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Women in Revolutionary Movements in Latin America
Author(s): Jane S. Jaquette
Source: Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 35, No. 2,
Special Sections: Moving and the
Wife, Women in Latin America, (May, 1973), pp. 344-354
Published by: National Council on Family Relations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/350664
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Women in Revolutionary Movements
in Latin America
JANE S. JAQUETTE
Department of Political Science,
Occidental College
The image of the female revolutionary, dressed
in fatigues and carrying a gun, stands in stark
contrast to our North American view of the
passive, "oppressed" Latin American woman.
For that reason alone it would be interesting to
explore the role of the female guerrillera as a
significant aspect of the Latin American revolu-
tionary experience. Yet the implications of
female participation should be spelled out more
clearly. First, the act of taking up a gun and
entering a guerrilla band implies a new relation-
ship of equality with men and a consequent

change in patterns of role differentiation by
sex. Second, there is the effect of the inter-
national feminist movement today on the
development of new role models and institu-
tions. From the example of the Vietnamese
women to Bernadette Devlin and Angela Davis,
the female revolutionary has become a shared
symbol, one which transcends national differ-
ences. As Chris Camarano (1971:48) wrote in
her article on Cuban women:
... I have come to feel... the need for inter-
nationalism in the women's movement, as in all
revoluntionary movements. Most especially, it is
important for us to try to understand what
lessons there are for us in the continuing struggles
of women already living in revolutionary society.
The changes in the quality of their lives, the
recurring pitfalls, the necessity for a constant
offensive against material and attitudinal under-
development-all of these have meaning for us
because they speak directly to our own oppres-
sion and to the possibilities of our throwing it
off.
The international movement provides a forum
not merely for debates on revolutionary tactics,
but also for the invention and testing of new
patterns of social relationships, and thus be-
comes a factor in the speed and direction of
social change.
It is unfortunate that the information now
available on the participation of women in
revolutionary movements in Latin America is
extremely scarce.1 Due to the lack of informa-

1I did not cover Mexico, 1968 and after, current
MIR activities in Chile, nor did I consider Eva Peron
tion, this paper is, by necessity, an attempt to
draw together what little there is rather than to
provide a thoroughgoing analysis. Nonetheless,
I think it is useful to keep the following points
in mind:
First, there is a female revolutionary tradi-
tion in Latin America. I find this fact suf-
ficiently important to devote the first section
of the paper to a discussion of historical
antecedents to the role of women in modern
guerrilla movements.
Second, historically, the women who have
participated as guerrilleras have shared certain
characteristics: they are young, often in their
early twenties; they often come from upper-
middle-class, educated backgrounds; and they
are quite often wives or relatives of male
revolutionaries. Within the guerrilla operation
itself, certain tasks such as bearing messages,
spying, carrying contraband weapons, etc., have
been traditionally assigned to women, along
with the tasks of nursing and cooking. This
kind of role differentiation, as we. shall see
particularly in the case of Uruguay, is increas-
ingly coming under attack.
Third, there appears to be a link between
female participation in guerrilla movements and
the development of political statements and
platforms directly aimed at feminist. issues.

Historically this was the case in Argentina in
1810 and in Mexico after 1910. In the modern
guerrilla movements, there is also such a link
but it seems to be affected by the closeness of
the male revolutionary leadership to inter-
national revolutionary currents (which increases
awareness of feminist issues) as against the
degree to which the movement is aimed at the
peasant (which decreases the likelihood of
feminist planks in revolutionary platforms).
This question will be taken up again in the
concluding section.
With these analytical suggestions in mind, let
sufficiently feminist to include her in the'historical
section of the paper. I did check Pensamiento Critico
(Cuba), Granma (Cuba), Sucesos (Mexico), Punto
Final (Chile), and Politica (Mexico), as well as Le
Monde (1968-1971) and the New York Times
(1964-1971).
JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY May 1973 344
us look at the information available.
GUERRILLERAS IN THE
LATIN AMERICAN
REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION
In Latin American history, particularly dur-
ing the Independence period, we find women
who have organized guerrilla groups, have taken

up arms, both with guerrillas or regular troops,
and often have died heroically while upholding
their political principles. One of the first
women martyrs was Cecilia Tupac Amaru, sister
of Jose Gabriel Tupac Amaru, direct descen-
dent of the Inca rulers, who led a final
desperate rebellion of the Indians against
Spanish domination in 1780. When the attempt
failed, Cecilia, who had been one of the first to
support her brother, was led around, nude, on a
burro through the streets of Cuzco while being
whipped on the shoulders (Blomberg,
n.d.:49-51). She died later on a ship carrying
her to exile in Spain, and her body was thrown
into the sea.
The most famous female figure of the
Independence period is Juana Azurduy, wife of
Manuel Padilla, a caudillo who continued to
fight the Spanish after the patriot army had
been defeated by the royalists. History reports
that "there was no action in which Padilla was
not seen next to his wife, who was accom-
panied by a retinue of Amazons as brave as
their leader." And Juana, "jumping from her
spirited battle horse to her pack mule, sleeping
with her arms at her side and wearing her boots,
appearing here and disappearing there to harrass
the enemy constantly," inspired Alto Peru
(now Bolivia) to "vibrate with patriotic fervor"
(Sosa de Newton, 1967:54). In 1816 her
husband was killed, and Juana escaped,
wounded, and returned to fight the Spaniards
dressed in black and holding the rank of
lieutenant colonel. She died in poverty, unable
to collect her Army pension, in 1862 (Blom-

berg, n.d.: 114).
The Argentines claim many heroines of the
Independence, among them Juana Robles, a
slave, who in 1814 penetrated the defenses of
the city of Salta to bring word of the surrender
of Montevideo. Loreto Sanchez de Peon was
also a famous messenger and spy who reported
the numbers of royalist troops by a system
using grains of corn as she did not know how to
count. When the Spaniards realized that women
were actively supporting the patriots, there
were reprisals. Women were tied to cannons and
beaten, their goods were confiscated, and they
were often forced to pay large sums of money.
They were jailed and abused and many fled
with the patriot army rather than face the
Spaniards (Sosa de Newton, 1967:48-49).
In Nueva Granada (Colombia), two women
were active in revolutionary warfare and were
executed for their principles. Policarpa Salavar-
rieta, who fought in a number of battles, was
imprisoned and condemned to death (Diaz,
1968:363). During her last moments she tried
in vain to convince the native firing squad to
turn their guns against the Spanish. A woman
named Antonia Sanchez organized and supplied
the guerrillera of Coromoro before she was
betrayed by a friend (Blomberg, n.d.:66).
Much of the writing on women in the
Independence period is of the sentimental,
nationalist type. In a few cases, however, an
attempt is made to link female participation

with women's rights or the feminist movement.
For example, Lily Sosa de Newton (1967:37)
argues that the Revolution of May in Argentina
opened "new possibilities which until then had
not been seen nor expected," and that the
Revolution meant a "loosening of the chain"
that bound women "in double subjection to
political power and to their feminine condi-
tion" in an atmosphere of "new ideas, different
attitudes, and improvised values."
A similar argument has been made for the
Revolution of 1910 in Mexico by Frederick
Turner. It is his position that "the participation
of women in the Revolution led, during the
period of violence and after, to an ideological
change favorable to the emancipation of
women" (1967:603). In spite of the fact that
women did not obtain the right to vote in
national elections until 1958(!), certain signifi-
cant changes began to occur during the Revolu-
tion, including the breakdown of loyalty to the
family and of the isolation of women from
national events and the explicit appeal to
women as a political support group. The result
was a change of status for women which
eventually resulted in the creation of a women's
sector within the Partido Revolucionario Insti-
tutional (which still governs Mexico), the
increasing participation of women in higher
education, the professions, and the labor force
in general, and the creation of a new feminist
consciousness. In 1911 "hundreds of women"
signed a letter to interim president De la Barra
asking for the vote. The Liga Feminista
Cuauhtemoc asked "not only for the political

equality of women but also for complete
emancipation in their 'economic, physical,
intellectual and moral battle' " (p. 612). For-
eign correspondents commented on the "spec-
tacular role" women were playing in the
Revolution, and an Argentine journalist sought
JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 345 May 1973
to explain this unusual fact by pointing out
that "technical advances" made weapons both
"abundant" and "lighter and easier to carry"
(p. 611).
A number of women held the ranks of
sergeant and lieutenant and one woman, Mar-
garita Neri, commanded a group of 400 Indians.
Elisa Acuna, who began with Flores Magon in
1903, fought with Emiliano Zapata until he was
killed (p. 614). As during the Independence
period, women were most often active as
messengers and spies and as cooks. Wives and
children of revolutionaries often became in-
volved by being used as hostages-Huerta's men,
for example, placed wives and children of
revolutionaries on the front of trains to prevent
ambushes (p. 609). It is interesting that in
post-Revolutionary Mexico, as in Cuba under
Fidel, the most powerful women were the
presidents' private secretaries. One of them,
Venustiano Carranza's secretary Hermila
Galinda de Topete, is said to have had an
important positive influence on divorce legisla-
tion (p. 619).

A very different revolutionary movement
which never gained power but which survived
years of persecution through the creation of a
large, clandestine organization, is the APRA
party. The program of the Alianza Popular
Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) emphasized
the integration of the Indian, the need for state
control of the economy, and resistance to
North American imperialism, and reflected an
attempt to apply Marxist thinking to the Latin
American reality. As APRA was the archetypi-
cal "populist" party in Latin America for many
years, it is interesting to note that the party
explicitly recognized women as an essential
element of the revolutionary struggle and
developed a "feminist platform" which in-
cluded demands for female suffrage, election
and appointment of women to government
posts, equal pay for equal work, maternity
benefits, and guarantees of civil rights to
married women (p. 5).
In 1934 the party published a document,
Aprismo Feminino Peruano, (Meneses, 1934) to
examine the decline in female participation. In
the 1920's, when APRA was a pan-continental
movement, women imparted "training, doc-
trine, and revolutionary consciousness" to
radical groups in the host countries (p. 7). Yet
prior to APRA's stand, the party noted, women
were considered "unfit for activities other than
the domestic ones." It pointed out that, for the
female aprista, participation had meant a
"singular, evolutionary process toward the
acquisition of a conscience of struggle ....

Insulted, persecuted, jailed, she broke the
bonds of repression" and "stimulated the faith
and the spirit which never diminished among
APRA prisoners" (p.7). The document con-
cluded that the decline of support resulted
from changes in political "fashion" to which
women would naturally be more "sensitive." It
noted the failure of the original middle-class
women activists to establish closer ties with
working women (pp. 24-34; 39-40).
WOMEN IN GUERRILLA
MOVEMENTS: 1953-1971
Cuba
Much has been written about the role of
women in the Cuban revolution itself (Franqui,
1965; Sutherland, 1969), on the changing role
of women in Cuba as a result of the revolution,
and of a conscious attempt by Fidel and other
members of the elite to transform the status of
women in Cuban society (Camarano, 1971:
Chertov, 1970; Purcell, 1971; Olesen, 1971).
Because Cuba has been in so many other ways a
model for revolutionary movements elsewhere
in Latin America, it is worthwhile to review
some of the facts to provide a basis for
comparison.
The three most important women in Cuba
today all participated in the 26th of July
Movement and fought in the Sierra Maestra.
Haydee Santamaria was taken along as a nurse
in the original attack on the Moncada barracks

and imprisoned along with the rest of that
group. She fought in the Sierra, then was sent
to Miami to organize financial support in the
United States. After the revolution she was
appointed by Fidel to the ORI (Integrated
Revolutionary Organizations) National Direc-
torate (Karol, 1970:247n) and became the
director of the Casa de las Americas,
Celia Sanchez, Fidel's "inseparable compan-
ion and confidant" (Franqui, 1965:10), helped
organize the 26th of July Movement in the
cities, fought in the Sierra, and became Fidel's
second-in-command. After the revolution she
continued to act as Fidel's administrative
secretary and as Secretary of the Council of
Ministers (Franqui, 1965:10, 18). Vilma Espin
helped plan the 1956 attack on Santiago,
fought in the Sierra, and later took the job as
head of the Federation of Cuban Women
(FMC) with the task of mobilizing Cuban
women into the work force and into the
revolution. Yet it is significant that all these
women are closely linked to important male
leaders-Celia as secretary to Fidel, Vilma as the
wife of Rauil Castro, and Haydee as the wife of
Armando Hart Davalos, party leader.
There is no question that the revolutionary
regime has been dedicated to mobilizing women
and that, as a result, the situation of women in

Cuba has changed drastically from pre-revolu-
tionary days. There is greatly increased partici-
pation of women in the labor force, and this in
turn has led to changes in the institution of the
family. Many women are freed from all-day
child care by a network of day care centers that
by 1968 were caring for nearly 41,000 children,
Sexual mores and female patterns of depen-
dency are being changed by the fact that
contraceptives are readily available (although
not actively promoted by the regime), that
abortion is legalized,2 and divorce is "free on
mutual consent." One of the major targets of
regime criticism has been the traditional hus-
band who tries to control his wife's behavior to
conform to traditional views. In his famous
speech on party militancy (March, 1963), Che
Guevara spoke of the husband who would not
let his wife, who was an official at the Ministry
of Industries, make trips without accompanying
her: "This is a boorish example of discrimina-
tion against women. Does a woman, perchance,
have to accompany her husband each time he
has to go into the interior or any other place so
she can watch him, lest he succumb to
temptation or something of the sort?" (Gerassi,
1968:241)
It is not only the attitudes of husbands
toward their wives which the regime is trying to
change, but also the attitudes of parents toward
their children. The mobilization of young
women into the 1961 Literacy Campaign and
other activities has threatened parents who did
not want their daughters exposed to the
dangers that lurk outside the home. The regime

responded to this concern by having the women
live together in groups in the rural areas, rather
than with the peasants as the men did, and by
appealing to youth to recognize the regime's
responsibility to their parents (Olesen,
1971:550-551).
Key to the new mobilization of women is the
Federation of Cuban Women itself, dedicated
to preparing women "educationally, politically
and socially to participate in the Revolution"
(Espin in Purcell, 1971:10). The FMC, with a
membership of 54 per cent of the adult female
2According to Sutherland (1969) it is legal only
when contraceptive methods have failed or when
reported within a month of conception. Parents are
notified if the girl is unmarried (p. 178). Oleson
(1971) reports that the pill, formerly not approved by
the regime due to health hazards associated with it, is
now being considered for future use.
population by 1970, has been responsible for
setting up the day care centers, organizing a
number of educational programs, including
special courses for domestic workers and
peasant women, and for the management of a
number of agricultural projects. Through its
educational programs and its magazine, Mu-
jeres, the FMC has been a central force in
creating-and directing-female consciousness.
The Federation has consistently taken a strong
line, creating new images of women as workers
and revolutionary fighters, for, as Vilma Espin
has stated, Cuba "cannot cease to be under-
developed while all women able to work are not

doing so." For the FMC a job liberates women
"from domestic slavery and the heavy burden
of prejudice" (Purcell, 1971:10). On the other
hand, "women are still expected to have
primary or sole responsibility for domestic and
child care chores in the home" (pp. 17, 18).
Occupational stereotyping still occurs with no
attempt made to mobilize males into tradition-
ally female-dominated industries such as food,
tobacco, and textiles. "Only in those tradition-
ally male occupations where sufficient male
labor is unavailable, has the regime made a
special effort to recruit female workers" (pp.
18-19). Women administrators are almost
always placed in jobs that involve supervising
other women, not male workers. On questions
of sexual mores, the FMC "has been generally
silent.. ." (Sutherland, 1969:186).
In contrast to the radical early period of the
Russian Revolution, the family has never come
under direct attack in Cuba. Olesen notes that
the regime "encourages common law couples to
marry" in special mass weddings. Legalized
unions have greater advantages with regard to
pensions, support, inheritance, and even land
titles (1971:551).
In spite of these limitations, Cuba is at the
forefront in creating new institutions based on
the premise of equality for women. This
commitment has penetrated the ideology of the
top elite as well. In his "Santa Clara" speech
(Castro and Jenness, 1970), Fidel argued that
women, like the black population of Cuba, had
been doubly liberated "as part of the exploited

sector of the society" and "not only as workers
but also as women, in that society of exploita-
tion." Second, he argued that the function of
reproduction, while important to society, has
"enslaved [women] to a series of chores within
the home ...." In order to reach the social
goal of liberating women, "we must have thou-
sands of children's day nurseries, thousands
of primary boarding schools, thousands of
school dining halls, thousands of workers' din-
ing halls, [and] thousands of centers of social
services..." (pp. 7-8). It should be noted that
this view of female emancipation does not rest
on the premise that sex role distinctions should
be eliminated, but rather on the professionaliza-
tion of female household work.
In contrast, Che has argued (Gerassi,
1968:241-242) that female participation in the
Revolution is inevitably linked to psychological
factors as well; that "the liberation of women
should consist in the achievement of their total
freedom-their inner freedom. It is not a matter
of a physical restriction which is placed on
them to hold them back from certain activities.
It is also the weight of previous traditon."
In retrospect, Alistair Hennessey has argued
that "it is not accidental that the Cubans
should have devoted so much energy to
women's organizations.... Without the sup-

port of women, especially in traditionally
Catholic societies, social revolution would be a
chimera." Cuban revolution has been among
the least exportable, and least debated, ele-
ments of the Cuban example.
Colombia
In the five rural guerrilla movements which
followed in the wake of the Cuban success,
those of Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia
and Bolivia, I have found evidence in all cases
of some female participation, although it was
very limited except in Peru and in the special
case of Bolivia. However, in only one of these,
the Colombian, was there any specific political
statement about women. This occurs in the
Platform of the United Front, drawn up by the
revolutionary priest, Camilo Torres, and an-
nounced prior to his joining the guerrillas.
Article 10. of the Platform (May-22, 1965)
reads as follows: "Women will participate on an
equal footing with men, in the economic,
political and social activities of the country"
(Gerassi, 1971:Ch. 39). Apparently Article 10
did not appear in the original draft of the
statement, written in February. According to
John Gerassi, this draft was circulated "to his
friends, to some trusted political comrades, and
to the few Communists he knew well. They
discussed it with him, suggested a few changes
and one serious addition-a clause on the rights
of women" (1971:26). Torres' biographer,
German Guzman, has argued that the Platform
was drawn up following studies by committees

from "the various progressive groups" in Co-
lombia based on research teams which Camilo
had organized originally as a seminary student
in France. A number of women were active on
those teams.3
While the Platform of the United Front was
an urban, even international, document, it was
apparently consistent with the views of the
guerrilla leadership, as evidenced by Camilo's
meeting with guerrilla leader Fabio Vasquez
Castana in early July. At that meeting the two
men "agreed on both strategy and tactics,"
including the buildup of urban support net-
works through the United Front. The published
version of the Platform appeared in Frente
Unido, the Front's magazine, in August. In
October the "Message to Women," which
denounced the exploitation of women in
Colombia, was published, just before Camilo
left Bogota to join the armed struggle (Gerassi,
1971:Ch. 39).
On February 15, 1966, Camilo was killed at
Patio de Cemento along with four guerrillas
who tried to come to his aid. One of the less
reliable reports of the incident indicated that
among the guerrillas there was a woman "who
wore blue jeans and who carried a rifle which
she began to fire against the army patrol." She
was wounded in the hand while escaping into
the forest (Guzman, 1969:250-251). In Janu-
ary, 1968, the Peking-oriented People's Libera-
tion Army, a new guerrilla group, declared:

Countless women from the people could only
rely on poverty, slavery and prostitution. Now
their path is clear and bright, they can join the
ranks of one of the auxiliary units of the EPL,
helping with their own hands to build a true
fatherland, and covering themselves with glory.
[Gott, 1970:Appendix 9]
Peru
Two groups who were unable to unite their
efforts (Bejar, 1969) opened guerrilla fronts in
Peru in 1965, the Movimiento de Izquierda
Revolucionaria (MIR) led by Luis de la Puente
and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN)
under Hector Bejar. Both drew up revolution-
ary statements, although Bejar writes that in
the case of the ELN "not much effort" was put
into the task as "most members felt that the
Left had already drawn up enough programs
without their writing yet another one" (Bejar,
1969:61). Neither platform refers to emancipa-
tion of women (Bejar, 1969; Mercado, 1967).
However, it appears that there were women
3Gerassi (1971) emphasizes the influence of
Camilo's mother, Isabel Restrepo Gaviria, whom he
describes as "a feminist who often took to the streets
to demonstrate against her sex's inequalities..." (p.
15).
fighting with at least one MIR unit, and the

imprisonment of the wives of MIR leaders by
the government aroused international concern.
On October 8, 1965, the Peruvian weekly
Oiga reported a clash between the army and 45
guerrillas of the "Tupac Amaru" front. This
group was accompanied by various women,
some with their children and others "authentic
guerrilleras who fought shoulder to shoulder
with the men." In the skirmish one woman
(Aquila) was killed with nine men, and seven
women were captured. Their leader, Guillermo
Lobat6n, was apparently killed on January 7,
1966 (Gott, 1970:272-273).
Meanwhile, the government had imprisoned a
number of wives of guerrilla leaders in a prison
at Chorrillos including the wives of Luis de la
Puente and Guillermo Lobaton. Little notice of
this was taken in the press.4 In February the
women prisoners sent a letter (Caretas, Feb.
1-14, 1966) protesting their imprisonment for
over seven months as contrary to "human rights
and ethical principles." They further asked for
official proof that Lobaton and other members
of the "Tupac Amaru" had been killed, and
accused the government of holding them
illegally as hostages. The women demanded that
they be informed of the accusations against
them, and they announced a hunger strike to
begin on February 13.
On February 17 Oiga published a cable from
the International Federation of the Rights of
Man protesting the "arbitrary detention of
seven wives of guerrilla leaders without trial and

without informing them of the accusations
against them in more than a half year of
imprisonment." The cable was signed by a
number of European intellectuals including
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The
hunger strike was called off when some of their
demands were met; and they were later released
(Oiga, March 4, 1966).
An article by Jacqueline Eluau de Lobaton
later appeared in the Chilean fidelista journal,
Punto Final, recalling Lobaton's ties with the
peasants and questioning whether he could still
be alive, as the Peruvian military had never
proven his death. The need of the revolutionary
Left to keep its leaders alive is met by the
creation of legends. In the creation of such a
legend around the figure of Guillermo Lobaton,
Jacqueline has become one of the most well
known of the Latin American guerrilla
heroines.
4Those named were Mercedes de Fernando Gasco,
Nelly Arias Escalante, Hilda Galvez, and Jacqueline
Eluau de Lobaton.
Venezuela and Guatemala
Evidence of the participation of women in
guerrilla activities in Venezuela and Guatemala,
two countries which were the first to experi-
ence the organization of guerrilla fronts in
response to Fidel's success in Cuba, is scarce
indeed. In Venezuela there is an account of a
girl who participated in the hijacking of a plane
in November, 1963, along with other "teenage"

students. The incident, which Richard Gott
described as a "publicity stunt," involved the
distribution of FALN (Armed Forces of Na-
tional Liberation) pamphlets over the town of
Ciudad Bolivar followed by an escape to
Trinidad. There the authorities were unwilling
to grant political asylum, and the students were
returned to Venezuela where they were charged
with air piracy (Gott, 1970:129).
The most famous of the women involved in
revolutionary activities in Venezuela is Eliza-
beth Burgos, who has received attention largely
because she is the wife of French Journalist and
revolutionary theoretician, Regis Debray. They
were married while Debray was being held
prisoner in Camiri, Bolivia, after he had been
captured and accused of helping Chq's forces
there in 1967 (Newsweek, Feb. 23, 1968).
Neither the Venezuelan nor the Guatemalan
revolutionary programs mention the issue of
emancipation, although the FLN (Venezuela)
mentions women as one sector in a broad
united front. In Guatemala, Yon Sosa and the
"Trotskyite" MR-13 movement explicitly ap-
pealed to students who often joined in the
battle as "weekend guerrillas." There were
women among those who fought. It is interest-
ing that the FALN program (Caracas, 1963)
emphasized the need to protect the Venezuelan
family (Gott, 1970:121), a point which also
appears in the MIR program in Peru and in
Camilo Torres' "Message to Women."
In Guatemala Kris Yon Cerna, niece of Yon

Sosa, and Eunice Campiran de Aguilar Mora,
wife of a Mexican student, were both "beaten
to death with clubs" after a police raid on a
high level meeting of Communist leadership and
sympathizers in Guatemala City on March 5,
1966. The meeting had been called to resolve
disputes that had arisen after the Moscow-
influenced Guatemalan Workers' Party (PGT)
decided to support a moderate presidential
candidate for the 1966 elections rather than
back the policy of armed struggle to which the
guerrilla group under Luis Turcios Lima (FAR)
was committed (Gott, 1970:71). The split
between the party and the guerrillas is just one
of the many examples of fatal division among
the groups on the Left which undermined the
guerrilla effort in Guatemala and elsewhere.
Aside from the two women who were in the
automobile accident when Turcios Lima was
killed on October 2, 1966,5 there are two
women whose names are linked to the Guate-
malan guerrilla effort. The first is Rogelia Cruz
Martinez, a former Guatemalan beauty queen,
who was killed by a rightist vigilante group
because of her well-known "left wing contacts"
(Giniger, 1968; Gott, 1970:86). The second
woman is Marian Peter Bradford, a Maryknoll
nun, who worked along with radical priests Art
and Thomas Melville. While the priests worked
on changing conditions and developing political

consciousness at the remote rural center of
Huehuetenango,6 she became the center of a
student movement at the university in Guate-
mala City which "gradually turned to the
underground guerrilla movement" (Common-
weal, Feb. 2, 1968). The Melvilles were
expelled from Guatemala in December, 1967,
as the cooperation of priests and nuns with the
guerrilla movement threatened the continued
existence of the Maryknoll mission in Guate-
mala. All of these women were linked to the
urban political network rather than the rural
fighting base of the movement.
The Urban Guerrilla Movement:
Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay
Following the death of Che in 1967 and a
series of defeats experienced by the rural
guerrilla movements in Peru and elsewhere, the
Left began to search for a new revolutionary
strategy that would not revolve around the
rural foco which was vulnerable to army
repression. It is at this time that the urban
guerrilla alternative began to take hold, most
notably in Argentina, Brazil, and above all
Uruguay. The chief theorist- for the urban
movement was a Brazilian, Carlos Marighela, a
former Communist Party member whose
"Handbook of Urban Guerrilla Warfare" and
other essays outline the strategy and tactics of
the urban struggle (Marighela, 1971). The urban
guerrilla movement in Brazil as elsewhere does
not discourage the participation of women, and
Marighela has written that many women who

5The two were an 18-year-old student, Silvia
Yvonne Flores Letona, who died, and "Tita," who
survived. See Gott (1970:72) and Newsweek, October
17, 1966.
6Huehuetenango was referred to by one Guate-
malan official as "the Maryknoll Republic of Huehue-
tenango," but it was clearly not a guerrilla base. See
Commonweal, August 9, 1968, September 20, 1968,
and February 2, 1968.
have joined the guerrillas "have proven them-
selves amazingly good and tenacious fighters,
especially during raids on banks and barracks,
and when in prison" (1971:97).
Most of the evidence of female participation
in the movement in Brazil comes from the
reports of prisoners who have been released as a
result of guerrilla kidnappings and from reports
of torture of political prisoners in Brazilian
jails. On January 25, 1970, Le Monde reported
the release of a nun, Sister Maurina Borgha de
Silviera, Mother Superior of the convent of
Ribeirao-Preto (Sao Paulo state) who was
accused of "having authorized terrorists to use
the convent as a base of operations" (Gott,
1971:15). Of 70 prisoners who were freed and
sent to Chile in January, 1971, 6 were women.
Two gave reports of being tortured in prison to
the press (New York Times, Jan. 15-16,1971).
In March Le Monde reported the trial in Sao
Paulo of Yara Spadini, a Brazilian social
worker, who was charged with "carrying sub-
versive material." When she replied that the
accusations against her had been invented and

that she had not been informed even of what
the charges were prior to her appearance in the
courtroom, cheers broke out in the audience
and the judge ordered the court cleared (Le
Monde, March 10, 1971)..
On February 26, 1970, two letters appeared
in the New York Review of Books describing
the tortures being used in the prisons and
signed by prisoners themselves. The first de-
scribes specific tortures in detail; the second,
from women prisoners being held at Ilha das
Flores, listed the names of 16 women7 who had
been tortured by electric shocks and other
methods, stating that the tortures "are known
to the commanding officers and all the military
personnel" serving at the prison. The letter
declared that "threats of reprisals and even
death" had kept them from speaking out
before, but that "statements by the President
of the Republic and the Minister of Justice, as
well as reports by the local and international
press, make us believe that we are more
protected against such reprisals." All of these
women except one were in their early twenties
7The women are Zil6a Resnick, Rosanne Resnick,
Ina de Souza Madeiros, Maria Candida de Souza
Gouveia, Maria Mota de Lima Alvarez, Marijane Viera
Lisboa, Marcia Savaget Fiani, Solange Maria Santana,
Ilda Brandle Siegl, Maria Elo6dia Alencar, Priscilla
Bredariol, Vania Esmanhoto, Victoria Pamplona,
Dorma Tereza de Oliveira, Marta Maria Klagsbrunn,
and Arlinda . Some biographical material
on each is provided in the letter (New York Review of
Books, February 26, 1970).

and many were married to men who were also
being held and tortured.
There is hardly any information on women
in the Argentine movement. Nonetheless, the
New York Times reported that "women fre-
quently participate in guerrilla operations and
are often used as decoys." In one case, "an
apparently pregnant woman waiting inside a
bank produced a machine gun to take charge of
a large robbery" (New York Times, Feb. 19,
1971). In another, a policeman was killed by
the guerrillas after he bent down to examine a
splinter in the foot of a "pretty girl" on the
beach.
The urban guerrilla movement about which
the most is known is the Tupamaro movement
in Uruguay (the name is taken from the Inca,
Tupac Amaru) organized under the leadership
of Rauil Sendic. Reports issued by the move-
ment indicate that a large number of women
have taken part in robberies, kidnappings, and
other operations,8 including an assault on the
Women's Prison which freed 12 female revolu-
tionaries. Among these was Lucia Topolanski,
who later was credited with being one of the
leaders in the kidnapping of British ambassador
Geoffrey Jackson. The lawyer for the Tupa-
maros, Marie Esther Giglio, is also a woman (Le
Monde, English Weekly Ed., Feb. 3, 1971).

Given the evidence of considerable female
participation, it is significant that the Tupa-
maros, alone among guerrilla groups, have
developed a detailed position on "revolutionary
women" (Punto Final, November 9, 1971). In
this statement the Tupamaros point out that
women have been disadvantaged by a "classist"
education which avoids physical training and
"limits, over a period of time, their creativity,
their initiative, and even their aggressivity."9 As
a result, a woman becomes "a spectator to a
history built by men." Given this educational
and cultural discrimination against women, the
Tupamaros then argue:
It is essential for the militant woman to find in
her own revolutionary comrades the just under-
standing of her limitations, in order that her
revolutionary role be efficacious and in order that
Q
8A list of women who have participated in these
operations includes: Susana Pintos, Maria Teresa
Labrocea Rabellino, Corita Devita Decuadra, Silvia
Maria Duran Nunez, Alicia Renee Rey Morales, Edith
Moraes A. de Rodriguez, Nelly Graciela Jorge Panzera,
Ana Maria Tetti Izquierdo, Lucia Topolansky
Saavedra, Maria Elena Topolansky de Martinez
Platero.
9This is taken directly from the Tupamaro docu-
ment, Actas Tupamaros. Buenos Aires: 1971.
the work of the group overcome prejudices so

that there will no longer exist "male" jobs and
"female" jobs, but rather the necessary com-
plementarity which the revolutionary task as a
whole requires. Thus, in the most risky and
complex politico-military operations of the Tupa-
maros, the woman combatant has been inserted
at an increasingly higher level.
In a published interview a Tupamaro was
asked about the role of women in the move-
ment. The reply was: "First let me tell you, a
woman is never more equal to a man than
behind a .45 pistol" (Costa, 1971:195).
Bolivia
I have left the story of "Tania" who was
with Che's group in Bolivia until last, both
because it is the most interesting and detailed in
terms of available information, and because it
can be used to illustrate the way in which
journalists have reported female participation in
guerrilla movements. Since her death in August
of 1967, Tania has become a revolutionary
heroine in Cuba. Her activities in Che's group
and the story of her death appear in most
accounts of Che's experiences in Bolivia. A
biography has been drawn together from letters
and other documents and has been published in
English (Rojas and Calderon, 1971).
Tania was born Tamara Haydee Bunke Bider,
daughter of East Germans who had fled from
Hitler's Germany to Argentina, on November
19, 1937. She and her family returned to East
Germany after the war, when Tamara was 14,
and there she joined a number of Communist

youth organizations. She began to learn to
shoot at an early age and later became a
shooting instructor in the GDR Association for
Sports and Skills. In 1958 she requested
permission to return to Argentina, her place of
birth, arguing that, as a Marxist-Leninist, "it is
natural for me to want to spend my life fighting
as well in one country as another ..." (Rojas
and Calderon, 1971:15). In 1960 Tamara
received a long-awaited invitation to go to
Cuba. There she worked first for ICAP (Insti-
tuto Cubano de Amistad de los Pueblos), as an
interpreter for the Ministry of Education, and
as an "information disseminator" for the
Federation of Cuban Women. She joined her
local block Committee for the Defense of the
Revolution and was allowed to join the militia.
In 1969 she joined a discussion group "to
study the Argentine situation" and the possibil-
ity of revolution there. One of her friends from
that group described her relationship with
Tamara: "We'd talk all day long. What about?
Armed struggle (constantly), the need for
training, the need for women to participate as
guerrillas in the armed struggle. Both of us were
rather obsessed with this. And Tamara, espe-
cially, did everything possible to find ways to
participate in the guerrilla struggle" (pp.
100-101). According to her biography, March,
1963, marked the end of a month-long clear-

ance process in which the Cuban revolution-
aries determined that she "was needed in
future activities" to support revolutions in the
Third World. They explained to her that these
would include "appraising and recruiting per-
sons qualified for the performance of diversi-
fied work in the revolutionary struggle," and
she would "receive mail; deliver messages;
collect medicines and food supplies; organize a
clandestine network to handle supplies and
communications; study urban or suburban
zones for future action; obtain information of
the political, economic and military capacity of
governments to be fought against; find out the
extent of Yankee imperial penetration of those
governments; and be ready to take up arms
when the moment for action came" (pp.
100-101).
From that moment Tamara-Tania entered a
period of intense training, first in Cuba, then in
Western Europe where she traveled to gain the
background for an effective cover identity. In
November, 1964, she went to Bolivia where she
established an identity as Laura Gutierrez
Bauer, an ethnologist. For two years she
worked to gain access to the highest levels of
Bolivian society and government officials and
to establish a communications network which
would provide urban contacts for the projected
rural foco. She was successful at both tasks
(Rojas and Calderon, 1971; Harris, 1970).
Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas, who was
responsible for turning Che's diary over to Fidel
and for exposing the CIA operation in Bolivia,
reported after Tania's death that she had spent

a "long time working in the most exclusive
circles of Bolivian 'high society' and politics
without anyone's suspecting her revolutionary
role" (Rojas and Calderon, 1971:196).10 For
two months before the guerrillas began assemb-
ling in rural Bolivia, she was able to gather and
report political and military information, and
she later communicated with them in part by
means of an "advice to the lovelorn" radio
10See also Harris (1970), p. 74. At one point she
married (and later divorced) a Bolivian student in
order to obtain Bolivian citizenship. Her diary notes
that "such an eventuality had been considered before
she left, and she had been given permission to take
that extreme measure, should it be necessary" (Rojas
and Calder6n, 1971:153).
program, broadcast in code out of Cocha-
bamba.
Tania made two visits to the guerrilla camp
prior to the one in which, due to unforseen
circumstances, she was forced to stay with the
guerrillas permanently. On that occasion she
was escorting Carlos Bustos, an Agrentine
contact of Che's, and Regis Debray to the main
camp at Nancahuazu ranch. This was against
Che's explicit instructions that she not do
anything to endanger her cover. To complicate
matters, Che was not in camp but away on a
long training march. By the time he returned,
on March 10, 1967, the visitors had already
been there two weeks, and on March 27 Che
reported in his diary that the presence of Tania
in the camp had become known to the army

through the reports of deserters (1971:198).
Tania had no choice but to remain. A
guerrilla comrade, Pombo, described her as
"stoic" and said that "she refused any special
treatment" (p. 200). Nonetheless, she and two
other members of the group became sick and
developed high fevers. For that reason they
were left in the rear guard group, led by
Joaquin, when Che split his forces. Joaquin's
entire group was killed in an ambush on August
30, after being betrayed to the army by a
peasant. 1
The National Liberation Army operating out
of Nancahuazui never issued a program, but its
proclamation of April, 1967, contained a
statement that appealed to the tradition of
revolutionary heroes and heroines in Bolivia,
mentioning among others, the name of Juana
Azurduy (Mercier Vega, 1968:14). It has been
said that Che's group failed in part because it
was isolated from the peasants. The appeal to
feminine heroines, and other elements of the
statement, are clear indications that the guer-
rilla group viewed itself, as Tania did in 1958,
as part of a self-conscious, world-wide revolu-
tionary movement, not as a force arising out of,
or even directed toward, immediate local
concerns of the peasants.
Conclusions
At the beginning of the paper I offered a
cautious generalization: that the presence of
feminist planks in revolutionary platforms

could be linked to the participation of female
guerrilla fighters, but that this relationship was
modified to some degree by the relationship
between the guerrilla leadership and the inter-
11Another woman, Loyola Guzman, a university
student in La Paz, was also part of the urban support
network for Che's group (See the Nation, November
20, 1971).
national Left, on the one hand, and its
closeness to the peasants on the other. Let us
review the evidence. The strongest feminist
political orientation occurs in Cuba after the
revolution, in Colombia and in Uruguay. In
Cuba and Uruguay, there was also a high level
of female participation; this was not true in
Colombia in the sense of guerrilla participation.
What inspired Camilo Torres was clearly the
international milieu, although women were
identified in his study groups and among his
intellectual contacts. In Colombia there is
evidence also that feminist planks may be
becoming more popular in rural guerrilla plat-
forms, which may be due to imitation. Uru-
guay's guerrillas are unique among urban groups
in the development of a full revolutionary
program; thus statements about Brazil and
Argentina, both having international links and
some female participation, would be premature.
Guatemala and Venezuela represent peasant-
oriented platforms with no specific references

to women and with minor female participation.
Feminist issues do not appear to have been
salient to peasants. Bolivia has already been
discussed as a case of an internationally derived
platform, appealing to a "female revolutionary
tradition" which has some relevance in Cuba
but not, I would suggest, in Bolivia. The real
anomaly is Peru where, despite evidence of
considerable female participation, the platform
of the MIR limited itself to a statement on the
family, a theme which suggests a traditional
orientation toward male and female roles.
Epilogue
There remain certain unsolved questions
about Tania's role in Bolivia which are not dealt
with in her biography but which are raised by
the following articles which appeared in News-
week (July 29, 1968):
For months Tania and Che were hounded by the
Bolivian Army, and finally, in two separate
battles, Che and Tania (who was reported to be
five months pregnant) were killed. According to
one theory, Tania was loyal to Moscow (estab-
lished while she was still living in the GDR)-and
not to Che-until her death, and might even have
intended to betray him. But some more generous
U.S. officials wondered whether Tania's cold
heart might not have been warmed by Che at the
end.
To be correct, this story would have to have
Tania become pregnant just after her arrival in
the guerrilla camp, a very well-timed bit of

fertility; and Che's rule against guerrillas taking
mistresses would have had to be broken by Che
himself (Rojas and Calderon, 1971:198-199).
Further, its plausibility rests on the notion of
female dependence: either Tania is a slave to
Moscow or a slave to Che, and in neither case is
there room for the view that she might have a
revolutionary commitment of her own, as the
years of lonely work from 1963 to 1966 surely
suggest.
Richard Gott writes of the "stories about
Tania" that:
It has frequently been maintained that Tania was
a Russian spy. Some stories go so far as to suggest
that she was Guevara's lover and that she was
responsible for the betrayal of the guerrilla force.
There is not a shadow of evidence for these
charges, and there seems little doubt that the
story was invented by the CIA. [Gott,
1970:314]
How fitting that U.S. officials should be
credited for "generosity" to Tania in a story
they themselves invented! The CIA source Gott
cites is supported by Richard Harris who
reported that former Interior Minister Arguedas
"recounted how he had planted an article for
the CIA in the Bolivian press which falsely
reported that Tania had been a Soviet spy
operating under orders to sabotage Che's
guerrilla operation" (Harris, 1970:193). Gott
has traced the report that Tania was Che's
mistress to a "highly sensational and inaccurate

piece" by Daniel James who "apparently
invented" the story (Gott, 1970:314).
Tania once complained about how difficult it
was to be a woman alone in a capitalist country
where, if you were out on the streets at night,
you would be taken for a prostitute (Rogas and
Calder6n, 1971:173). It is ironic that, even
after her death, she received the same treatment
from the "capitalist"-one is tempted to add
"sexist"-press.
REFERENCES
Blomberg, Hector Pedro
n.d. Mujeres de la historia mexicana; Buenos
Aires:Libreria y Editorial L.V. Zanetti.
Camarano, Chris
1971 "On Cuban women." Science and Society
35 (Spring).
Castro, Fidel and Linda Jenness
1970 Women in the Cuban Revolution. New
York:Pathfinder.
Che Guevara
1968 "On Party militancy." In John Gerassi (ed.),
Venceremos; The Speeches and Writings of
Che Guevara. New York:Simon and
Schuster.
Chertov, Eva
1970 "Women in revolutionary Cuba." The Mili-

tant, September 18.
Costa, Omar
1971 Los Tupamaros. Mexico:Colecci6n de
Ancho Mundo.
Diaz, Carlos Arturo
1968 "Las mujeres en la independencia." Boletin
de Historia y Antiguedades 55 (July-
September):361-371.
Franqui, Carlos
1968 The Twelve. New York:Lyle Stuart.
Gerassi, John
1968 "Introduction" to Venceremos; The
Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara. New
York:Simon and Schuster.
1971 "Introduction" to Revolutionary Priest; The
Complete Writings and Messages of Camilo
Torres. New York:Random House.
Giniger, Harry
1968 "Guatemala is a battleground." New York
Times Magazine, June.16.
Gonzalez, Luis J. and Gustavo A. Sanchez Salazar

1969 The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia.
New York:Grove Press.
Gott, Richard
1970 Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Lon-
don:Thomas Nelson.
1971 "Introduction" to Carlos Marighela, For the
Liberation of Brazil. Penguin Books.
Guzman, Germian
1969 Camilo Torres. New York:Sheed and Ward.
Harris, Richard
1970 Death of a Revolutionary; Che Guevara's
Last Mission. New York:Norton.
Marighela, Carlos
1971 For the Liberation of Brazil. Penguin Books.
Meneses, R6mulo
1934 Aprismo feminimo peruano. Lima:
Atahualpa.
Mercado, Rogger
1967 Las guerrillas del Perl. Lima:Fondo de
Cultura Popular.
Mercier Vega, Luis
1969 Guerrillas in Latin America. New York:
Praeger.
Olesen, Virginia

1971 "Context and posture: notes on socio-cul-
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policy in contemporary Cuba." Journal of
Marriage and the Family 33 (August):
548-560.
Purcell, Susan Kaufman
1971 "Modernizing women for a modern so-
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Latin American Studies Association, Decem-
ber.
Rojas, Marta and Mirta Rodriguez Calder6n (eds.)
1971 Tania. New York:Random House.
Sosa de Newton, Lily
1967 Las argentinas de ayer a hoy. Buenos Aires:
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Sutherland, Elizabeth
1969 The Youngest Revolution. New York:Dial
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Turner, Frederick C.
1967 "Los efectos de la participaci6n feminina en
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Cover PageArticle Contentsp. 344p. 345p. 346p. 347p. 348p.
349p. 350p. 351p. 352p. 353p. 354Issue Table of
ContentsJournal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 35, No. 2,

May, 1973Front Matter [pp. 174 - 298]Editorial [p.
173]Letters to the EditorComments on Rosenberg and Anspach,
"Sibling Solidarity in the Working Class" [p. 177]Moving and
the WifeMothers' Anxieties versus the Effects of Long Distance
Move on Children [pp. 181 - 188]Intentions and Expectations
in Differential Residential Selection [pp. 189 - 196]The
Adaptation of Women to Residential Mobility [pp. 197 -
204]Relocation in the Military: Alienation and Family Problems
[pp. 205 - 209]Geographic Mobility as Seen by the Wife and
Mother [pp. 210 - 218]The Effects of Voluntary and
Involuntary Residential Mobility on Females and Males [pp.
219 - 227]Exploring the Impact of Work Satisfaction and
Involvement on Marital Interaction When Both Partners Are
Employed [pp. 229 - 237]Suicide and Marital Status: A
Changing Relationship? [pp. 239 - 244]High School Marriages:
A Longitudinal Study [pp. 245 - 255]Use of the Observational
Method in the Study of Live Marital Communication [pp. 256 -
263]The Effects of Age and Education on Marital Ideology [pp.
264 - 271]Child Density and the Marital Relationship [pp. 272
- 282]Step-Kin Relationships [pp. 283 - 292]The Internal
Consistency of Blood and Wolfe's Measure of Conjugal Power:
A Research Note [pp. 293 - 295]International Department:
Women in Latin AmericaWomen in Latin America: Introduction
[p. 299]Priests, Machos and Babies: Or, Latin American
Women and the Manichaean Heresy [pp. 300 - 312]The
Prospects for a Women's Liberation Movement in Latin America
[pp. 313 - 321]Woman's Entry to the Professions in Colombia:
Selected Characteristics [pp. 322 - 330]Old and New Feminists
in Latin America: The Case of Peru and Chile [pp. 331 -
343]Women in Revolutionary Movements in Latin America [pp.
344 - 354]Book Reviewsuntitled [p. 355]untitled [pp. 355 -
356]untitled [pp. 356 - 357]untitled [pp. 357 - 358]untitled
[pp. 358 - 359]untitled [p. 359]untitled [pp. 360 - 361]untitled
[pp. 361 - 364]untitled [pp. 364 - 366]untitled [pp. 367 -
368]untitled [pp. 368 - 369]untitled [pp. 369 -
370]Publications Received [pp. 371 - 372]

"If I Am to Die Tomorrow": Roots and Meanings of Orozco's
"Zapata Entering a
Peasant's Hut
John Hutton; Orozco
Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1.
(Autumn, 1984), pp. 38-51.
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"If I am to die
tomorrow"-
Roots and Meanings
J O H N H U T T O N ,
Northwestern University
I of Orozco's
Zuputu Entering u
Peasant's Hut
FIGURE 1 Jose Clemente O r o z c o (Mexican,
1883-1949), Zapata Entering a

Peasant's H u t , 1930. Oil on canvas; 198.8 X 122.3
cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Joseph
Winterbotham Collection (1941.35).
much of the past three decades, the art of the FORMexican
"Mural Renaissance" of the 1920s and
1930s has received little attention in Western European
and, especially, American studies of the development of
the visual arts in the twentieth century. The Mexican
Muralist movement was regarded as stylistically retro-
grade in its emphasis on representational art, and need-
lessly polemical in its glorification of the Mexican Revo-
lution (1911-20). Indeed, in what often has been
portrayed as the smooth evolution of modern art toward
the "international style" of Abstract Expre.ssionism, the
politically motivated, activist art of the Mexican Mural
Renaissance has seemed all but irrelevant.'
This attitude represented a sharp contrast from the
1930s, when the developing Mexican arts movement was
looked upon as a model by American artists, from Philip
Guston to Jackson Pollock, both of whom studied with
Mexican muralists. The tres g ~ a n d e s ("three greats") of
the Mexican Renaissance-Diego Rivera, David Alfaro
Siqueiros, and JosC Clemente Orozco-received major
commissions in the United States, stirring both enthusi-
asm and sharp hostility. A Siqueiros mural in San Fran-
cisco was whitewashed in 1933 for its alleged anti-Amer-
ican theme; a huge Diego Rivera mural commissioned
by Nelson Rockefeller for Radio City Music Hall be-
came a cause celebre when, also in 1933, it was literally
blasted off the wall (Rivera had refused to paint out a
large portrait of Lenin). Orozco's murals at Dartmouth
College survived in spite of protests from alumni

groups, while a series of murals he painted for the N e w
School for Social Research in N e w York were covered
over with a curtain for more than two decades.
In spite of the controversy, however, the example set
by the Muralists' work-both in the United States and in
Mexico-played a major role in the creation of art and
mural projects under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New
Deal. The painter George Biddle proposed such a pro-
gram to Roosevelt in May 1933, pointing out that "the
Mexican artists have produced the greatest national
school of mural painting since the Italian Renaissance."
Biddle stated that the Mexican government "allowed
Mexican artists to work at plumber's wages in order to
express on the walls of government buildings the social
ideals of the Mexican Revolution," and pointed out that
young American artists were eager to express "in living
monuments the social ideals [the president was] strug-
gling to a ~ h i e v e . " ~ The result was the formation of the
Federal Artists Project (FAP) and its successor, the Pub-
lic Works Artists Project (PWAP), the training g o u n d
for many of the major American painters of the postwar
period. By 1940, these projects had been largely phased
out as funding diminished.
Within the past few years, the appearance of a series of
articles. books. and exhibitions about Mexican revolu-
tionary art indicates a renewed interest in the achieve-
ments of the painter^.^ The resurgence of representa-
tional painting has sparked new interest not only in
other 20th-century examples of figurative art, but also in
calling attention to work that is didactic in nature. As
revolutionary upheavals have swept Latin America and
Africa. the examvle of Mexican Renaissance art has in-
spired similar artistic movements, often combining a so-

phisticated modernism with a powerful message.l
The work of TosC Clemente Orozco remains in many
ways the most enigmatic of the products of Mexican
Muralism. Unlike Rivera and Siqueiros, Orozco was rel-
atively close-mouthed about his political views and goals
(especially in his autobiography, written when he had
already retreated into a bitter cynicism). Though
Orozco's works are numerous and highly visible in Mex-
ico. there are few examvles of his vaintine in the United "
States: the mural cycles at Dartmouth College (Hanover,
N H ) and the N e w School for Social Research, a mural of
Prometheus in the refectorv of Pomona College (Los "
Angeles), and a handful of easel paintings in museums
and private collections. A particularly striking example
of Orozco's work is contained in the collections of The
Art Institute of Chicago-his Zapata Entering a Peas-
ant's H u t (fig. I), painted in 1931, while Orozco was
living in self-imposed exile in the United States. Made a
scaDegoat in 1924 for riots inspired bv anticlerical murals
exe'cuyed for the National ~ r e ' ~ a r a t o ; ~ School in
Mexico
City, Orozco drifted for a time before accepting in 1927
the offer of Alma Reed (then head of Delphic Studios in
New York) t o come to the United States.
Orozco was characteristically laconic in describing the
birth of his Zapata. In his Autobiography, he stated that
he had accepted a commission to paint the Prometheus
for Pomona College. The fee for the mural was, he said,
"trifling," not even "enough for my return passage to
N e w York." H e continued, "I set a b o u t painting a pic-
ture, Zapata Entering a Peasant's H u t , which n o w hangs

in T h e A r t Institute of Chicago. I made a p o o r bargain
of selling it and recrossed the continent."' T h e painting
dismissed s o casually b y O r o z c o in these t w o sentences
has sparked vigorous debate as t o b o t h its quality and
meaning in the m o r e than 40 years since its completion.
In her biography of O r o z c o , Alma Reed called the w o r k
a " m a s t e r p i e ~ e . " ~ I n 1951, the Mexican critic J u s t
i n o Fer-
nandez concurred, stating, "Few w o r k s from his other
u.
periods compare w i t h it. A n d t o state this is t o say his
Zapata is o n e of the important paintings of the 20th
century.'"
0 t h L r critics have found such a verdict questionable; a
1935 essay argued that though "the artist's knowledge is
authentic and his emotion is i m ~ r e s s i v e . " for most
view-
ers outside of Mexico the w o r k is meaningless: "Unless
we are well-informed about the past and present in Mex-
ican unrest, we are baffled b y references and passions t o
which we have n o key.""
C o m m o n t o both the praise and criticism of Orozco's
Zapata has been a general unwillingness o r inability t o
deal effectively with the svnthesis of social content and
artistic expression in the painting. Much of the negative
criticism of O r o z c o (and his Mexican contemporaries)
has stemmed f r o m a eeneral reiection of anv art that
presents a specific, political message: faced with the rise
(as in Mexico) of a militant, social art, many critics and
art historians have tended t o d e n v that such works rank
as art at all.' Simultaneously, much of the defense and
praise of O r o z c o by ~ m e r i i a n scholars has been based

o n the premise (implicit o r explicit) that the artist was
n o t a political-much less a revolutionarv-~ainter. , In L
1950, f o r example, a critic w r o t e that O r o z c o , "alone,
amongst the Mexican painters, has resisted the glorifica-
tion of the Indian Dast o r of the contemDorarv revolu-
tion."I3 A m o r e recent article by a West G e r m a n art
historian attempts t o argue that O r o z c o , unlike the other
major Muralist artists, had a real understanding of the
events around him, and was unblinded by ideolorical
preconceptions." A classic s t u d y of modern Mexican
painting sees O r o z c o ' s Zapata in purely biographical
terms-the p r o d u c t of Orozco's unhappiness in N e w
York. l 2
This depoliticization of Orozco's work-based in part
o n the misleading claims of his autobiography-has been
aided and abetted b y an increasingly conservative politi-
cal and economic elite within Mexico itself, which has
sought t o present the country's greatest modern painters
as "national treasures," while stripping their w o r k of its
impact and social content. An obituary f o r O r o z c o in
the English-language journal Mexican L$e argued, f o r
example, that O r o z c o was "an artist of cosmic dimen-
sions" whose views implied a "longing f o r Arcadia" and
revealed the "stirring drama of the Mexican people." T h e
O r o z c o of the Red Battalions a n d the revolutionarv
struggle has been effaced entirely; as the obituary notes,
O r o z c o , "as h e personally admits . . . had n o political
c o n ~ i c t i o n s . " ' ~
This essay is an attemDt t o relocate O r o z c o ' s Z a ~ a t ai
n
the social and artistic context f r o m which it sprang-as
part of the Mural Renaissance and Orozco's o w n oeuvre,

a n d as a statement that is at once deeply personal and
intensely political.
A n American art critic has called the Mexican Mural
Renaissance "the only important instance of an art
movement created b y the artists themselves, dedicated to
propagandizing the ideals of a political system."" While
this statement is far t o o sweeping-one thinks imme-
diately, f o r example, of the Russian Futurists and C o n -
structivists in the early 1920s-it does emphasize both
the self-organization of Mexican artists in the 1920s and " .
their commitment t o an educational, polemical art that
would disseminate the goals of the Mexican Revolution
t h r o u g h o u t a turbulent and largely illiterate country. I n
this campaign, certain political icons quickly emerged:
Father Miguel Hidalgo (1753-1811), the organizer of
Mexico's independence movement f r o m Spain; Benito
J u a r e z (1806-1872), victor over the French puppet E m -
p e r o r Maximilian in the mid-19th c e n t u r y ; and, above
all, the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (1873?-1919), a
Deasant leader in the villaee of Aninecuilco. in the south- -
ern state of Morelos, near Mexico City.
T h e Mexican Revolution was-in contrast with m o r e
recent Latin American revolutions such as those in C u b a
and Nicaragua-seemingly leaderless, inchoate and un-
directed, and extremely bloody. Between 1911 and 1920
( t h e revolution's initial armed period roughly spanned
these years), somewhere between one-and-a-half and
t w o million Mexicans lost their lives in a complex series
of factional struggles. M o s t of the casualties were inno-
cent peasants slaughtered because they were in t h e
w r o n g place at the w r o n g time.I5
By 1911, the regime of the aging dictator Porfirio Diaz
had alienated the educated elite as well as the over-

whelming majority of Mexican peasants and urban
workers. I n an attempt t o modernize Mexico, Diaz and
his associates (the so-called cientificos) had encouraged
foreign investment t o such an extent that the majority of
Mexican national resources was in foreign hands; in the
name of "scientific, modern farming," peasant small-
holdings across t h e c o u n t r y were swallowed u p by n e w
haciendas, enormous estates. T h e regime made vast
s u m s of m o n e y f o r Diaz and his friends; but by the
beginning of the 20th century, it had sparked a series of
Indian uorisings and urban and Deasant revolts. The bla-
0
tant rigging of the 1911 elections led to riots that finally
caused the collapse of the regime. Diaz's successor, an
ineffectual reformer named Madero, was quickly top-
oled in a couo. and Mexico dissolved into chaos as re-
'gional leaders' warred for the succession.
Zapata's peasant forces in Morelos organized them-
selves into a group called the Liberating Army of the
South, dedicated to expropriating the huge haciendas
and distributing that land to the peasants. Their pro-
gram, the "Plan of Ayala," specifically called for retak-
ing the land usurped by "the landlords, cientificos, o r
bosses," and nationalizing all their goods.I6
In the Mexican Revolution. Z a ~ a t a stands out as the , I
one major figure who was absolutely unswerving and
selfless in the pursuit of this goal. H e battled each suc-
ceeding Mexican regime as it sought to postpone or turn
back land reform. His conservative opponents called
him "Attila"; but he was considered by his followers,

marching under his banner "Land and Liberty," as their
champion. H e . could . not be bought off with a govern-
ment post o r with vague promises; as a new government
bureaucracy hardened after the revolution, he proved
too great a threat to the delicatelv balanced new order. In
0
1919, Zapata was tricked into an ambush and murdered.
As the "revolutionary" governments of the 1920s be-
came mired in bureaucracy, nepotism, and corruption,
the image of Zapata became a symbol of freedom among
a wide range of nationalist and socialist movements,
achieving the status of the major political icon for politi-
cal artists.
A mural by Diego Rivera, T h e Ballad of Emiliano
Zapata (fig. 2), is typical of the standard Zapata icon. It
shows Z a ~ a t a as a benevolent and genial leader. sur- "
rounded by guitar-strumming peasants; behind them is
the Zapata banner.I7 Other murals focus on the image of
Zapata as wounded martyr; one, for example, in the
Ministry of Education (Mexico City), depicts Zapata in
his funeral shroud, in the manner of a martyred saint.
The religious echoes are not accidental; a companion
Dane1 also shows the murdered socialist governor of the "
Yucatan as a saint, emphasizing the stigmata of his
Orozco's Zavata enter in^ a Peasant's H u t at first
U
seems to fit comfortably within this standard image.
Painted in Orozco's distinctive palette of harsh reds and
blacks. mixed in this case with muted earth tones. it
focuses on the leader as he enters a peasant hut. The
viewer's gaze is drawn toward the figure of Zapata by the

brilliant blue skv that frames him.
The painting Is constructed along a structural device
of intersecting diagonals that Orozco often employed:
one formed by the out-raised arms of the peasants in the
FIGURE 2 Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957),
T h e Ballad of Emiliano Zapata, 1923/24. Fresco.
Mexico City, Ministry of Education. Photo: B.
Wolfe, Portvait of Mexico ( N e w York, 1937), pl.
136.
foreground (from the upper left to the lower right cor-
ner), the other marked by the shoulder of a Zapatista
soldier, running to the upper right corner along the
peaked tops of the soldiers' sombreros. These diagonals
are most strongly emphasized in the upper half of the
painting, providing the lower borders of a frame for the
figure of Zapata. The sides of the oddly trapezoidal
doorway which intersect the diagonals complete the
frame, catching the peasant leader in a diamond-shaped
net. which h e l ~ s to maintain the viewer's focus on him.
A disturbing undertone of barely contained violence
and emotional frenzy saturates Orozco's Zapata. The
work is dominated by recurring death imagery: the dag-
ger in the belt of one Zaoatista. the bandolier of bullets
Gorn by another, the bliod-red scarf around the hero's
neck, and especially the machete o r bayonet slicing up
directly at Zapata's left eye. Alma Reed has even argued
that the rim of Zapata's sombrero, delineated in a light
hue, was intended to suggest a martyr's halo.I9
These features stand out if we comoare the oaintina in
the Art Institute with a small study fdr the wdrk, no; in
the Museo Carillo-Gil in Mexico City (fig. 3). In the

FIGURE 3 Orozco, Study for Zapata Entering a
Peasant's Hut, 1930. Oil on canvas. Mexico City,
Museo Carillo-Gil.
Art Institute painting, Orozco increased his emphasis
both o n Zapata and o n the elements expressing menace
and violence. The bright blue of the sky behind Zapata
and the conversion of the door from a rectangle into a
trapezoidal framing device place more emphasis on
Zapata. The knife blade to the right of Zapata's face in
the earlier work has been rotated in the Art Institute
composition to point directly at Zapata's eye. Finally, a
second. out-thrust arm and clawlike hand has been
added to the foreground, heightening the dramatic in-
tensity of the gesture.
The figure of Zapata is not merely the compositional
focus of the painting. H e is also the fulcrum o n which
the action turns. Zapata does not stand passively in the
doorway; he is in motion, entering the hut. The two
Zapatistas turn toward him; the peasants fall to their
knees. The effect is a rippling motion outward (though
anchored at either side by the frame), a wave of motion
and response, triggered by his appearance.
The intense emotion evoked by the painting has
caused difficulties in interpretation. The peasants in the
foreground, for example, have been described as "kneel-
ing" at Zapata's approach, their hands "outstretched in
appeal or blessing"; another writer argued that the peas-
ants show "despair," while a third claimed that the pair
are raising their hands in "exaltation." Most common is a
description of the painting as "stirring," o r even "calm,

serene, and noble."20 It is this ambiguity to which Amer-
ican critics objected, lamenting the absence of a "key"
by which t o interpret the work. Is the painting's mood
one of hope o r despair, exaltation or terror? Are the
peasants pleading for Zapata's help or for their lives? Are
they relieved at his entrance, terrified by it, or openly
hostile?
N o art work, however, can be totally self-explanatory
to one unfamiliar with the culture, history, and objec-
tives of the artist who produced it, or with the period
and context in which it was produced. It is through an
understanding of Orozco's life, the Mexican artistic
movements of the 20th century, and the Mexican Revo-
lution itself that we can most effectively come to grips
with his Zapata.
Prior to the revolution, the fine arts in Mexico were
dominated by the Academy of San Carlos; there, stu-
dents were taurht in the most traditional and conser-
V
vative manner, endlessly copying Renaissance master-
pieces. Orozco later commented on the process: "The
Mexican had been a Door colonial servant. i n c a ~ a b l e of
I
creating o r thinking for himself; everything had to be
imported ready-made from European centers, for we
were an inferior and degenerate race." H e added, "They
let us paint, but we had to paint the way they did.. .
Indeed, Mexican painting in the early 1900s consisted
mainly of imitative and stiff renditions of European
styles. European trends, whether Spanish Baroque o r

avant-garde, were seen as the ideal, while Mexican paint-
ing and sculpture were denigrated. Even though outside
the academies (in the satirical murals that decorated tav-
erns and in the popular prints produced in the early
years of the revolution) more vigorous trends were stir-
ring, the attitude of the government and patrons of art
remained obsessed with European academic painting. A
nationalist journal, El Hijo de Ahuizote (The Child of
Ahuizote), lamented at the turn of the century that "only
too common among us is the impulse to praise what is
Orozco's Zapata Entering a Peasant's Hut
foreign and to deprecate what is national, and this re-
gardless of quality."22
The outbreak of the revolution had a ~ r o f o u n d effect
on Mexican artists and their art. In 1911,~students at the
San Carlos Academy, including Orozco, struck to re-
move the director, a rigid devotee of Spanish academic
painting. His successor, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, saw
the revolution as a chance to forge a new, nationalist art.
In 1913. he wrote to the Secretarv of Education of the
new Mexican government, stating that his aim was "to
awaken the enthusiasm of the students for the beauty of
our own land and to give birth to an art worthy of being
truthfullv called a national art."23
With ;he disintegration of Mexico into a multisided
civil war following the murder of Madero, young Mex-
ican artists flocked to ioin the revolutionarv armies
being formed. Most were drawn to the "constitu-
tionalist" armies of Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro
Obregbn, who had pledged to grant land reforms and to

favor the nascent urban workers' movement. Orozco
became affiliated with one such working-class organiza-
tion, the Casa Obrero Mundial (House of the World
Worker), a vaguely anarchistic union group claiming
50,000 members. When the Casa voted to support Car-
ranza and Obreg6n by recruiting some twelve thousand
members to fieht in six "Red Battalions" attached to
Carranza's arrAes, Orozco supported the decision. Al-
though he was unfit for active service (due to a child-
hood accident that had cost him a hand). Orozco siened , , "
on as political cartoonist for La Vanguardia, the daily
newspaper of the Red Battalions. H e traveled with the
battalions in a converted railway car which functioned as
his makeshift editorial 0ffice.2~
Orozco attempted in his 1947 Autobiography to
negate the political importance of this early activity. His
involvement, he argued, was purely accidental: "I might
equally well have gone to work for a government paper
instead of the opposition, and in that case the scapegoats
would have been on the other side." H e concluded. "No
artist has, or ever has had, political convictions of any
sort."25 Both the actions and the art of the young Orozco
belie that claim. In his cartoons for La Vanguardia,
Orozco found a wav to reach out bevond the confines of
the educated elite ;hat frequented ;he salons and mu-
seums of Mexico City. Though, for the most part, his
cartoons lack the unrelieved brutalitv of much of his
later work, they already exhibit what was to become a
major characteristic of his art: while other artists de-
picted the positive aims of the revolutionary armies,
Orozco focused upon the identification of the revolution
with death. It w a i n o t uncommon in La Vanguardia, for
example, for the face of a young girl to be used in order
to embody the notion of a bright, new, revolutionary

Mexico; but in one cartoon (fig. 4), Orozco superim-
posed an axe and machete over the girl's face. The cap-
tion reads, "Yo soy la Revoluci6n-la destructora . . ."
("I am the Revolution-the destroyer. . ."). This was to
become a dominant motif in Orozco's works.
In 1915. Carranza. confident of victorv and uneasv
over the growing power of the Mexican unions in the
country's urban centers, used a trolley strike in Mexico
City as a pretext to dissolve the Casa and the Red Bat-
talions. Orozco. cut adrift. o c c u ~ i e d himself for a time
with somewhat Goya-like drawi&s and watercolors de-
picting the agonies of the civil war. Unable to find steady
em~lovment. he visited the United States in 1917. H e
retkrnkd to Mexico in 1920, determined to find some
way to use his art to support the ongoing revolution.
In 1922, he joined with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo,
David Alfaro Siqueiros, and other young artists to found
the Syndicate of Revolutionary Technical Workers,
Painters, and Sculptors. The syndicate, an uneasy fusion
of an artist's union with a political organizing cell,
rapidly became the voice of Mexican nationalist artists.
Its manifesto (drafted by Siqueiros) called for a new art,
"native (and essentially Indian) in origin"; a "fighting,
educative art for all." The manifesto also stated that the
syndicate would address its art to "the native races hu-
miliated for centuries: to the soldiers made into hang-
(7
men by their officers; to the workers and peasants
scourged by the rich; and to the intellectuals who do not
flatter the bourgeoisie."26 The chosen medium for the
new art was to be the mural-the Door. after all. could

1 -
not afford to purchase paintings, while public art was
available to all.
The syndicate moved quickly to set up its own news-
paper, El Machete. The paper proclaimed itself "of the
FIGURE 4
Orozco, Cover il- W~U~V~KUT)
lustration for La
Vanguardia, May ,, _ _ - . _ _._ . .-.,8- .- --
10, 1915. mu~ r 13r11au )V Lm l a * P l l b I , ,, 3 * -- - P - -
-
' Y o soy LA REVOLUC~ON,
'La D E S T R ~ , C V ~ I A
people and for the people"; the members of the syndi-
cate prided themselves on being both activists and art-
ists. determined to use their art to advance the revolu-
tion and, when necessary, to defend that revolution with
arms in hand.27
Orozco flung himself into both facets of the struggle.
O n the political level, he helped to found the Grupo
Solidario del Movimiento Obrero (Solidarity Group of
the Workers' Movement), intellectuals and artists who
were attempting to build support for the newly formed
trade-union movement. O n the artistic level, Orozco
became the chief cartoonist for El Machete, producing
savage red and black cartoons later described by one
critic as "ugly, rabid, unjust and ma~terly."~8 Orozco
became the artistic cudgel of the revolution, lashing out
at its opponents with a savage power.

The same aualities dominate Orozco's first murals,
done for the 'National Preparatory College in ~ e x i c o
City (1924-26). Orozco's brutal scenes, filled with im-
ages of upheaval and mass slaughter, outraged Catholic
students, sparking the Preparatoria riots of 1926. The
syndicate disintegrated as Rivera attempted to shift the
blame for the riots to Orozco and Siaueiros. both of
whom were dismissed from the mural project. Orozco
found occasional work as an illustrator, but, for the time
being, Mexico's public walls were denied him. Dis-
couraged, he left in 1928 for the United States, where he
remained until 1934.29
Throughout his exile, Orozco worked in a strong and
unified tone, repeatedly expressing his hatred of oppres-
sion and corruption. The thrust of his revolutionary vi-
sion solidified in his American works-a vision sweep-
ing in its condemnation of existing society (Mexican and
American), yet curiously silent as to positive goals. In
the black-and-red palette derived from his cartoons for
El Machete. Orozco oresented a world dominated bv
FIGURE 5 Rivera, Mexico's Future, 1929/35.
Fresco. Mexico City, National Palace.
executioners and their victims. The few attempts to cap-
ture the goals of the revolution are most often limited to
iconic portraits of figures Orozco admired; the murals
for the New School for Social Research in New York.
FIGURE 6 David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexican,
1896-1974), Revolution Against the Diaz Dic-
tatorship, completed 1957. Acrylic (?). Mexico
City, National History Museum.

for example, feature portraits of Lenin, Gandhi, and the
martyred socialist governor of Mexico's Yucatan state,
Felioe Carillo Puerto. Far more common in these
works-and in Orozco's murals in Mexico after his re-
turn in 1934-is the domination of images of corruption
and brutalitv. fused with scenes in which revolution and , ,
natural cataclysms join together to sweep aside the brutal
old order.
The Enelish literarv critic Christooher Caudwell once "
noted that young, middle-class artists are often "Roman-
tic Revolutionaries," attracted to the destructive side of
the revolutionary process. "They often glorify the revo-
lution as a kind of giant explosion which will blow up
everything they feel t o be hampering them," he wrote,
adding that "it is the wild and destructive part of the
revolution that seems to them most picturesque; and in
many cases it is evident that a revolution without vio-
lence would be disappointing." H e cited the case of
Baudelaire, who, in the 1848 revolution in France, ex-
claimed, "Vive la destruction! Vive la mort!" ("Long
live destruction! Long live death!") As the tumultuous
armed and violent ~ h a s e of a revolution yields to a re-
construction of society, he noted, such figures often be-
come disillusioned o r even hostile to the new regime.'O
Orozco fits well into this oattern. H e deoicted the
enemies of the revolution clearly and in vivid detail; the
rich, the politicians, the leaders of the church, and cor-
rupt labor leaders are shown as incarnations of evil, their
individualized and hideous faces glaring out at the
viewer. In contrast, Orozco's workers and peasants-the
ostensible protagonists of the revolution-remain anon-

ymous, their faces either turned away from the viewer or
covered and hidden. I t is as if oppression and brutality
had robbed them of their individual identity, their very
humanitv.
The masses of peasants and workers in Orozco's work
are a part of the revolutionary process, but never its
motivating force. O n the contrary, the revolution is the
work of titanic superhuman heroes and/or uncontrolla-
ble natural forces;n sudden eruption. In his 1931 easel
painting T h e Dead (Mexico City, Museo Carillo-Gil),
for example, Orozco depicted the towers of Manhattan
smashed and swept aside by a huge wind. His 1930
mural Prometheus for Pomona College shows small,
gray people fleeing from the huge figure of the demigod
who invited the wrath of Zeus in order t o give fire to
humanity. In other words, for Orozco, revolutions d o
not occur through choice or the cooperation of the poor
fighting for a better future. Rather, they take place be-
cause conditions demand them, much like earthquakes
o r hurricanes. They are not necessarily pro anything;
they are denials of what currently exists, of an unaccept-
able present.
The special character of Orozco's vision of the revolu-
tion can best be seen in contrast with the work of his
contemporaries. In Diego Rivera's mural Mexico's Future
(fig. 5), revolution is pictured as a pyramidal complex,
with interlocked scenes of oppression, corruption, and
revolt culminating in the image at the apex, where Karl
Marx directs workers and peasants t o a better future.
Similarly, in David Siqueiros's unfinished Revolution
Against t h e D i a z Dictatorship (fig. 6), masses of workers
(led, rather improbably, by Marx and a young Joseph
Stalin) stride purposely forward, sweeping aside the
troops of the dictator Diaz o n their way to socialism.

Orozco did not share this vision of a bright future for
FIGURE 7 Orozco, Hidalgo and National Inde-
pendence, 1937. Fresco. Guadalajara, Mexico,
Government Palace.
revolutionary Mexico. Though he dismissed the revolu-
tionary battles he witnessed as a "gay carnival" at one
point in his Autobiography, in other passages he con-
veyed the aimless brutality of Mexico's slide into civil
war: "Factions and subfactions were past counting, their
thirst for vengeance insatiable. . . . Underneath it all,
subterranean intrigues went o n among the friends of to-
day and the enemies of tomorrow, [who were] resolved,
when the time came, on mutual e~termination."~' The
imprint of what he witnessed remained dominant in his
work: if for Rivera and Siqueiros revolution meant liber-
ation, for Orozco it was bloody vengeance on the rich
for their sins.
The titanic figures, all "Men of Fire," who appear
again and again in Orozco's work-Cartes, Prometheus,
the Aztec god-savior Quetzalcoatl, national indepen-
dence leaders such as Benito Juarez-are the embodi-
ments of this vengeance. For the most part, they are not
clear-cut figures of good or evil, as in his 1937 mural
Hidalgo and National Independence (fig. 7 ) . Father
Hidalgo, the leader of Mexico's independence movement
from Spain in the 19th century, is shown as a huge figure
with a fire sword, inciting Mexico to bloody civil war.
Huge clouds of fire and smoke swirl across the mural as
tiny, anonymous, gray figures attack one another or flee

in terror. Hidalgo is an heroic, dominant figure, yet one
cannot easily ignore the corpses piled in the foreground.
All of the elements of Orozco's com~lex. love-hate
I '
relationship with the Mexican Revolution can be seen in
the Art Institute's Zapata. The dark reds and blacks, the
references to death, and; above all, the dominant,
brooding figure of Zapata himself are typical of
Orozco's imagery. In creating this image of Zapata,
Orozco did not draw upon the traditional, benign
Z a ~ a t a icon. Rather. he turned to folk culture and in Dart
to Mexican literature. Mexican folk songs (corridas) and
legends of Zapata are centered upon images of death and
doom. A corrida of the 1920s, the "Sad Farewell of
Emiliano Zapata," goes: "I was called Attila/by those
whom I fought/but now all is ended/The terrible one is
dead. " Zapata consciously sought to strike terror among
his enemies. the rich hacendados (land owners): "We
must frighten them. We must terri'fy them. ~ e l a u s e if
they do not fear us, they will never listen to us. . . ." The
Za~atista armies rushed into battle chantinz "If I am to "
die tomorrow, let them kill me right away!"-a cry both
of defiance and despair, the voice of those who fight with
courage but without hope.32
FIGURE 8 Follower of Jose Posada (Mexican), Calavera
Zapatista, 1911. Engraving. Photo: R. Berdeciol
S. Appelbaum, eds., Posada's Popular Mexican Prints
(New York, 1972), p. xi, fig. D.
FIGURE 9 Orozco, En Vano (In Vain), 1913117. Water-
color. Mexico City, Museo Carillo-Gil. Photo: Museo
Carillo-Gil, Obras de Jost Clemente Orozco (Mexico
City, 1953).

Orozco was scarcely alone in his ambivalent reaction
to the events of the revolution, in his embrace of it as the
inevitable response to repression, while simultaneously
pulling back in horror and reveling in the mass slaughter
that accompanied it in Mexico. O n the contrary, his
vision of the revolution was shared by many Mexican
intellectuals who came predominantly from the Mexican
middle class. We find such a view, for example, in the
literary works of Mariano Azuela, the first major
novelist of the revolution. Azuela was a close friend of
Orozco, who illustrated the author's best-known novel,
Los de Abajo (The Under Dogs), in 1927. Azuela wrote
novel after novel in which the characters, much like the
poor in Orozco's drawings and paintings, are caught up
in a revolutionary turbulence beyond their control.
Orozco and Azuela did not (as Rivera and Siqueiros did)
use their experiences in the revolution to produce a
controlled, directed art aimed at shaping a particular
course of action; rather, both (in their respective media)
used the experiences of the revolutionary struggle to
construct an inchoate but powerful vision of upheaval,
fire, and blood.33
From the visual arts in Mexico, Orozco was able to
draw upon the innumerable cartoons and lithographs
produced during the revolution. Particularly important
in this regard are the calaveras (literally, skulls) created
by the folk artist JosC Guadalupe Posada and his imita-
tors. These calaveras show the leaders of the various
Mexican factions as skeletal figures, Grim Reapers, or
even human spiders. One such work, a Calavera
Zapatista (fig. 8), no longer ascribed to Posada by most

Orozco's Zapata Entering a Peasant's H u t
scholars but clearly derivative of his work, attaches the
traditional attributes of the Zapata icon (the droopy
mustache. sombrero. crossed bandoliers. and rifles) to a
skeleton,'riding a gaunt horse across a'field of bbnes,
while carrying a skull-and-crossbones flag.
In Orozco's case. the identification of the Za~atista
movement with this sort of death imagery has clear bio-
graphical as well as idealogical roots. Orozco, it should
be remembered, was the cartoonist for the newspaper of
the Red Battalions. One of Orozco's muralist colleaeues "
later noted that Orozco's contact with supporters of
Zapata came "only as they were brought in daily and
shot. "34 His earliest depictions of the peasant supporters
of Zapata and his northern counterpart, Francisco
(Pancho) Villa, exhibit the hostility, which Orozco may
have witnessed. of the Red Battalions' urban leaders to
the religious, rural peasant forces. In a series of cartoons
entitled La Cucaracha, for example, Orozco showed
peasant soldiers as brutal, loutish, drunken, or sullen-
ignorant executioners. One picture, En Vano (In Vain)
(fig. 9), contains a curious parallel to his later Zapata: a
man and two women (apparently wealthy in this case)
FIGURE 10
Oil on can
York, The
anonymou
Orozco,
vas; 114.3
Museum
IS gift.

apatistas,
139.7 cm
Modern
1931.
I. New
Art,
kneel in an anguished plea for life before two peasants
who seem not so much implacable as bored.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican left retro-
spectively reevaluated Zapata and his movement,. grad-
ually elevating them to the status of major revolutionary
heroes. A similar (though much slower) reassessment
seems to have taken place in the work of Orozco. His
Zapatistas, however, remain at least ambiguous in a way
that differentiates them from his oeuvre as a whole
during this time. If there is any period in which
something approximating positive symbols emerges in
Orozco's art, it is in some of the works produced
between 1930 and 1934. His murals for the New School
for Social Research (1930-31), for example, deal with the
brotherhood of all races and with resistance to colonial
rule. Mahatma Gandhi and Lenin are depicted posi-
tively, paired off against contrasting images of slavery
and colonialism. Significantly, these murals-based on a
program imposed on Orozco-are static, lifeless
images, losing in impact whatever is gained in clarity.
N o such clarity is apparent in the portrayals of Zapata
and his followers in this period, however. For example,

FIGURE 11 Orozco, Pancho Villa, 1931. Oil on canvas.
Mexico City, Museo Carillo-Gil.
his easel painting Zapatistas (fig. 10) does not exhibit
any of the positive imagery one encounters in works by
Rivera and Siqueiros. The peasants in the painting are
not engaged in traditional activities: they are not dis-
tributing land or arms, bravely facing firing squads, or
shaking hands with workers. They merely march for-
ward, bowed figures followed by shrouded women,
while their comrades on horseback loom over them like
mountains in the background. The painting is dark and
somber, the red limited to a scattering of shirts and
robes; the central portion of the composition is a cluster
of gleaming bayonets and machetes.
While there is no direct documentary evidence that
Orozco was mellowing in his attitude toward Zapata and
his followers. his clear shifts in his work would seem to
indicate a shift in attitude, as well. This can be seen if
the Art Institute's Zapata is compared with another of
his paintings from the same year featuring Zapata's
northern Mexican counterpart, Pancho Villa (fig. 11).
Orozco showed Villa as a bloated thug, surrounded by
corpses. While Villa looms in the foregound, gun in
hand, Zapata, though powerful, is in the background,
brooding and menacing, yet restrained. Villa is seen as a
butcher; the Zapata is not nearly so clear.
Orozco's 1934 murals for Dartmouth Colleee reDre-
back by an American general, surrounded by caricatures
of bankers and criminals. This revolutionary figure has
been variously interpreted-as Zapata, as a peasant, and
as a Mexican ~uerillero: one critic considered it a
deliberate fusioi of ~ a i a t a ' s features with those of

Orozco himself.35 What is clear is that Orozco, still in
his American exile. deliberatelv identified the stan-
dardized icon of the Zapatista-droopy mustache,
crossed bandoliers, and sombrero-with the revolution
itself, brutally "stabbed in the back" by the United
States.36 Nonetheless, this positive interpretation of
Zapata's revolutionaries occurs in a work in which the
revolution is depicted as a helpless victim of powers
beyond its control.
N o r did this positive (yet pessimistic) evaluation of the
Mexican revolutionary struggle remain intact. Upon his
return to Mexico, Orozco once again participated in
leftist political and cultural groupings; he joined the
Communist Party-led League of Revolutionary Artists
and Writers (LEAR), even Leading the LEAR delegation
to the American Artists Congress against Fascism and
War in New York in 1936. As the new government bu-
reaucracy hardened, however, and as the reform regime
of President Lazaro Cirdenas was succeeded by more
conservative regimes bent upon enriching themselves
and their friends, Orozco's vision of the revolution
soured. In his 1940 murals for the Gabino Ortiz Library
FIGURE 12 Orozco, The Masses, 1940. Fresco.
Jiquilpin, Mexico, Gabino Ortiz Library. Photo:
J. Fernandez, Orozco, Forma e Idea (Mexico City,
1942), p. 171, fig. 163.
0 I
sent at least a temporary resolution of this ambiguity.
The panel Hispano-America (fig. 13) shows a
mustachioed Mexican revolutionary being stabbed in the

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