Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

Under such circumstances, indigenous poverty grew in the nineteenth century. Eventually a government came to power that did not even pretend to care for the rights of ordinary people. And when resentments against the dictator Porfirio Díaz spread throughout the land, many indigenous people joined the fight against him and helped to bring him down. One of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution was the Nahuatl-speaking Emiliano Zapata from Morelos. Photos of him leading his men to victory or convening a council where his people sat down to make their own laws, still grace the pages of textbooks and the walls of bars and restaurants. In the decades after the revolution, progress did not move in a straight line—but there was progress, and often native peoples were in the vanguard. The Maya who came out of the forest to protest NAFTA in the 1990s called themselves the Zapatistas after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s indigenous people were thoroughly engaged in their own struggles to seek out their history and define and protect their ancestral heritage, much like disempowered peoples elsewhere.