Introduction
Enrique Rodríguez was well known in 1938. Time magazine likened the battle-hardened rebel to a western cowboy in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century: the ‘swashbuckling hold-up man who confined his depredations mainly to big banks and railroads was at least half hero’.Footnote 1 A year before, the New York Times called Rodríguez ‘one of Mexico's most noted bandits’ and reported periodically on his rural attacks.Footnote 2 The Mexican press, meanwhile, described Rodríguez as a ‘famous rebel’ who possessed a network of supporters to help him ‘outwit the persecution of federal troops’.Footnote 3 Friend and foe alike referred to the skinny Rodríguez by his nickname, ‘El Tallarín’ (‘the noodle’). Yet despite such attention in the national and international press, historians know relatively little about Enrique Rodríguez Mora or the rebellion he led in Morelos. This is surprising because, long before Rubén Jaramillo took up arms against the Mexican state in the 1940s and 1950s, Rodríguez, also a former combatant under Emiliano Zapata, headed the first prolonged guerrilla insurgency in Morelos (1934–8) since Zapata's death in 1919 and the end of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). While scholars have published works in both Spanish and English on Jaramillo, Rodríguez does not even have a page dedicated to him in the collected biographies of former Zapatista militants, which include over 150 different entries of men and women in three volumes.Footnote 4 Both Rodríguez and Jaramillo shared an antipathy towards the corruption of the state government and expressed similar agrarian grievances, but their movements were distinct, especially in terms of the national political contexts of their revolts. Rodríguez operated before and during the leftist presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) and Jaramillo during the more conservative administrations of the mid-twentieth century. The rebels of the 1930s targeted schoolteachers in their attacks, whereas educators in the countryside often sympathised with Jaramillo. This fact has led many contemporaries and some historians to label Rodríguez a Cristero – a religious militant and defender of the Catholic Church. Jaramillo adopted and preached Methodism, but religious issues seemingly played no overt role in his movement. Politically, El Tallarín did not offer a clearly articulated political alternative as did the Jaramillistas, who gained more support and longevity in the pueblos by establishing an electoral platform and participating in elections. Rodríguez, however, remained isolated, armed and mobile in the sierra for four years.
Whereas Tanalís Padilla emphasises the compatibility of the Cardenista project of national agrarian reform with Jaramillo's quest for justice in the countryside, El Tallarín represents a clash between Zapatismo and the Cardenista state.Footnote 5 El Tallarín, rather, belongs to the diverse groups in Mexico which combated and opposed Cárdenas, such as small property owners, the middle class, industrialists and Catholic groups.Footnote 6 Before 1934, the peasantry of Morelos had served as a crucial block of support for weak federal regimes. In exchange for land and electoral loyalty, former Zapatista troops had mobilised to defend the national government during the De la Huerta rebellion of 1923–4 and the Cristero war of 1926–9. As the case of El Tallarín shows, this alliance broke down in 1934 for three reasons. First, the federal government stopped redistributing land in Morelos in 1929, although landless peasants from neighbouring Guerrero continued to settle in the state. Overpopulation, bureaucratisation and corruption put new pressures on natural resources and villages. Second, a stronger regime in Mexico City and Cuernavaca tolerated less independent political organisation than in the 1920s. Civilian politicians increasingly used a heavy hand to deal with former Zapatistas such as El Tallarín who would not fully support the official Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party, PNR). Finally, reforms to the federal primary schooling curriculum in 1934 introduced anticlerical teachings into rural classrooms. Widespread hostility in Morelos to Cárdenas' educational reforms led to violence, and attendance in federal classrooms plummeted. Enrique Rodríguez headed this three-dimensional rebellion and defended agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship and religious liberty. His movement evolved into a broad critique of the post-revolutionary state's trajectory in the mid-1930s. By 1938, the revolt had forced Cárdenas to renegotiate the terms of Zapatista loyalty to the federal regime in order to secure peace in Morelos.
Historians have offered various interpretations to explain El Tallarín's rebellion. For most, Rodríguez is relegated to a footnote in a larger story of the tumultuous and transforming presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. Luis González cites news of the ‘crimes of El Tallarín’ as proof of the uncertainty faced by Cárdenas during his first days in office.Footnote 7 Perhaps most influentially, Jean Meyer has argued that Rodríguez fought for religious freedom against a secularising state and that he represented a classic Cristero insurgent. Meyer omits a discussion of Morelos politics and cites just one manifesto issued by the insurgent in 1937, found today in the archive of Aurelio Acevedo, a former Cristero leader. The manifesto declares that ‘although it might be a little late, we struggle as much for religion as for all the rights of the fatherland in order to defend the true reason of the pueblos'.Footnote 8 Only when President Cárdenas reopened the churches did Rodríguez surrender, according to Meyer.Footnote 9 Arturo Warman's classic work on Zapatismo, meanwhile, emphasises the similarities between El Tallarín and Rubén Jaramillo's uprising: the post-revolutionary Mexican state betrayed the ideals of the revolution, forcibly opposed any groups that attempted to organise against the government, and drove Rodríguez and Jaramillo into revolt.Footnote 10 Studies dedicated specifically to Rodríguez's rebellion are rare, however. A brief article by Sosa Elízaga places the 1934 revolt in south-eastern Morelos within the larger framework of the failed presidential bid of Antonio I. Villarreal and considers El Tallarín a social bandit with agrarian grievances.Footnote 11 The most thorough study of the rebellion is a recent undergraduate thesis from the state university of Morelos. Aguilar Domínguez argues that Rodríguez initially took to the sierra in 1934 after a shoot-out with the local municipal president and gubernatorial candidate forced him to seek refuge in the hills. The main cause for the rebellion, then, resided in Rodríguez's personal conflict with local members of the official PNR, rather than religious freedom, which Aguilar Domínguez discounts as a main factor in the revolt.Footnote 12 Historians, in other words, have tended to identify El Tallarín with various critiques of the maturing revolution. Hence, we currently possess a contradictory image of Rodríguez as failed mutineer, discontented agrarista, religious leader, and conservative member of the PNR. Yet as this article will show, the political, agrarian and religious questions cannot be divorced from each other when considering the 1934 rebellion.
The case of El Tallarín sheds new light on the understudied ‘Second’ Cristiada of the 1930s, or La Segunda. Historians have underestimated the importance of the Segunda and the violent opposition to Cárdenas. El Tallarín, in fact, represents one of the largest Segundista rebellions outside of the Bajío region. In contrast to the previous decade, the Catholic Church of the 1930s condemned violence by any organisation that tried to claim the Church's mantle, and punished clergy who aided pious insurgents. The Segunda included a diverse array of revolutionary leaders, but its strength lay in the diffuse opposition to central impositions throughout rural Mexico.Footnote 13 Most importantly, in the case of Morelos, the anticlericalism of the 1930s impacted rural communities in a way that it had not during the previous decade, which explains Zapatista hostility to Cardenismo. In the 1920s, former Zapatista militants, such as Genovevo de la O, defended the federal government and hounded Cristeros in the centre-west states, and village militias in Morelos mobilised to fight invading Cristero cavalry from Guerrero.Footnote 14 El Tallarín was unlike the pious rebels of the 1930s in Michoacán and elsewhere in that he did not revolt during the major religious conflict of 1926–9.Footnote 15 In other words, Rodríguez does not represent a classic Cristero in the sense that, unlike the typical portrayal of a Cristero, for him religion did not trump all other causes. El Tallarín was more complex and multidimensional than a typical Cristero and tended to defend pueblo religious devotions more than the institutional Catholic Church. Rodríguez shares some characteristics with the Segunderos of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, where inhabitants of the mountains resented the growing presence of the national government.Footnote 16 In both Morelos and Sonora, local grievances went beyond religious matters and included calls for democracy, clean elections and local sovereignty. Even more strikingly, El Tallarín resembles Saturnino Cedillo of San Luis Potosí, who soft-pedalled anticlericalism in his home state and was one of the last caudillos to rise against the government in 1938. Rodríguez and Cedillo resented the encroachment of the central state into local issues.Footnote 17 The Second Cristiada, therefore, encompassed various critiques of an expanding federal government. Beyond religious devotion, the Segunderos could be motivated by local politics, land inequality and local sovereignty.Footnote 18
This article is based almost entirely on original archival materials. Written inspections of rural schools in Morelos, located in the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (Historical Archive of the Secretariat of Public Education, AHSEP), and intelligence reports found in the Sección Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (Political and Social Research, IPS) of the Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior, known as SEGOB or simply Gobernación), provide fresh descriptions and analyses of the localities in which the rebels operated. Multi-page reports by federal school inspectors give detailed descriptions of the social contexts of El Tallarín's theatre of operations in the eastern Morelense municipalities of Jonacatepec, Tepalcingo, Axochiapan and Tetela del Volcán. Indeed, the federal government was so convinced of the revolt's significance that Gobernación sent spies to the region in order to investigate the tumults as soon as the conflict began. Moreover, newly uncovered correspondence from the archive of Aurelio Acevedo enhances our vision of the religious motive in El Tallarín's revolt, as he attempted to ally with the Liga Nacional Defensora para la Libertad Religiosa (National Defence League for Religious Liberty), the civilian institution that armed and financed the Cristeros of the late 1920s. Little-used national and international newspaper clippings also offer insights into how contemporaries and urbanites perceived the mysterious ‘bandit’. Finally, the official papers of Lázaro Cárdenas in the Archivo General de la Nación and the Casa de la Cultura Jurídica de Morelos house rich reports by municipal presidents, generals and other local informants familiar with the region and its inhabitants.
Agrarian Upheaval
Little is known of Enrique Rodríguez's early life. Born c. 1900 in the small Morelos community of San Pablo Hidalgo (Tlaltizapán), he grew up in a ranching family that possessed private land before the revolution. San Pablo Hidalgo had formed as an agricultural colony in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the expanding sugar estate of Chinameca hacienda threatened to push the pueblo's families on to sterile secondary lands usable only for livestock grazing. Enrique's three older brothers – Marcelino, Leonardo and Félix – led him to join the revolution in 1911 at the young age of 11, by which time he was already an orphan. His uncle, Catarino Perdomo, became one of the first Zapatista colonels in the Liberating Army of the South, and his first cousin Elpidio Perdomo, a future governor of Morelos, also rose to the rank of colonel. Enrique's eldest sibling, Marcelino, was promoted to general in 1914 by Zapata after fighting valiantly against Huerta's forces. Enrique, however, commanded troops under General Felipe Neri until the latter's death in 1914. He then joined his three brothers – known as ‘Los Tallarines’ or the Rodríguez Brigade – fighting in eastern Morelos, where the 17-year-old gained intimate knowledge of his future theatre of operations. Marcelino was killed in combat in 1917, and shortly thereafter Carrancista soldiers assassinated Enrique's brothers Leonardo and Félix.Footnote 19 By then, Enrique had obtained the rank of colonel and following his brothers' deaths probably joined General Francisco Mendoza's forces.
Rodríguez had allies and family members across Morelos. He knew people throughout his home municipality, Tlaltizapán, located in the southern hotlands. In the east of Morelos along the border with Puebla, locals assured a government agent in 1934 that Rodríguez had many friends and relatives around Zacualpan and Tlacotepec.Footnote 20 This provided El Tallarín with a crucial network of support in eastern Morelos because Tlacotepec was home to a sizable militia and controlled large quantities of irrigation waters and fertile lands.Footnote 21 Experience in the revolution had taught Rodríguez to survive as a guerrilla fighter; hiding in the mountains, hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, burning archives and political assassinations were hallmarks of Zapatista militancy that he successfully employed two decades later. In the 1920s Rodríguez and the Zapatistas joined Álvaro Obregón's federal army, and Rodríguez later returned to San Pablo Hidalgo to grow rice for commercial sale.Footnote 22 By 1934 he had settled in the south-eastern municipal seat of Tepalcingo, where he cultivated a plot of ejidal land – a common occupation of former combatants in Morelos. By 1940 Tepalcingo was a large village with some 3,000 inhabitants, most of whom were agricultural workers. Also like many former revolutionaries, Rodríguez now partook in local politics, and he probably held a position in the local militia.
The agrarian reform carried out in Morelos during the 1920s goes a long way towards explaining how and why the federal government was able to capture the loyalties of former Zapatista militants. In 1910, 28 families owned most of the land in Morelos. By 1933, over 26,000 persons controlled the soil, including the richest valleys, woodlands, streams and rivers.Footnote 23 Peace in the countryside, however, did not translate into harmony in the pueblos. In fact, violence between villages for control of the most fertile lands accompanied the agrarian reform. Both the state and federal governments remained weak in the 1920s and unable to effectively implement policies in rural Morelos.Footnote 24 This situation began to change in 1930, when a constitutional government controlled by the PNR brought political stability to the state government for the first time since 1914. The PNR declared the land redistribution in Morelos complete, but petitions for fields, waters and forests continued apace. The promise of natural resources in fact attracted the landless from neighbouring Guerrero, increasing the state population from roughly 103,000 inhabitants in 1920 to over 182,000 residents 20 years later.Footnote 25 The influx of migrants exacerbated village conflicts at the same time that the PNR was ending land reform and establishing a foothold in municipal politics. Local caciques (political bosses), who could use the control of land as a political weapon, strengthened their hold in rural communities by allying with politicos in the state government. By 1934, the number of petitions for natural resources arriving in the governor's offices had spiked considerably and revealed the growing tensions in the countryside.
Rodríguez's decision to launch his revolt from Anenecuilco – Zapata's home village – demonstrates the importance of the agrarian question. On Independence Day 1934, two months before Cárdenas' inauguration, a significant number of rebels symbolically gathered in the famous pueblo to pronounce the Plan Revolucionario Anenecuilco. Commencing the revolt from the cradle of the agrarian revolution allowed El Tallarín to link the rebellion to a grander struggle for liberty, land and pueblo sovereignty that had begun two decades prior.Footnote 26 Who exactly gathered that day at the revolutionary assembly in Anenecuilco remains unclear, although Francisco Franco, the pueblo's elder leader, likely attended the meeting. The village itself had secured abundant fertile lands during the 1920s, but heading into the winter of 1934–5, Anenecuilco entered a bitter dispute against several ambitious generals led by Maurelio Mejía, a former Zapatista, who would deprive the pueblo of its two best fields.Footnote 27 Franco, charged with protecting Anenecuilco's sacred land titles, was forced into hiding over the winter and authorities accused him of spreading ‘the idea that the current state of things must change’.Footnote 28
Also noteworthy was the fact that the Plan Revolucionario of 1934 specifically invoked the Plan de Ayala of 1911 and adopted the agrarian and democratic principles enshrined in that famous document. The first article of the 1934 Plan named Enrique Rodríguez as leader of the liberation movement. The Plan then declared the July presidential elections null and named Aurelio Manrique, a prominent opposition leader hostile to official anticlericalism, president of a national government with authority to wage war against the regime imposed by Plutarco Elías Calles – the most powerful and polarising figure in Mexican politics at the time. Manrique had a long revolutionary background going back to the days before 1910 and served as governor of San Luis Potosí in the 1920s, but afterwards he became increasingly conservative and was forced into exile from 1929 to 1933 for publicly denouncing Calles.Footnote 29 The Plan further denounced all Callistas, who had become ‘owners and lords [of] all public offices and sources of wealth’.Footnote 30 In response to the national debate over the reforming of Article 3 of the Constitution that would establish socialist education as official policy, the Plan fervently rejected the Callista doctrine ‘that without any Authority seeks to educate our daughters as they please’. Children, it asserted, deserved a ‘Christian education and morally under the … exclusive responsibility of their parents’. The rebels would recognise the ranks of all former militants of the Zapatista army if they joined the insurrection. The Plan Revolucionario Anenecuilco concluded by denouncing Calles for sending the nation's gold to England – gold which the Callistas had appropriated from Mexico's agricultural and industrial production through corrupt banks. While less eloquent and shorter than the Plan de Ayala, these grievances against the regime were nonetheless frequent among the diverse independent political groups in Mexico. When opposition leader Antonio I. Villarreal issued a manifesto to the nation one month after El Tallarín, he echoed the sentiments expressed by the Plan Revolucionario Anenecuilco.Footnote 31
The uprising in eastern Morelos, coupled with dozens of village petitions for land, forced Cárdenas to act. The president appeared in Anenecuilco in June 1935 to return the fertile lands usurped by corrupt generals, although his actions provoked a long conflict with neighbouring Villa de Ayala over the fields. Villages across Morelos began to receive provisional extensions of their ejidos; during the Cardenista sexenio, the government doled out a further 70,000 hectares of land to rural communities.Footnote 32 The presence of El Tallarín in fact pressured the government to carry out a second agrarian reform. Following a congress in Jojutla in 1935, an official document circulated stating that pending petitions for lands and waters were the most pressing problems among campesinos. The government ordered a brigade of engineers to descend on the districts of Jojutla, Cuautla and Jonacatepec and resolve all petitions, ‘as the present agitation and the propaganda that the rebel Enrique Rodríguez spreads … merit it in order to further unite campesinos behind the National Government’.Footnote 33 The promise of lands, water and forests helped to secure the loyalties of agricultural workers, eased tensions in agrarian communities and to some extent reduced El Tallarín's pool of potential supporters in the pueblos.
Redistributing land, however, was not enough to quell the insurgency. The Plan Revolucionario's references to elections and Christian education reflected a sequence of events in 1934 that paralleled Rodríguez's flight to the hills. In the midst of growing agrarian tensions, Morelos held a gubernatorial election in April of 1934. José Refugio Bustamante won the prized office, representing the official PNR, which had established offices in pueblos across the state since first taking the governorship four years prior. Hot on the heels of the gubernatorial contest, presidential elections followed on 1 July 1934. Moreover, 1934 saw a national campaign to reform the Constitution and teach ‘socialist education’ in federal primary schools. In Morelos, the state and federal governments signed an agreement to federalise the remaining 32 schools under state jurisdiction, many of which were in the south-east, resulting in stronger central control of pedagogy in distant rural areas.Footnote 34 The unionisation of teachers in Morelos accompanied the process of federalisation. The leftist turn in the school curriculum, stronger central control of rural education, and teacher unionisation culminated in a heightened political consciousness among teachers. Finally, in August 1934, the state legislature passed harsh anticlerical legislation, limiting the number of priests to one per 75,000 inhabitants and requiring clergymen to register with the state government.Footnote 35 These events unfolded within a short window of time and tipped the balance of power in the Morelos countryside in favour of centralised government, especially regarding matters of local politics, land, religion and education. Particularly, these reforms rankled the Zapatista base and conservative members of the PNR, and directly or indirectly, each event involved Enrique Rodríguez, who became a lightning rod for local conflicts.Footnote 36
The Political Origins of the 1934 Rebellion
The governor of Morelos played a key role in creating conditions ripe for rebellion. José Refugio Bustamante, victor of the 1934 gubernatorial contest, was typical of Morelos' non-Zapatista political class in the post-revolutionary period. He had not fought in the Mexican Revolution, but he became a career politician beginning in the 1920s, when he served as municipal president of Cuautla; he later served as a state legislator in the early 1930s. Although the non-Zapatista politicians in Morelos never opposed agrarian reform, Bustamante sought to channel all organisation, mobilisation and demands of the popular classes through the government and official party. Politics under Governor Bustamante were notoriously corrupt. Politicos in the state government walked the Cuernavaca streets armed and frequently caused public disorder. The governor even hired gunmen in the district seats and stayed in close contact with loyal municipal presidents to control local opposition groups.Footnote 37
In this atmosphere, Rodríguez encountered trouble. Anticipating the 1934 gubernatorial election, he installed an office in Tepalcingo to support the candidacy of Francisco Álvarez (Bustamante's main rival in the internal PNR elections) and began holding public meetings throughout the south-eastern region, where he used his personal influence to rally supporters. The municipal president of Tepalcingo, Luis Mariscal, supported Bustamante, and tensions between Rodríguez and Mariscal escalated close to violence in 1933. Mariscal was the political cacique of Tepalcingo and employed violence to quell his opposition.Footnote 38 On 20 February 1934, in a cantina during the large and raucous religious festival of Tepalcingo, when religious sensibilities were highly charged, Rodríguez approached Bustamante to greet the official PNR candidate, who would coast to victory in the election a month later. Mariscal intervened and would not allow Rodríguez to speak with Bustamante. The municipal president then departed and moments later shots were fired. Gunmen pursued Rodríguez to the outskirts of the pueblo, but he escaped unscathed. He fled to the surrounding ranches and remained underground until September.Footnote 39
Between flight and rebellion, Rodríguez's tumultuous experience with members of the PNR delivered him into the arms of the national opposition led by Antonio I. Villarreal, who campaigned against the official party's presidential nominee of 1934, Lázaro Cárdenas. Rodríguez backed the candidacy of Villarreal. At this juncture the opposition considered Lázaro Cárdenas a mere lackey of Calles, as the latter had hand-picked presidents since 1928.Footnote 40 They perceived little difference between the two figures. Although the national opposition to the Cárdenas ticket lacked cohesion and suffered internal division, it coalesced into the Confederación Revolucionaria de Partidos Independientes (Revolutionary Confederation of Independent Parties, CRPI) prior to the presidential election. From Morelos, over half a dozen local political parties and clubs joined the CRPI.Footnote 41 Calles' radical anticlericalism and the corruption of the regime began alienating once loyal supporters in the heartland of Zapatismo.
A Gobernación agent sent to Morelos to gather intelligence after the uprising of September 1934 painted Enrique Rodríguez as a Villarrealista. According to the agent's lengthy investigation, the rebels had maintained contact with Francisco Álvarez, who in January of that year had lost the internal PNR elections for governor to Bustamante. Álvarez, bitter after losing a close contest, opposed Calles and remained in contact with Rodríguez and other Villarrealistas. When Antonio Villarreal campaigned in Morelos before the July election, El Tallarín and others came out to support him. The Gobernación agent reported that Rodríguez had been in rebellion since 1 July 1934, the day of the presidential election, but he made no mention of the violent episode in Tepalcingo in February involving Rodríguez, Mariscal and Bustamante.Footnote 42
Several months after the uprising, the government commissioned Julia Mora Zapata, niece of the deceased caudillo and a trustworthy figure, to find Rodríguez, learn the reasons for his discontent and convince him to lay down his arms. Mora went south to the small mining community of Huautla. She did not speak with the rebels themselves; however, after talking with locals, she concluded that Rodríguez and his followers principally took to the hills because ‘the current local authorities seek to harm them for having been disaffected in the latest political contest and have denounced them to federal forces. They have been sought out in their homes, and for fear of no security, they have taken up the position in which they find themselves.’Footnote 43 The investigation fits with Rodríguez's own initial reasons for revolting. At his surrender four years later in Mexico City, he told a reporter:
It was in '34 … when I fled to the hills. I was then in Tepalcingo, working my land; but Governor Bustamante did not care for me, because I did not help him in his political campaign. Someone told me: ‘The forces are going to come for you.’ And I asked him why. And he answered me: ‘Because the governor is saying that you shouted: “Death to the Supreme Government, viva Villarreal.”’ I thought, they won't get a hold of me, and I fled to the hills.Footnote 44
Rodríguez's relationship with an authoritarian governor, in other words, stood as his main reason for initially going underground. When speaking to the reporter he did not deny any of the charges that he had rejected the official party, nor did he mention the topics of socialist education or Cárdenas. Of course, the occasion was not suited to a philosophical discussion with Mexico's ‘famous bandit’, but Rodríguez clearly argued that mere political self-defence had provoked his flight to the highlands.
The insurrection began with a surprise attack. On 24 September, less than two weeks after pronouncing the Plan Revolucionario Anenecuilco, Rodríguez and a band of some 45 individuals entered Tepalcingo at 5 o'clock in the morning. Fifteen men began to lay siege to the municipal president's home. Luis Mariscal, as municipal president and a loyal supporter of Bustamante, was the governor's eyes and ears in the town, and his gunmen had nearly killed Rodríguez during the religious festival in February. The assailants surrounded Mariscal's home and fired shots. Surprised, the municipal president fled his house while shooting his pistol at the attackers. He escaped unharmed and would update the governor and president on raids by El Tallarín during the rest of his time in office. The men proceeded to sack Mariscal's house, carrying off leather chaps, a saddle, ropes, spurs and a horse – equipment for a cavalry. Afterwards, they gathered in the central plaza, read aloud their plan for government and shouted their support for Antonio Villarreal; they then abandoned the village at 7 o'clock in the morning, two hours after the siege began. The raiders levied no forced loans, nor did they target any other local residents, but they destroyed the telephone line between Tepalcingo and the district seat, Jonacatepec.Footnote 45
Unrest quickly began to take hold. A day after the attack on Tepalcingo, on 25 September, federal soldiers appeared in Anenecuilco to apprehend the local agrarian leader, Francisco Franco, and deprive the pueblo of its best fields.Footnote 46 Unknown men erected fences on the pueblo's lands and authorities nabbed Franco, who managed to escape but was forced into hiding for several months over the winter. That such events occurred in the famous village was symptomatic of the state of Callista politics in Morelos and contributed to growing turmoil throughout the region. The generals accused Franco of colluding with El Tallarín and spread false statements about the village leader in the press.Footnote 47 It is quite plausible, however, that the events in Tepalcingo the previous day provided the pretext for the generals to force the Anenecuilco leaders to hand over the pueblo's cherished land titles and intimidate Franco into signing an agreement. After the soldiers appeared in Anenecuilco, on 26 September 1934, El Tallarín led men on horseback to briefly occupy the far south-eastern municipality of Axochiapan. Locals Jesús García, José Solís and Pedro Pliego joined the rebels and helped them to overwhelm the village. A fourth consecutive day of insurrection occurred in Cuautla when farmers assassinated the local chief of police.Footnote 48
Was the sudden unrest in Morelos connected to local agrarian and political affairs, or was it part of a larger rebellion inspired by Antonio Villarreal from Nuevo León? The armed actions of rebels in Morelos did not have direct links to Villarreal, but clearly the rebels sympathised with his movement.Footnote 49 While it is true that in 1934 government supporters labelled most members of the political opposition as Villarrealistas, and that in October Villarreal announced a national rebellion to begin on 20 November, proof of a direct link with El Tallarín is based on circumstantial evidence. Luis Mariscal, the municipal president of Tepalcingo, is the only informant to assert a clear connection between Rodríguez and Villarreal, and his allegations must be viewed with scepticism. He claimed that ‘extra-official reports’ given to him revealed that on 17 September, ‘days before the vandalic movement broke out, ex-general Villarreal was at a ranch named “Los Metates”, the site where several characters went to sign said government plan’.Footnote 50 Los Metates was an uninhabited ranch, an hour from the south-eastern train station of Huitchila. Mariscal wrote that Gobernación agents sent to gather intelligence on the uprisings also learned of the secret meeting at Los Metates between Villarreal and Rodríguez. General Miguel Henríquez Guzman, the army's commander sent to crush El Tallarín, additionally mentioned that ‘they constantly receive money and War materials and spread news that rebel movements against the Government exist in the entire Republic’.Footnote 51 Caution should be exercised when considering this evidence, however: the cacique of Tepalcingo had clear political motives for reporting rumours, and he greatly admired General Henríquez, with whom he had been in contact since the uprisings in September. Finally, Villarreal spent the months after the July election in Monterrey and the United States.Footnote 52 Even if the meeting at Los Metates occurred, Villarreal's revolt from the north fizzled out during the early months of 1935 and never displayed the capacity to send arms south or support an insurgency in Morelos.Footnote 53 Logistical obstacles limited an alliance between the insurrectionists of Morelos and the north, even though El Tallarín clearly sympathised and associated with the Villarrealistas. Most importantly, the case reveals that Rodríguez had his own agenda in Morelos; he was never beholden to any national politician. He was no proxy gunman.
The spats of violence in Tepalcingo, Axochiapan and Cuautla shared evidence of common political grievances with those of the north, but they had their roots in local agrarian and political issues particular to Morelos, and many of the persecuted individuals would find refuge in the sierra under Rodríguez's command, swelling insurgent ranks to between 100 and 200 men. Many had prior experience with arms, as they served in village militias, still present in Morelos in the 1930s. El Tallarín, for instance, harassed the militia leader of Los Hornos on several occasions for refusing to join the insurgency.Footnote 54 None of the guerrillas appear to have participated in the Cristero uprising of the late 1920s. The rebels' mobility and hit-and-run tactics allowed them to stay one step ahead of annihilation by the federal army. General Henríquez commanded five columns of soldiers and pursued El Tallarín for the remainder of 1934; in the first 90 days of the hunt into the mountains, the army failed to engage the guerrillas even once. From the field, Henríquez noted the obstacles posed by endless hills, where the army columns could be seen from great distances, and deep ravines and canyons, where isolated ranches of just a few houses were tucked away. The rebels in hiding, according to Henríquez, survived on small rations of beans and tortillas. In order to win the support of the local population, the army paid the local ranchers in food and forage for their animals, even though General Henríquez remained suspicious of their sympathies and considered them ignorant peasants who merely sought adventure and were easily manipulated by demagogues.Footnote 55
By the end of 1934, then, a small regional rebellion had broken out in Morelos. It began over politics in the midst of growing agrarian upheaval. The repression during the gubernatorial and presidential campaigns led Enrique Rodríguez and his village followers to the hills. They shared the grievances of other groups in Mexico opposed to the PNR regime, and they became a draw for such elements. Within two years of the initial uprisings, rebel territory had spread from the south-eastern corner of the state to include the northern highlands of Morelos, especially along the borders with Estado de México and Puebla and areas surrounding the Popocatépetl Volcano. Two or possibly even three guerrilla squads operated in the highlands under the banner of El Tallarín. Dividing into smaller bands allowed the insurgents to move swiftly and evade the army. For instance, Rodríguez and his men appeared early one morning in Ocuituco, Morelos, and abducted the village tax collector from his home. The rebels took him to Hueyapan, still dressed only in his underwear, and executed him in the central plaza in front of a large crowd.Footnote 56 Rural attacks spilled over into villages in Puebla.Footnote 57 Despite this activity, the army never cornered the guerrillas for a decisive battle and repeatedly failed to capture Rodríguez. Furthermore, no evidence exists to suggest that local agrarista militias or paramilitary forces familiar with the local terrain aided the army in its quest to quash El Tallarín. Armed villagers had backed the federal government in 1920, 1923 and 1927, but they would not pursue one of their own in 1934.
Religion and Socialist Education
While the rebels stayed isolated in the highlands after the first uprisings, turmoil brewed in the valleys. Heading into the winter of 1934–5, grassroots resistance in Morelos to the state-building policies emanating from Mexico City erupted for the first time in the post-revolutionary period. Recall that the national government officially introduced anticlerical teachings into rural classrooms in the autumn of 1934, shortly after state and federal governments had signed an agreement in August to federalise the remaining schools under Cuernavaca's direction. Assigned the tasks of promoting Mexican nationalism and discouraging religious practices, teachers and Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public Education, SEP) inspectors injected anticlericalism into the pueblos. Opposition to the curriculum reforms came from the villages, primarily from parents of schoolchildren. Underground Catholic cells and the conservative press such as La Opinión and Hombre Libre heightened anxieties among parents by exaggerating abuses committed by the federal government, and the Church warned mothers and fathers not to send their children to schools that adopted socialist education. Quarrels over religion and the school began to surface in SEP reports earlier in the spring as the national debate over socialist education spread.Footnote 58 Then, in the autumn, conflicts boiled over. Attendance in federal classrooms dropped significantly in the countryside at the beginning of the school year.
Up to that point, Morelos had among the highest rates of schoolchildren attending federal schools in Mexico. Nearly every village and hamlet in the state possessed a teacher. The classrooms of the 1920s, however, were conservative compared to their counterparts of the following decade. Teachers possessed modest resources and focused on teaching basic knowledge such as mathematics and grammar; they sought to integrate rural communities into the national market economy and instil new behaviours and skills. In the 1930s, by contrast, teachers expressed a new missionary zeal and stepped deeper into village politics and agrarian matters. Educators wanted to nationalise the ethnically diverse countryside into one popular Mexican culture (defined by urban intellectuals), and they considered the Catholic Church their primary adversary. The Church posed an obstacle to a secular state attempting to instil civic patriotism and nationalistic values, especially in the rural population. Official rhetoric repeatedly referred to the need to ‘defanaticise’ ‘superstitious’ Mexicans, whose ultimate loyalty, authorities assumed, resided in Rome with the pope, and not with the Mexican nation. Socialist education would liberate the peasantry of clerical tutelage and false consciousness.Footnote 59
Historically, the Church did not flex its institutional muscle in Morelos as it did in states such as Puebla and Michoacán. The Diocese of Cuernavaca, established in 1891, was among the newest in Mexico, led by Bishop Hipólito Vera until 1898 and later by Bishop Francisco Plancarte y Navarrete – both experts on, and defenders of, apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Thereafter, Manuel Fulcheri y Pietrasanta (1912–22), Francisco Uranga y Sáenz (1922–30) and Francisco María González y Arias (1931–46) held the episcopacy of Morelos. The Church did not suffer attacks by Zapatistas during the revolution and acted with independence towards the revolutionaries. Of course, plenty of priests denounced the Zapatistas, but many also communicated with insurgent leaders and sought to maintain the prestige of the Church in the countryside. One famous case included the heroic story of a martyred priest in Tepalcingo. The cleric rang the parish bells to warn of approaching federal soldiers, who later killed him.Footnote 60 War did not even disrupt the religious customs of Morelos; if anything, it exacerbated a ritual autonomy in the pueblos not constrained by official doctrines, allowing local cults to thrive in the 1920s. Holy life in Morelos, in other words, fell into the hands of village institutions and clashed somewhat with official theology.Footnote 61
Socialist education collided with the religious effervescence of pueblo life. The reforming of the Constitution amounted to an official assault on the institutional Church and popular religious beliefs. This offensive against the cyclical customs and rituals of rural communities had not occurred in Morelos during the Cristero war of 1926–9. Then, teachers abstained from religious discussion in classrooms, and many priests left temporarily to reside in Mexico City while the body count rose in the centre-west states. In 1929, for example, only four priests officially registered with the state government, although others likely operated clandestinely in Morelos.Footnote 62 No cleric resided in Tepoztlán while North American anthropologist Robert Redfield carried out research in the large village between 1926 and 1927, yet the local cult flourished.Footnote 63 Clergymen returned to rural Morelos at the end of the conflict and resumed their important roles of administering the sacraments and acting as moral authorities in the pueblos. All seemed quiet until teachers introduced socialist education into the classrooms. To accompany the secular reforms, in 1934, the state legislature passed the first Ley de Cultos (Religious Law) that went into effect on 1 September, limiting the number of priests in the state and forcing them to register with the government. The manoeuvre constituted a direct attack on pueblo religion and parish priests. That autumn, teachers organised into the Bloque Radical de Maestros Socialistas de Morelos (Radical Bloc of Socialist Teachers) and declared support for the PNR's Six-Year Plan. The union declared the Catholic clergy as the prime obstacle to implementing socialist education.Footnote 64 The SEP offered new courses for teachers in socialist doctrine and organisation and seminars on ‘the influence of religion on social structure’.Footnote 65 Finally, the agreement of federalisation between Cuernavaca and Mexico City in September reorganised the state educational bureaucracy. State schools in the key municipalities of Tepalcingo and Axochiapan, and south-eastern Morelos in general, were among those transferred from regional to central control.Footnote 66 Thus, whereas anticlericalism in 1920s Morelos constituted high-range ecclesiastical persecution and prompted informal evasion of the law, the anti-religious policies of the 1930s broadcast secular values into the heart of rural communities, flying in the face of tradition.
El Tallarín countered the government's education mobilisations by attacking rural teachers. The rebels viewed SEP employees of the 1930s as imposers of an atheist state – outsiders not welcome in the pueblos. Teachers, tax collectors, PNR members and militiamen were all fair game in their eyes. El Tallarín, recalled one woman from Hueyapan, pursued ‘all those who worked for the government’.Footnote 67 In January 1935, the head of the SEP in Morelos, Leopoldo Carranco Cardoso, provides the first reference to the deaths of SEP employees associated with El Tallarín: teachers Gilberto Méndez and Silvestre González, who were killed that winter. Méndez was accidentally shot by ‘federal troops during confusion with a militia’; González, on the other hand, was put to death ‘by the Cristero rebels of “El Tallarín”, who, after hanging him, placed a notice on him that said: “dead for imposing socialist teachings”’.Footnote 68 Unfortunately the director provides no more details, but what is certain is that fear spread among educators in the countryside and attendance in classrooms stood at a new low. Teachers wanted to transfer away from isolated villages to locations nearer the cities.Footnote 69
Similar to the Zapatistas of the 1910s, the rebels quieted their activities during the rainy and planting season of the summer, but in September 1935, just before the school year began, attacks on pueblos and teachers resumed. A few weeks after a brief battle in the mining town of Huautla, two teacher training school students in their mid-twenties, Facundo Bonilla and Camerino Valle, were put to death near Los Momotles, Tlaquiltenango. The two youths had been travelling on a near-empty bus destined to take them to their posts in Colonia Hidalgo and Los Hornos respectively. A group of insurgents under the command of El Tallarín assaulted the coach and captured the two educators, accusing them of believing in socialist education. The assailants directed Bonilla and Valle off the bus, tied them up, and then beat and shot them, leaving the two bodies by the roadside. Both youths died shortly thereafter from their wounds.Footnote 70 It remains unclear how many teachers became victims of El Tallarín – by the last year of his rebellion in 1938, the daily Excélsior estimated that he had been responsible for the deaths of seven rural teachers. The most recent incident had occurred in Cuautometitla, Puebla, where assailants killed the local teacher, José Ramírez Martínez, and members of the municipal government. The rebels hung the four bodies from trees in the central plaza and fled the village.Footnote 71
On other occasions, insurgents would intimidate a teacher but spare his or her life. On 19 June 1936 at 6 o'clock in the evening, a group of armed men attacked the school in Buena Vista del Monte, a hamlet in the mountains north of Cuernavaca. As the teacher dismissed the students after a full day of classes, a girl entered the building alarmed and pleading for help for her family members. Upon exiting the school building, the teacher encountered several armed individuals. The assailants shouted insults at the teacher and poked him with their rifle barrels, preventing him from passing. Seventy armed men, the teacher later claimed, sacked the village. The 15 local men who comprised the village militia were absent, and the attackers began to take arms from the houses of militiamen. Villagers fled the pueblo. Only women, children and the teacher remained in the hamlet of less than 200 inhabitants. Surrounded, the teacher could not escape, and the attackers shoved and kicked him back into the school building. The rebels demanded all documents pertaining to socialist education, as well as arms, clothes and money. Several of them called for the teacher's death and began to interrogate him. The unnamed teacher recalled, ‘the women and children present at the time, who were in tears and wailing because of the difficult situation I found myself in, lent me courageous help. They made the attackers … see that my educational work in the school extended only to practical teachings.’Footnote 72 The educator denied teaching socialist education, but the armed men continued their threats until their unidentified leader, most likely El Tallarín, entered the school building. The teacher repeated that the women and children's pleas were correct and that he had abstained from teaching socialism. These words half-convinced the leader to spare the instructor's life. He left the educator with a pamphlet and threatened to return and kill him. The rebels retreated after sacking the pueblo, taking with them even foodstuffs. The teacher never provided the name of the militia leader, but given that El Tallarín based his operations out of the north-eastern corner of Morelos around the Popocatépetl Volcano in 1936, it is quite likely that Rodríguez or someone closely associated with him did interrogate and ultimately release this specific teacher.Footnote 73 In any event, the attack shows that, in some cases at least, the rebels distinguished between the state and its specific policies, between education and anticlericalism. Teachers could continue to educate village children, but only if they respected pueblo traditions and abstained from any discussion of atheism.
Attacking rural teachers, especially those with an interest in socialism, represented just one expression of the rebellion's religious component. New documentation reveals Rodríguez's attempts to forge an alliance with the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, the principal civilian institution that backed the Cristeros of the late 1920s and 1930s against the federal government. The Liga, an ultra-Catholic organisation, would appear an unlikely ally of a guerrilla from Zapatista country given that some wealthy landowners and rich Catholics possessed links to the centralised and autocratic lay organisation. And while the Liga had endorsed, financed and armed the Cristeros of 1926–9, it had less success doing so in the 1930s and was riven by factionalism.Footnote 74 But similar to El Tallarín's adherence to Villarrealismo, the Liga presented him with an ideologically sympathetic ally that possessed a national profile and a history of confronting the state. As early as 1934, El Tallarín and his men met a delegation of the Liga from Puebla in the small village of Zalostoc, Morelos. Rodríguez recognised the Liga's programme as established in the 1934 Plan de Cerro Gordo and agreed to coordinate his action with the institution's directorate.Footnote 75 The correspondence exchanged between the Liga and the Morelos insurgent demonstrates the difficulties of forging such an alliance. El Tallarín warned the Catholic organisation not to avoid the agrarian question: ‘if the league does nothing more than defend Religion, and worst if it is line with asendados [sic], be sure that blood will continue to spill’.Footnote 76 Rodríguez boasted of his control over the pueblos, urged the Liga to commit to the armed movement and pledged his allegiance to universal Catholic values: ‘We are completely Religious and deeply respect parish priests [los padrecitos]’, another letter asserted.Footnote 77 Although convinced of the movement's genuine religious motive, the Liga failed to furnish sufficient war materials for the Cristeros of the 1930s, and the correspondence reveals an uneasy alliance with El Tallarín. Again, like the Villarrealistas of northern Mexico, the Catholic lay organisation offered the insurgents of Morelos nominal support at best, while failing to provide the material resources necessary for war.
More important than any alliance with the Liga, villagers, too, shared a cultural antipathy to anticlerical teachings, and they backed El Tallarín. During the revolt, descriptions of religious divisions within pueblos filled the reports of federal bureaucrats. On Monday 6 November 1934, for example, only six students appeared in class in Amacuitlapilco (Jonacatepec), a village of some 400 persons. The teachers proceeded to visit the homes of those absent in order to persuade their parents to return them to school. In several homes, SEP representatives were greeted with hostile words and threats. Only ten children presented themselves in class on Tuesday, so that evening at around 6 o'clock, the federal zone inspector attempted to gather villagers together and convince them of the educational project's merits. After nearly giving up on the meeting, the municipal officer, backed by 12 men armed with machetes, confronted the inspector, Juan Ponce, and two teachers. The municipal representative's hostile approach alarmed Ponce, since he had held cordial meetings in the pueblo on previous occasions with the same individual. The inspector calmly sought to explain the SEP's intentions and purposes, but the group exclaimed, to the cry of ‘Viva la Religión!’, ‘that they did not want the school because it combated priests and religion’, Ponce recalled. Within moments bells had been rung, alarming the villagers. Men and women armed with machetes, pistols and rifles surrounded the SEP personnel. Several persons in the mob began to shout denunciations of the federal and state governments, declaring also that ‘the pueblo knew how to impose its will’. The angry crowd attempted to grab the teachers and threatened to kill them. Shots were fired into the air. Alarmed at the potentially tragic situation unfolding, authorities in the village – the municipal representative and the militia leader – and several other individuals attempted to calm the mob and protect the SEP employees. Inspector Ponce and the two teachers managed to escape in a car and flee to Jonacatepec for safety.Footnote 78
Villagers, therefore, shared the same values that informed El Tallarín's raids on SEP schools. Rodríguez represented the rural inhabitants of eastern Morelos, who loathed anticlericalism in local schools. Pious individuals regularly placed printed flyers under the doors of villagers' houses at night; these small pamphlets attacked the educational reforms, extolled religious principles and called upon parents not to send their children to federal schools.Footnote 79 A group of residents in Yecapixtla complained that socialist education offered their children little, and that the teacher did not instruct students on how to pray or how to make the sign of the cross. Parents refused to send their young ones to school ‘until the Ejecutivo Federal is changed, for it is his ideology that makes teaching in the schools different from its previous form’.Footnote 80 They saw President Cárdenas as the culprit behind the new curriculum. Mothers and fathers resisted by sending their children to private schools that three local women had established. The director of the school in Yecapixtla accused several in the group of hiding the local priest, who changed homes frequently. In the eastern highland pueblo of Tetela del Volcán, parents fervently protested the introduction of sex education into classrooms. After endless discussions on the topic, the adults of the village wrote that ‘there remains no other path for us parents of families than to unite in order to defend our children from the prostitution that threatens them’.Footnote 81 Sex education, parents asserted, would lead children down a slippery slope of immorality. Procopio Mendieta, father of a young daughter, also spoke out against the SEP curriculum in the highlands around Tetela del Volcán. He specifically condemned educators for preaching atheism to children and for targeting women with their propaganda during local religious festivals. Authorities accused Mendieta of colluding with El Tallarín and eventually jailed the agitator.Footnote 82 In other words, local devotees, and not the clergy per se, presented a grassroots bulwark against anticlerical impositions from the outside.Footnote 83
Surrender
The scenario of a reformist president heeding the cries of the popular classes undermined El Tallarín's rebellion, as Cárdenas watered down anticlericalism, exiled Calles from Mexico and redistributed land in Morelos. Still, the insurgent displayed no signs of surrendering in exchange for amnesty and a good plot of land. Mistrust of politicians stood as a common characteristic of Zapatista leaders in the post-revolutionary period – the revolt's influence, then, was diffused in the pueblos, effective only in the larger scheme of national politics by virtue of its longevity, military prowess and ability to capture the popular imagination in the Mexico City press. El Tallarín may represent one of the most dangerous and feared guerrilla combatants of the post-revolutionary period, but politically, he could not, at least in the final years, capitalise on the bursts of popular outrage against socialist education. By 1938, El Tallarín was ready to come down from the cold mountains.
Only when Rodríguez's first cousin, Elpidio Perdomo, assumed the governorship of Morelos in 1938 did the guerrilla take advantage of an opportunity to end the rebellion. Perdomo, like his cousin, grew up in the southern hotlands and rose to the rank of colonel during the revolution. He remained in the army until the mid-1930s and was stationed in the northern city of Monterrey. Authorities knew Perdomo had a relationship with Rodríguez going back to their youth, and shortly after the rebellion broke out in the autumn of 1934, Perdomo travelled south on behalf of the government in search of his cousin. Perdomo arrived in Tepalcingo but failed to convince El Tallarín to surrender his arms, although it is not clear if the two actually spoke with each other.Footnote 84
Perdomo had campaigned on the promise that he would convince El Tallarín to lay down arms, and Cárdenas backed him on this key issue. Previous attempts by the president, Julia Mora Zapata and Perdomo had failed to persuade Rodríguez to give up the struggle – but the political scenario in the summer of 1938 offered him an opening, with Bustamante now out of power and his first cousin in. Close friends of Rodríguez contacted individuals in the Perdomo administration regarding surrender in exchange for guarantees that the rebel would face no criminal charges and could return to a peaceful civil life. Then, relatives of the two cousins became involved. Genaro Perdomo, aged 62 and uncle to both the governor and the rebel, met and spoke with his nephew Enrique after eight days of searching for him in the hills. Genaro convinced Rodríguez to wait close to their home village of San Pablo Hidalgo at a point named ‘la piedra escrita’ while he went to Cuernavaca to update the governor. Genaro and Elpidio returned together to ‘la piedra escrita’, and after what we can only imagine to be affectionate greetings between two cousins who had not seen each other in many years, the governor offered Rodríguez safety and guaranteed protection, and Rodríguez agreed to give up the life of a guerrilla. Perdomo then travelled to Mexico City in order to meet with the Ministry of Defence and ensure the amnesty. The federal government agreed to the deal, and Rodríguez wrote and signed a short letter of surrender to Cárdenas. He assured the president that the governor had worked out the conditions of his amnesty and requested ‘guarantees … in order to recognise your good government and dedicate myself to a tranquil, honourable life’.Footnote 85 Two weeks later on 7 September, El Tallarín presented himself in the governor's office, and the following day he and the governor drove with their uncle Genaro to Mexico City. There, at the Ministry of Defence, after four years of rebellion, El Tallarín finally surrendered.Footnote 86 During the surrender negotiations, Rodríguez appears to have conceded little more than a promise to lay down arms and return to civilian life. He faced no criminal charges. Cárdenas, thus, had responded to popular pressures from Morelos and made concessions, thereby recreating the pact between Zapatismo and the state.Footnote 87
Indeed, it was Perdomo's personal intervention on behalf of the federal government that provided Rodríguez with the opportunity to surrender. The state governors of post-revolutionary Mexico often performed such intermediary roles between Mexico City and the general population.Footnote 88 By 1938, the federal regime had redistributed additional lands in Morelos and it no longer sought to implement anticlerical legislation at the local level. Four years of struggle had inched the villages closer to the ideals of ‘tierra, libertad y religion’. Perdomo offered El Tallarín the confidence to give up life on the run. If Bustamante's hand-picked successor had won the Morelos gubernatorial election, Rodríguez would not have come down from the mountains. The caudillo's mistrust of government stuck with him until the end – a politician's word was no good. Thus, gubernatorial politics stood at the centre of Rodríguez's reasons for initially fleeing to the sierra in 1934 and for ultimately deciding to surrender in 1938, while religious discontent fuelled widespread indignation in rural Morelos during the rebellion. After the election for governor in 1938, Bustamante, who had once attempted to control Rodríguez by force, was defeated, out of the political picture and no longer a threat. Both Rodríguez and his cousin Perdomo, in fact, had escaped attempts on their lives by Governor Bustamante's goons, but the former Zapatista revolutionaries survived and lived to tell the tale.
A reporter from Excélsior interviewed El Tallarín shortly after his surrender at the Ministry of Defence. The rugged militia leader shed his riding boots, pistol and ammunition belt and donned a new suit and shoes for the occasion. ‘He's a man of the countryside, with skin tanned by the sun’, wrote the journalist. His left cheek was bruised black and blue from a blow: ‘A horse gave it to me’, said Rodríguez. His right hand was partly disabled after taking a bullet several years before. Excélsior described El Tallarín as a victim of circumstance. Rodríguez denied all the reports in the press of the crimes attributed to him over the past four years and stated ‘that he never assaulted the people; that his famed reputation as a bandit has been formed by his “political enemies”’.Footnote 89 He departed the Ministry of Defence carrying a letter of amnesty in his pocket approved by Cárdenas, then returned to Morelos and practically disappeared from public view thereafter.
El Tallarín's life after surrender remains obscure. He briefly mentioned at his surrender that he would not return to farming and would probably lend a hand in the Perdomo administration. An article by El Universal in 1939, when Perdomo was entrenched in a battle against the state legislature, mentions accusations by legislators that the governor had employed his famous cousin and a group of pistoleros to intimidate the legislative body during a political stand-off.Footnote 90 The fog surrounding Rodríguez's life after rebellion only thickens in regards to his death, which apparently occurred within a few years after his 1938 surrender. Some eastern Morelenses believed he fell in the violent political clashes of Perdomo's governorship, while one former Zapatista recalled that he died a drunkard. In any case, the two stories are not mutually exclusive, and they suggest that after laying down arms El Tallarín lived in the shadows and struggled to settle into civilian life.Footnote 91
Conclusion
El Tallarín's rebellion was the first to erupt in post-revolutionary Morelos and it established a pattern among those Morelenses who carried the torch of Zapatismo into the mid-twentieth century. Rodríguez and his successors were all motivated by the growing influence of centralised government in pueblo life. During the dry season of 1942–3, for instance, over 100 campesinos from eastern Morelos took up arms to evade federal authorities and defend agrarian self-sufficiency. In what became known as the bola chiquita, villagers from Zacualpan, Tlacotepec and Hueyapan – the same region in which El Tallarín possessed strong support – resisted an intensive campaign of conscription by the federal army to serve in Mexico City during the end of the 1942 harvest.Footnote 92 Moreover, as Tanalís Padilla has shown in the case of Jaramillistas in the 1940s and 1950s, farmers increasingly resented politicians' heavy-handed involvement in the local sugar economy and met state repression with mobilisation and armed struggle.Footnote 93 Likewise, for both Rodríguez and Jaramillo, repression following the gubernatorial contests of Morelos marked key moments on the path to rebellion, further emphasising the essential middle roles played by governors during the process of political centralisation. After each violent occasion, rural pressures forced the presidents of Mexico to intervene, renegotiate the terms of Zapatista loyalty and offer amnesty to the movements' leaders.
Yet what separates El Tallarín most from his successors is the degree to which the defence of religion formed a central component of his uprising. Only during the first years of the Cárdenas presidency did official anticlericalism provoke a defiant response in the Morelos countryside. It did so because, unlike the high-level ecclesiastical persecution of the late 1920s, socialist education in 1934 clashed with the daily religious culture of the people. Before 1934, religion fostered communal solidarity and provided an autonomous space for pueblos to operate; teachers' subsequent attempts to undermine pious beliefs smacked of a central imposition. Village religious devotions, therefore, formed an integral part of the Zapatista concept of local sovereignty, and this explains why Morelos became an important battleground in the Segunda: anticlericalism in the form of socialist education threatened village liberty. And despite the Catholic Church's weak institutional foundations in states such as Morelos and Campeche (where folk religious traditions thrived), official anticlericalism in the 1930s mobilised groups as diverse as parents of schoolchildren, former Zapatista officers and middle- and upper-class laywomen. The Segunda, then, as Ben Fallaw has shown, tended to unite Catholics across Mexico regardless of the Church's organisational strength.Footnote 94 The Segunderos were more geographically and socially diverse than the Cristeros of the late 1920s, and issues beyond religion could motivate resistance.
For El Tallarín, in fact, religion was not even the initial factor that led him to the hills. Instead, local politics proved decisive in his revolt and surrender, which draws attention to the consolidation of the PNR during the 1930s. Rodríguez's struggle had its origins in the internal elections of the Morelos PNR held in January 1934, lending support to Lorenzo Meyer's finding that the real contest for power during the Maximato occurred within the PNR rather than in constitutional elections between rival parties.Footnote 95 These internal contests reinforced political centralisation, but, as the case of Morelos shows, the party hierarchy in Mexico City could not control conflicts between its members at the state and municipal levels. Rodríguez's troubles with the PNR also demonstrate that the party was hostile to campesino leaders during the Maximato and had yet to plant deep roots in the countryside.Footnote 96 In turn, the experience of Morelos in the mid-1930s suggests discontinuity between the Maximato and the Cárdenas presidency. Fortunately for El Tallarín, the Callistas did not succumb to popular pressures and negotiate with the opposition to the degree that the Cardenistas did. Unlike Saturnino Cedillo, whose revolt from San Luis Potosí was crushed by the president in 1938, Rodríguez had the sense and the political fortune to quit while he was ahead. As he exited the political scene in the 1930s, El Tallarín stood as a defender of agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship and pueblo religious liberty.
