name appears on nine varieties. The major mint appears to have been at Atlixtac, named only on the bronze, never on silver.⁶

The analyses reveal not only the real gold content of these issues, but help to establish the silver standard, which was probably aimed at 900 thousands fine, a creditable alloy and better than the 800 thousands of the Federal subsidiary coinage. It is therefore possible to estimate fairly closely the theoretical composition and value of the Zapatista silver coinage:

• The Federal gold coinage since 1905 had been struck to an imaginary gold peso, 900 thousands fine, weighing .8333 grams, equivalent to .75 grams pure gold. Therefore the announced gold content of the Zapatista peso, .300 grams (pure, as the analyses show), would have been worth precisely 40c.

• The Federal subsidiary silver introduced in 1905 was struck to an imaginary silver peso containing 20 grams pure silver. The value of 60c would then be represented by 12 grams pure. If 12 grams composed 90% of the weight of the Zapatista peso (i.e. at 900 thousands fine), the total weight of the coin should have been 13.33 grams, including 12 grams silver (worth 60c as monetary silver), .300 grams gold (40c), and 1.033 grams copper (nil).

In fact this is very much the profile of the Zapatista peso. The average weight of our specimens falls .64 grams or about 5% under the assumed theoretical weight, but part of the loss is owing to our having to work with worn coins. The average silver content of the peso is reasonably stable in 10 of 13 groups, but the gold is never up to par after group 9 and at Taxco is definitely wanting. Still this is a very complicated business, the successful manufacture of such a coin depending on three separate calibrations: the proportion of gold in the alloy, the proportion of silver, and the weight of the individual specimens.

Theoretically the two-peso piece should be double the peso. The gold content, curiously, is announced as .595 rather than .600 grams, a difference in value of 2/3 of one centavo. At a theoretical weight of 26.67 grams the coin should produce a pure silver content of 24 grams (= 1.20), gold of .595 grams (= .79 1/3), and copper of 2.072 grams (nil.) In fact the gold percentage of the two-pesos is consistently higher than that of the peso, but the intrinsic value of the individual specimens varies considerably. The main difficulty seems to have been that control of planchet weight was not careful, so that individual weights are fairly widely scattered.

This might he accidental, but there is one clear category of deliberate deviation from the theoretical standard, in the pesos of Taxco. Their gold content averages .053, or scarcely 18% of the promised .300 grams; the maximum for any single Taxco piece is .099 grams. Since even this small amount is still many times the gold content of the Federal silver coins, they cannot have been taken from circulation to provide the source of the metal.⁷ Presumably the mint used an ore with a small but steady proportion of gold which went unrecognized, or at least was not recovered owing to inefficient extraction procedures. It is unlikely that such a trivial amount of gold was deliberately added to the silver at Taxco, when it does not begin to approach the standard .300 grams.

Whether such dishonesty occurred elsewhere is not certain, for the groups of similar low gold content without mint name might have been Taxco products too. Group 9c is without doubt from Taxco: its obverse die is the same as that of groups 45 and 46. This die link is as well the evidence that a Zapatista mint was operating in Taxco in 1914; the coins which actually bear the mint name are all dated 1915. That the anonymous $2 groups were also struck at more than one mint is again indicated by the study of interchange of common dies.⁸ Groups 12 through 12f are all connected, but the two groups which deliver gold well below the theoretical standard, 12g and 12h, are also not die-linked with the others nor to each other. They must have been used at two mints other than that of the large die-linked anonymous series, an hypothesis which is supported by comparison of their alloy with that of the coins struck in 1915 from mint marked dies. Group 12g differs from the large series in its rather high copper percentage, somewhat low net gold content, and low average weight—precisely the characteristics of group 33, probably the earlier of the two 1915 Campo Morado groups:

It must be that the $2 pieces of group 12g were struck at Campo Morado in 1914, although no dies bear the mint name in that year.

Similarly group 12h contains very high copper, but relatively low silver and gold. These are characteristics of the Suriana 1915 issue:

While the two issues are dissimilar in degree, they present the same general profile, so that it is not impossible that they issued from the same mint.

The anonymous $2 pieces of 1914, therefore, should be attributed to not one but three different mints, probably the same as the three mints which struck the denomination in 1915. The first of these, and the most active in 1914, can be identified as Atlixtac; the other 1914 groups were struck at Campo Morado and (probably) Suriana.

The coins reveal certain aspects of Zapatista monetary policy and control. First, an unprecedented alloy was created, from which, it was calculated, coins equal in intrinsic value to the Federal could be produced. However, this theoretical system was not consistently maintained in practice. The major 1914 issues of the two pesos kept to a high gold content, but two minor mints, and all mints in 1915, did not. The gold content of the peso was not generally maintained to standard, and at Taxco there was outright malfeasance in the mint. Since the quantity of gold assumed to be present in the Taxco pesos is too small to be easily tested, and too small to affect the color of the coin in any way, no one—it appears—has ever doubted that this issue contained what its legend claimed. Eguía Lis tested only one Taxco example, and his result has remained a curiosity, but now we can show that in fact it is characteristic of all the Taxco issues of 1914 and 1915.

Second, the coins were defined centrally, for they usually bear identical types and legends and die production was efficiently centralized. All the $1 and $2 dies were cut by the same hand (save groups 35, 47, 47a, and the reverses of 45 and 46), without respect to the mint at which they were to be used. The earliest dies were anonymous, perhaps because no need was felt to distinguish among coins which had been centrally authorized even if struck at different mints. But Mexico had a tradition of a multiplicity of mints, each marking its coins—there were fourteen Republican silver mints in the nineteenth century—and the mint names subsequently found on the Zapatista silver may reflect a suspicion which our analyses have substantiated, that there were rather significant intrinsic differences in the products of the different mints.

The mints themselves make the third point. Zapatista coinage was organized far more elaborately than has hitherto been recognized. At least four mints were established to strike the $1 and $2 silver in 1914 and 1915: Atlixtac, Campo Morado, Suriana, and Taxco. Although the majority of the die pairs bear no mint name, it is possible through die linkage, metallic analysis, and other numismatic techniques not here discussed, to discover unsuspected activity in the latter three mints in 1914.

Finally, there is the curious ambiguity of the Zapatista silver coins as objects. On the one hand they are novel in module, alloy, and denomination ($2). The legend “Reforma, Libertad, Justicia y Ley” repeats the theme of many Zapatista pronouncements, and identifies the particular political source of the issue (where other Revolutionary coins are often conveniently vague). But in other ways they are extremely conventional. The types of eagle on nopal, and Liberty cap on rays, which had distinguished Federal coinage from the beginning of the Republic, appear along with the legend República Mexicana, by no means universal on other revolutionary coinages.⁹ Most important, the Zapatista silver, unlike the majority of revolutionary coinages or the paper of forced circulation, was intended to elicit confidence by maintaining an intrinsic value no less than that of the Federal. All of this served to emphasize not only the historical continuity of the coins, but the conventional commercial honesty of the men responsible for them.

Author notes