Cuautla
"I stood on the street in Anenecuilco where Zapata was born, in 30-degree heat, and then drove to the thermal pools and floated there until evening. Some days organize themselves."
The road into Cuautla drops out of the cool Morelos highlands into something warmer and more tropical, and after the pine-scented air of the higher elevations the heat lands on you like a physical thing. Cuautla sits at around 1,300 meters — lower than Mexico City, lower than Cuernavaca — and the climate is the honest lowland climate of central Mexico: warm all year, hot in spring, surrounded by sugarcane fields that stretch along the valley floor between the remnants of colonial-era haciendas.
I came on a Wednesday morning to visit the Zapata museum and ended up staying until nearly dark.
Anenecuilco: Where Zapata Was Born
The village of Anenecuilco is five kilometers from the center of Cuautla, down a road that passes through the cane fields and then through what feels like a normal small village until you see the sign. Emiliano Zapata was born here in 1879. The Museo Casa de Zapata is a small, serious museum in a restored building that takes the story with the gravity it deserves.
I say it hits harder than it has any right to, but what I mean is that I went expecting the usual commemorative-museum experience — hagiographic photographs, educational panels, the occasional glass case — and found something more honest. The museum explains the agrarian grievances that produced Zapata without sanitizing either the violence of the revolution or the incompleteness of its results. The land reform question that he died fighting for was not, the museum makes clear, resolved by the revolution. It continues.
What struck me most was the scale of the house. This was not a wealthy family. The room where he was born is small and the reconstruction is modest: a few pieces of period furniture, whitewashed walls, a dirt floor.
After the museum I drove back through the village slowly and parked and walked the main street for twenty minutes. There is nothing to see, strictly speaking. A tianguis was setting up. Children were coming out of school. The sugar mill on the edge of town was doing something loud. I had just read about where Zapata was born and this was where it happened and standing in an ordinary street sometimes tells you things that a museum cannot.
Agua Hedionda: The Stinking Water
The name is accurate. Agua Hedionda — literally “stinking water” — is a complex of sulfurous thermal springs on the edge of Cuautla that have been drawing visitors since at least the colonial period. The water is warm and mineral-rich and smells distinctly of sulfur, which is not an argument against it. The French have sulfurous thermal stations too — Vichy, Évian, the Pyrenean spas — and we have always believed, correctly I think, that water that smells unusual is usually doing something worthwhile.
I arrived at Agua Hedionda on a Wednesday afternoon expecting it to be calm. Wednesdays in Mexico are often the calmest days for places like this. I was moderately wrong: there were several dozen families in the largest pool, children shrieking, teenagers conducting the kind of complicated social operations that teenagers conduct near water. It was cheerful and slightly chaotic and I found a less occupied pool toward the back and got in.
The water is pale and milky from the minerals. I lay on my back and looked at the sky and thought about nothing much for a long time. The hacienda buildings on the edge of the complex — former sugar hacienda infrastructure, now incorporated into the resort — cast long shadows across the grass. After Anenecuilco in the heat of the morning, floating horizontally in warm water felt like an entirely reasonable response to Mexican history.
The Valley and the Haciendas
The sugarcane haciendas of the Morelos valley are mostly ruins now, or partial ruins, or converted into other uses. Some have been restored as hotels. Some are just there — facades standing beside roads, arcades crumbling into the cane fields, the occasional chimney of a former trapiche (sugar mill) pointing at nothing.
Driving around the valley outside Cuautla in the late afternoon, I passed three or four of these without planning to. The light on them was the late-afternoon gold that the Mexican highlands do so well, long shadows and warm walls. One of them had cattle grazing through what had been the main courtyard. Another had been converted into a school, children coming out the main gate into the road.
The revolution that Zapata helped start in 1910 was, among other things, a revolution against exactly these haciendas — against the system by which enormous estates had absorbed the communal lands of indigenous villages over the preceding centuries. Standing next to the ruins of one and having just come from his museum, I found the connection between landscape and history unusually tangible. Morelos is like that. The land here remembers things.
