Readers of John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution will recall the reverence held by the villagers of Anenecuilco for the documents that verified their community’s historic rights to land and autonomy. During the Revolution, Emiliano Zapata entrusted the titles to his associate Francisco Franco, who safeguarded them until his assassination by federal police in 1947. The archive then passed to the custody of Jesús Sotelo Inclan, author of a moving history of Anenecuilco first published in 1943, who kept the papers until he died in 1990. A year later his family presented them to the nation.
To mark that occasion, Alicia Hernández Chávez has prepared a handsomely illustrated volume of considerable scholarly merit. Four appendixes, totaling over one hundred pages, reproduce selected items from the collection. The first provides the texts of colonial documents copied from originals in the Ramo de Tierras of the Archivo General de la Nación at the request of village leaders in 1854. The others contain facsimiles and transcripts of documents that vividly chronicle the history of Anenecuilco after independence. Color reproductions of colonial maps enhance the volume’s visual appeal, and scholars of land tenure will appreciate the carefully drawn maps showing the distribution of lands in Morelos in 1910 and 1929.
Hernández Chávez’ accompanying essay provides a welcome addition to the increasingly sophisticated historiography of nineteenth-century Mexico. She perceptively traces the transformation of grassroots political life, as colonial repúblicas de indios became constitutional municipal governments and “Indians” became “citizens in arms” through the formation of national guard and militia units. Despite these changes, however, the villagers of Anenecuilco never forgot the importance of colonial law and custom to the collective life of their community. As more local leaders mastered the skills of literacy, they gained new awareness of the need to document those oral traditions with written evidence.
