I need all the info on Emiliano Zapata as you can find?

Question

Whoever has the most info on Emiliano Zapata gets chosen as best answer. THANK YOU! *kisses* muah xoxooxoxoxoxoxoo

Answer 1

ZAPATA

It is hardly coincidence that the Chiapas rebels under Subcomandante Marcos call themselves Zapatistas and not Villistas or Carrancistas or Obregonistas or even Maderistas -- to name other illustrious figures from the Mexican Revolution. Of all the revolutionary leaders, Emiliano Zapata was the most radical and the most committed to social justice. Detractors say that Zapata was a semi-literate brigand who allowed himself to be co-opted by city-bred radical intellectuals. These made him look ridiculous by putting his by-line on pronunciamientos containing names and ideas with which he could not possibly have been familiar: Hegel, Marx, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Emerson and Whitman, the Gracchi, Brutus, Marie Antoinette, Fourierism, Fabian Socialism, etc. There was even more laughter when an appeal went out over Zapata's name to French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the World War I hero, that he use his "powerful moral influence" in support of "the cause of the Mexican people."

Is this picture accurate? Was Zapata simply an apolitical bush marauder who permitted a band of radical city slickers to manipulate him?

This perception requires closer scrutiny. Though a leader of peons, Zapata was not a peon himself. His father, Gabriel, was a small property owner and Emiliano grew up not in a choza (hut) but in a comfortable abode-and-stone house. Neither he nor his brother, Eufemio, ever had to work as day laborers on one of the big haciendas. At the outbreak of the Revolution he was a renowned horse trainer and had even been asked to manage the Mexico City stables of a wealthy Morelos sugar planter.

Where others might have been tempted to use this skill as a passport to social advancement, Zapata did not. Though a man of limited formal education, Zapata had a strong and well-developed political consciousness. Members of his family had fought against Spain in the Independence War and on the Liberal side in the in the War of Reform and against the French Intervention. As a young boy, Emiliano devoured stories told by older family members of their campaigns against the Reactionaries and the Imperialists. Knowing that Zapata would never sell them out, citizens of his home town of Anenecuilco elected him president of a council to defend their interests in September 1909, the year preceding the Revolution.

So Zapata was no stranger to ideological commitment, however shaky may have been his knowledge of Hegel and Voltaire. Though he enthusiastically joined Francisco Madero's rebellion against the old dictator Porfirio Diaz, by late fall of 1911, Zapata was completely disillusioned by what he saw as Madero's footdragging on land reform. On November 27 of that year he published the Plan de Ayala, still considered the most radical reform program in Mexican history. Written by a village schoolteacher named Otilio Montafio, it is described by historian and Zapata biographer John Womack as "garbled and rambling, without a hint of metropolitan grace." Wordy, repetitious and full of misspellings, it was considered a joke by Zapata's more sophisticated enemies in Mexico City. So much so that Madero gave Enrique Bonilla, editor of Mexico City's Diario del Hogar, enthusiastic permission to print the Plan. "Yes," said Madero, "publish it so everybody will know how crazy Zapata is."

This was a grave error. For all its stylistic defects, the Zapata-Montafio document contained provisions mandating a degree of social change that had never appeared in any other Mexican manifesto. Among other radical measures, the Plan de Ayala called for not only restoration to pueblos of lands they had lost through illegal expropriation but also for classification of landlords who opposed the Zapatista movement as "monopolises" whose property could be seized. Equally unprecedented were proposals for pensions to widows and orphans of those killed in the revolution and a provision that foes of Zapata under arms be classified not as war prisoners but as "traitors" subject to the death penalty.

This all took place before the urban intellectuals began flocking to the Zapatista movement. The Plan de Ayala was proclaimed at the end of 1911; the city radicals, migration began in May 1914. At the time, Mexico was under control of General Victoriano Huerta, the able but alcoholic and despotic professional soldier who overthrew Madero in 1913 and is widely believed to have masterminded his assassination.

In that late spring of 1914, Huerta's days were numbered. Revolutionary forces under Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregón and Pancho Villa were steadily advancing on Mexico City from the north. In June Huerta's forces would suffer the shattering defeat at Zacatecas that triggered his July 20 flight into exile.

In a desperate attempt to break up any potential focus of resistance in the capital, Huerta closed down the House of the World Worker in May. The House was a hotbed of radical activity and many of its members belonged to that previously mentioned group of left-wing urban intellectuals.

With the House's closure, a split developed among its former members. Some went underground in the capital, later to join Carranza and help organize the workers into the so-called "Red Battalions." Others escaped south into Morelos and joined Zapata.

Of the group that joined Zapata, best-known was Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama. A fiery orator, he was strongly influenced by anarchist Peter Kropotkin's creed of the good peasant. At the 1914 constitutional convention Soto y Gama had refused to write his name on a Mexican flag designed for the event, branding the flag a "symbol of clerical reaction."

Others who rallied to Zapata were Rafael Perez Taylor, Miguel Mendoza Schwerdtfeger and Octavio Jahn. Perez Taylor and Mendoza Schwerdtfeger were vaguely Marxist while the French-born Jahn was a syndicalist who had reportedly fought in the Paris Commune.

Why did Zapata welcome followers who were seemingly so out of sync with the earthy values of a nativist Mexican revolutionary movement? Possibly because of disillusionment with Otilio Montafio, author of the Plan de Ayala and Zapata's original intellectual guru. When Huerta overthrew Madero and seized power, Montafio had considered recognizing him. A year earlier he had suggested that he and Zapata should disguise themselves and flee the revolutionary struggle. In May 1917 Montafio was shot by a Zapatista firing squad. He had been found guilty of attempting to flee to territory controlled by Carranza, by now Zapata's enemy.

The gap left by the departure of Montafio and other rural intellectuals was filled by the new wave of urban intellectuals. For all their high-flown rhetoric they served Zapata well. Soto y Gama elaborated and refined Zapatista agrarian policy while Mendoza Schwerdtfeger served ably as a headquarters secretary between 1914-16. After Zapata's fatal ambush in 1919, almost all of these men joined Obregón's revolt against Carranza (who had masterminded Zapata's fall) and later played important roles in his administration.

Zapata's lack of formal education was amply counterbalanced by native shrewdness and intense ideological commitment. So the myth of sophisticated city intellectuals exploiting a peasant revolutionary is as threadbare as it is facile. As much as the eggheads who introduced exotic historical names into his communiques used Zapata, he used them.

Answer 2

Born August 8, 1879, in Anenecuilco, Morelos. Was a mediero (sharecropper) and horse trainer. Conscripted into the army for seven years attaining the rank of sergeant. As president of the village council, he campaigned for the restoration of village lands confiscated by hacendados. His slogan was "Tierra y Libertad." Zapata sided with Madero.

Between 1910 and 1919, Zapata continued his fight for land and liberty, rebelling against anyone who interfered with his Plan of Ayala which called for the seizure of all foreign owned land, all land taken from villages, confiscation of one-third of all land held by "friendly" hacendados and full confiscation of land owned by persons opposed to the Plan of Ayala.

On April 10, 1919, Zapata was tricked into a meeting with one of Carranza's generals who wanted to "switch sides." The meeting was a trap, and Zapata was killed as he arrived at the meeting.

Answer 3

Emiliano Zapata Salazar (August 8, 1879 – April 10, 1919) was a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, and which was initially directed against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He formed and commanded an important revolutionary force, the Liberation Army of the South.

He is considered to be one of the outstanding national heroes of Mexico; many Mexican popular organizations, including the Zapatistas, a current revolutionary movement based in the state of Chiapas, take their name from him. Towns, streets, and housing developments called "Emiliano Zapata" are common across the country and he has, at times, been depicted on Mexican banknotes. There are controversies on the portrayal of Emiliano Zapata and his followers, on whether they were bandits or revolutionaries. But in modern times Zapata is one of the most revered national heroes of Mexico. Conservative media nicknamed Zapata ‘The Attila of the South’. To many Mexicans, specifically the peasant and indigenous citizens, Zapata was a practical revolutionary who sought the implementation of liberties and agrarian rights outlined in the Plan de Ayala. He was a realist with the goal of achieving political and economic emancipation of the peasants in Southern Mexico, and leading them out of severe poverty.

Zapata has in the last few decades been recast as a quasi-religious icon as well, mostly within indigenous or Zapatista communities, where he is called "Votán Zapata." Votán (Wotán in modern Mayan spelling) is a Mayan god, who with his twin brother Ik'al was said to have descended from the mountains to teach the people to defend themselves. A part of Our Word is Our Weapon is dedicated to Votán Zapata.

Zapata was born to Gabriel Zapata and Cleofas Salazar in the small central state of Morelos, in the village of Anenecuilco (modern-day Ayala municipality). At the time Mexico was ruled by a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz, who had seized power in 1876.

The social system of the time was a sort of proto-capitalist feudal system, with large landed estates (haciendas) controlling more and more of the land and squeezing it away from independent communities of Native Americans (pueblos, "towns" in Spanish), who were then subsequently forced into debt slavery (peonaje) on the haciendas. Díaz ran local elections to pacify the peones and run a government that they could argue was self-imposed. Under Díaz, close confidants and associates were given offices in districts throughout Mexico. These offices became the enforcers of land reforms that concentrated the haciendas into fewer hands.

Zapata's family, although not enormously wealthy, still retained independence. They were never in danger of poverty, avoiding peonage and maintaining their own land (rancho). In fact the family had in previous generations been porfirista, that is, supporters of Díaz. Zapata himself always had a reputation for being a fancy dresser, appearing at bullfights and rodeos in his elaborate charro (cowboy) costume. Though his flashiness would usually have associated him with the rich hacendados who controlled the lands, he seems to have retained the admiration and even adoration of the people of his village, Anenecuilco, so that by the time he was 30 he was the head of the defense committee of the village, a post which made him the spokesman for the village's interests. He was directly elected to this position during the Autumn of 1909, just a year before the start of the revolution.

Zapata, who also spoke the indigenous language Nahuatl, was recognised as a leading figure of the largely indigenous Nahua community of Anenecuilco, and he quickly became involved in struggles for the rights of the Indians of Morelos. He was able to oversee the redistribution of the land from some haciendas peacefully but had problems with some others. He observed numerous conflicts between villagers and hacendados over the constant theft of village land, and in one instance saw the hacendados torch an entire village.


Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.For many years he campaigned steadily for the rights of the villagers, first establishing via ancient title deeds the claims of the villagers to disputed land, and then pressing the recalcitrant governor of Morelos into action. Finally, disgusted with the slow response from the government and the overt bias towards the wealthy plantation owners, Zapata began making use of armed force, simply taking over the land in dispute.

Answer 4

Best site I've seen is wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata.
(use his entire name...this site may cut off the full address).

If you need more info, just go to google.com and enter his name.

Good luck!

Answer 5

Look at my link!

Answer 6

Well, with a reward like that, why wouldn't we want to do your work?????

Answer 7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata