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Villa and Zapata were not the only ones. In all the sierras
and valleys of Mexico, each region had its own revolutionary. Here in Guerrero it was one Agustin Lorenzo. His
name is already legend. Don Pancho Cuellar comes down from Ixcateopan and tells me about Agustin Lorenzo. His
brother reiterates the discourse. Their father rode with the great Caudillo. That was before the revolution.
Things were really bad then. The poor had not even anyone to speak for them. . . . As he talks, Pancho
looks as Agustin Lorenzo must have looked. . . . He was pure Indian, from Tlamacuzapa.
He made raids on the rich and he was the friend of the poor. Sometimes he made a mistake. But he never robbed.
He never robbed--but he interrupted convoys. That is the way Pancho's father joined him. Pancho's father was an
arriero and drove burro trains through the mountains, even as Pancho does today. It was different then. There
were no automobiles or trucks on the roads; travel was lonely. The road to Tlamacuzapa leads down the chasm of
the barranca toward Juliantla. It was there that Agustin Lorenzo relieved Pancho's father of his burros and their load.
After that he did not dare return to town, so he joined the bandit. But was he a bandit? Did he rob? Senor,
he was a revolucionario, all revolucionarios rob. Even today, except that now revolution is finished. There is
a corrido about Agustin Lorenzo. Antonio, Pancho's brother, recites it with gestures. It is all about the Little
Mexican, the Indian, who went out from his land and gathered his men and made war on the rich hacendados. The poor people
loved him, and he could come and go in their houses as he liked. He could even enter the great town of Iguala and the
Federals dared not touch him. And finally the Carrancistas paid a man;-- they took a poor devil out of jail and they
paid him to go and murder Agustin Lorenzo. And this poor man went and he joined the forces of the great bandit.
And he became Agustin Lorenzo's close friend. And then one night he drew his dagger and plunged it to the hilt in Agustin
Lorenzo's back. . . . Afterward the traitor had to join the army and be sent to Mexico to save his
life. But Agustin Lorenzo bade a sad farewell to his beloved hills, and sometimes he may be seen walking in the fields
of corn in the valley there where they buried him, for they say his spirit does not die.
Pancho goes on to tell of the fabolous riches that Agustin Lorenzo stored
by, things he hid in the caves in the hills . . . in the Canyon of the Hand, down by Naranjo, they found
a hundred saddles with gold and silver embroidery and some elegant charro clothes with silver buttons, because Agustin Lorenzo
loved to dress handsomely, and in that cave he had also hid many little idols and masks of Aztec priests, because Agustin
Lorenzo was a little Mexican, even as are my brother and myself, and he had belief in those things. . .
. That is the way Don Pancho Cuellar puts it, and he knows a great deal about those things.
Taken from:
A small
Mexican world
By Spratling, William, 1900-1967.
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