LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013. My wife and I were having coffee this morning in our apartment in Chía, Colombia. We saw a few tiny raindrops speckle the concrete outside the window before us. “Está lloviznando,” she said.

       Her words slapped my mind back to the moment I first learned the word for “it’s starting to sprinkle.” Summer 1970, I’d just finished the first year of graduate school, and discovered I’d hoarded enough from my fellowship to get me the 300 miles to Mexico, maybe even stay there for the summer, if I didn’t eat much, and traveled “a ventones,” which we usually expressed by the universal gesture of sticking one’s thumb out into the wind. Hitchhiking.

       I carried one book: John Womack’s masterful history Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. I read the book as I hitched around Morelos, the state south of Mexico City where “El Caudillo del Sur,” the Chieftain of the South, El General Don Emiliano Zapato, had lived, fought, and died.

       What had jolted me back in time was a moment from that summer of 1970 when I had been sitting in the dirt beside the highway that crossed Morelos, waiting for my next ride. A Mexican peasant squatted beside me, also waiting for a ride.

       A few sparse raindrops made tiny puffs in the dust and disappeared, leaving not enough sign of their arrival to moisten anything, including us. My campesino acquaintance spoke, casually announcing the raindrops’ simultaneous arrival and disappearance into the roadside dust: “’sta llovisnando, he said.

       The moment didn’t seem significant, yet has stayed with me for 40+ years, because of the details it carried:sitting in roadside dust beside a Morelos highway, reading Womack’s book about Zapata’s life and death in and near the places were he had lived and died. Libraries are good, but this was better.

       A couple of weeks later, I had been to Zapata’s birthplace (Anenecuilco), and followed his hoofbeats  about Morelos. (He was a horseman, a general of the rebel cavalry. I don’t think he walked much). I spoke with some of the viejitos, the old ones, who had been alive during the 10 year conflagration that was the Mexican Civil war, 1910-1920. (I have moved many times since then, including losing my home in Oregon to the bank, in the process also losing nearly all my books, including Womack’s. So I apologize for not having those names at hand.)

       But Chinameca stuck. Buses didn’t go there, because few travelers did either. But trucks hauling livestock did, and one slowed beside the stockade while I stepped down with my mochila and waited for the dust of the departing truck to clear before walking up to the gate. The fort was something out of an old western movie, still very much in use. It was a square structure built of logs, big enough to enclose the soldiers’ barracks, a cookhouse, a tack room, and a stable, as I remember.

       A sergeant was in charge of the entire establishment. I approached him with my questions, told him I was a student following and studying the trail of Zapata’s life, and asked his advice about where I might find a room to rent for the night (while hoping he would offer something that was free). The answer to my question about a rental room was visually obvious before he answered: there was no hotel, rooming house, or anything of the sort in sight. The Chinameca stockade stood alone in the Mexican countryside. It was a military fort, and nothing else.) I then asked his permission to spread my GI poncho on the ground outside the stockade wall.

       Without losing his friendly demeanor, the sergeant shook his head. He said it was a bad idea for me to sleep outside, because of “los borrachitos,” drunks who hung around the stockade and mooched enough tortillas and bottles of oh-so-cheap muscatel wine from passers-by to keep them alive. He made it clear that their behavior couldn’t be vouched for; that thievery was the gentlest thing I could expect from them, and that as the night wore on, weapons would likely appears. Didn’t sound like a good night’s sleep to me. He said I should bring my mochila inside the fort, and spread my poncho on an empty bunk in the soldiers’ quarters. I happily complied.

       Chinameca was not a tourist destination. But the sergeant seemed mildly pleased with my interest in the history of the place, and not at all threatened by my inquiries. While he had nothing like a bookish preparation for questions about what had happened there, every Mexican who lived in the southern part of the country knew, or at least had a close idea about, what that history had been.

       On April 10, 1919, Zapata rode with some 100 of his men to Chinameca, to keep an appointment to negotiate a peace with opposing forces. The two sides agreed on a pact which promised safe passage to soldiers of both sides. Zapata and his men camped just outside the walls of the fortress. Unknown to them, the very rooftops of the fort were covered with opposition soldiers, lying flat on their bellies with loaded carbines, at point-blank range from anyone inside the fort, with the added military advantage of firing down on their targets.

       Shortly after dawn, at a pre-agreed signal, Zapata and his men rode through the gate of Chinameca. But instead of remaining open, per agreement, the gate was quickly shut behind them. The “neutral” opposing forces opened fire from their advantageous position on the rooftops just above Zapata and his soldiers.

       They were slaughtered, including their noble chieftain, El General Emiliano Zapata, El Caudillo del Sur: the Chief of the South.

       The night I spent in Chinameca, I slept on a Mexican Army cot, protected by the fortress walls, beneath the same roof that had hidden Zapata’s killers. (Between 1919 and 1970, it that roof probably been replaced once or twice.)

     That evening in the barracks, I read Womack’s account of the ambush that had taken place, literally, where I sat, walked, and lay down that night.