Blog 6: Emiliano Zapata

Today in class when we were discussing the movie Viva Zapata and discussing how Zapata’s goal was to get the peasants’ land back from the elite large landowners, someone said “He’s just like Robin Hood! He steals from the rich and gives to the needy!” I couldn’t help but get this song from Shrek struck in my head, so I thought I’d share it with y'all.

Anyway, what really got me thinking today was the discussion about how Zapata relates to 1950s politics in the United States. During the 1950s, the U.S. was involved in the Cold War, and the Red Scare was going on at home. The question that really interested me was: is Zapata supposed to represent communism in the film? And if he is, then what was the filmmakers’ message about communism? First, I don’t think that Zapata is supposed to completely represent communism. Yes, his goals kind of paralleled those of communism—he wanted to redistribute land among the peasants that was under the control of rich, powerful elites. However, unlike communists who want to confiscate all land from the rich and equally distribute it among everyone, Zapata merely wanted to regain control of the land that had actually belonged to the peasants before it was seized from them. I like what Lucas said in our discussion, too: maybe Zapata was sort of supposed to represent communism or at least parallel it, but the point that the filmmakers were trying to make was that Americans were getting over-paranoid about communism and freaking out over a cause that could actually be considered noble. I’m not saying that I believe in communism, but throughout Viva Zapata the viewer can’t help but sympathize with the peasants, whose plight is similar to poor people all over the world who have so little, and are therefore willing to embrace a communist system that promises them so much.

Whatever message the filmmakers were trying to portray, I still enjoyed this movie. I’m not going to lie, at the part when Zapata was president for basically a day and he was about to write down the name of the defiant peasant he had just encountered, I was screaming at my laptop: “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Gaa you’ve turned into Díaz!!!” There were also many humorous moments throughout the film that I appreciated, and overall I liked this movie.