I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), an Indian tenant farmer, became a Mexican revolutionary during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, one who largely gained control of Southern Mexico in an effort to recover expropriated village lands for the peasant farmers or campesinos. His tools were courage, integrity, and an army of Indians with which he fought federal governments and occupied Mexico City on three separate occasions. By and large the Mexican Revolution was about warring ideologies but it was also about agrarian concerns that ran deep among the Mexican Indian peasantry, “It is principally as a consequence of the struggle of the men of the South that the Mexican Revolution achieved the profound agrarian content which has marked it to this day. Although the distribution of land was their primary objective, the zapatistas also developed an integrated program for national economic, social and political reforms. This program possessed a clearly defined ideological orientation” (Millon 5).
Emiliano Zapata was born in Anenecuilco, Mexico. He was of the peasantry and his main goal as one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was to regain the lands unrightfully taken from his people. He fought to win the transfer of hacienda lands back to the peasants. Zapata’s cry mimicked the aims of the peasantry, Tierra y Libertad! (Land and Liberty!). When President Francisco Madero ordered federal troops to Morelo to oust Zapata’s forces, the Zapatista movement was born. Madero’s troops could not conquer Zapata and his army of Indians. He refused to lay down arms until Madero returned the lands back to the peasants. Annoyed and dissatisfied with Madero’s gradual and half-hearted reforms, Zapata originated a program of land reform known as Plan de Ayala which called for restoring all lands taken back to the peasants:
Signing a Plan de Ayala which Montano had compose...