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Illustrious people

Francisco Ignacio madero

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After the tragic decade, President Fco I Madero fell prisoner at the hands of Victoriano Huerta, along with Vice President José Ma Pino Suarez. Forcing them to resign from their positions. Major Cárdenas approached them when they were preparing to sleep in the government palace and told them that in the morning they would be transferred to the Lecumberri prison for their safety and then they would leave for the port of Ver so they could take a boat to Cuba Island. .

President Madero with tears in his eyes said goodbye to his friend General Felipe Ángeles and prepared to leave, Mr.

Pino Suarez came out from the palace patio while shouting... Goodbye my general!!

They got into the car and passed the door and at that point Cárdenas turned around with a stick and said: - Don't worry, we're going to enter through the back door.

Madero knew that there was no back door and he made it known.
Then Cárdenas stopped the procession, took Madero out of the car and shot him twice in the forehead. At the same time that they shot Madero, they took Pino Suarez out of the car and when he realized that they had murdered the president, he shouted... Help, they're killing me!!! They cornered him against the wall and shot him there.

Sunday 23
The morning newspaper... EXTRA, EXTRA!!! PRESIDENT MADERO HAS DIED!!! With red letters...

The city was filled with crimes against the Maderistas. So, many flee to the north of the country and abroad. The women, sad and outraged because the apostle of democracy had been murdered, took up arms and joined the ranks of Fco Villa in the north.

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Pancho Villa immediately supported the proposals of Francisco I. Madero, who in his Plan of San Luis called to take up arms, on November 20, 1910, against the regime of Porfirio Díaz, promising the peasants the return of their unjustly lands. taken away during the prolonged Porfirista dictatorship (1876-1911), which had harshly repressed all political opposition. Nicknamed the Centaur of the North by his co-religionists, Pancho Villa contributed with his army to the rapid triumph of the Revolution, which in just six months managed to expel Porfirio Díaz from power and the country (1911).

Despite the lukewarmness of his reforms, Pancho Villa supported the progressive presidency of Madero (1911-1913) and then fought the counterrevolutionary dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta (1913-1914), whom he managed to overthrow in collaboration with Emiliano Zapata and the constitutionalist leader Venustiano Carranza. But after the victory of this second revolution, Villa and Zapata felt disappointed by Carranza, and took up arms again, this time against him. This time military luck was not on their side: in 1915 the Carrancista general Álvaro Obregón defeated the Villistas, strengthening Venustiano Carranza in the presidency (1915-1920).

Having since lost his political and military power, Villa was assassinated in 1923; The same fate had befallen Emiliano Zapata four years earlier. Despite the justice of his demands (it is estimated that, in 1910, a thousand landowners employed three million landless peasants), not even his ideals survived his failure. Successive presidents claimed to be heirs to the Revolution, but Venustiano Carranza and his immediate successors (Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, who would dominate the political scene until 1936) limited themselves to domesticating it, without ever undertaking a true agrarian reform.

Francisco villa

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Emiliano zapata

Specifically, his revolutionary and vigilante spirit began at the age of nine, when he saw how the landowners in the area dispossessed the peasants of their land, including his family. Outraged, he asked his father why they didn't do something about it, but he told him it was useless. After that episode, the little boy promised that when he grew up he would get everyone back their land.

Emiliano lost both of his parents in less than a year when he was only 16, after which he would work as a farmer (farmer producer) and arriero (transporter of goods).

At 18, during his town's festivities, he was arrested by rural forces for his activism, being freed thanks to his brother Eufemio, which finally forced them (both him and his brother) to leave the state.

In 1906, his support for some peasants against the oppression of landowners made him utter the popular phrase: “It is better to die standing than to live your entire life kneeling.”

Emiliano supported the peasant cause in many raids and movements, which aimed to give them better living conditions. He was recognized in many places for his specialty with horses, both in knowledge of them and in their use, and his charisma allowed him to gain many followers throughout his travels.

A pesar de esto, Emiliano Zapata fue declarado enemigo del gobierno en torno a 1910, considerándosele un bandolero. Su lema solía ser Tierra y Libertad.

Tras unirse al movimiento de Francisco Ignacio Madero y lograr que éste se volviera presidente, Zapata se alzó al ver que no lograba poner una solución a la problemática de los campesinos. Antes de esto, el mismo Madero había sido padrino de su boda con Josefa Espejo.

Zapata también luchó por la emancipación de la mujer y el derecho de huelga, lo que fue de especial interés debido que, a pesar de los diferentes gobiernos, sus ideales siempre se mantuvieron en orden.

En 1919 la revolución de Zapata entró en un momento complejo, con varios de sus hombres abandonando la lucha y disminuyendo sus fuerzas. Esto hizo que el general Pablo González (bajo la orden del entonces presidente Venustiano Carranza), aprovechara la oportunidad para iniciar un ataque hacia Zapata.

Al poco tiempo Zapata sería traicionado por sus propios aliados (en concreto por Jesús Guajardo), lo que desembocaría en una emboscada liderada por el general Pablo González, que acabaría con el asesinato de Emiliano el día 10 de abril del año 1919 en la ciudad de Chinameca, Temixco (México).

A pesar de esto, y aunque la revolución se apagó notablemente con la muerte de Zapata, su espíritu siguió muy vivo en México, así como su pensamiento de justicia para la comunidad campesina que prevalece hoy en día.

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Las Soldaderas

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ADELA VELARDE PEREZ (Adelita)

Adela Velarde Pérez was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on September 8, 1900. Those who knew her say that she inherited the strong and indomitable character of her grandfather, General Rafael Velarde, a determined supporter, but also a personal friend of Benito. Juárez, whom he protected from house to house during his itinerant presidency.

 

Adela was a heroine of the Mexican Revolution, a woman who, at the age of 13, against her parents' will, enlisted in the Mexican Revolution. She joined, by her own decision, a group of nurses that Doña Leonor Villegas de Magnon had recently created. , president of the White Cross, specializing in talking to the dying and preparing them for a good death; In many cases he notified family members when they died.

 

It was February 7, 1913 when Adela Velarde Pérez boarded the nursing train for the first time in the City of Chihuahua, a time from which the famous photograph by Jerónimo Hernández emerged, where a group of women can be seen wearing a rebozo on the stairs of the transport. Its mission from that moment on was to care for the wounded of the Constitutionalist Army. She, Adela, preferred to leave the comfortable, carefree life that her well-off family gave her and, encouraged by Leonor, she decided to serve, not as a soldier, but as a nurse, initially in Colonel Alfredo Breceda's regiment. Laughing, thin, and pretty; Soon all the soldiers in the troop began to call her Adelita. Her love…. Adela: “I am always in the White Cross and he is defending his country”

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In the same year he met Sergeant Antonio Gil del Río Armenta, a member of the Francisco Villa Forces, with whom he had a love relationship for a year. Antonio sat on the train every night to sing love songs with his guitar.

He asked for his change to serve in the Revolution in the Mexican White Cross, the reason, to be close to his beloved, they wanted to get married and they fought many battles together with Pancho Villa until the battle of Gómez Palacio, Durango, the bloodiest of the Revolution and while Antonio was assisting the wounded, a bullet hit him, he fell dying and Adela looked at him from afar and ran to help him, in desperation she put her head on his legs, her face was covered in tears; With the last breath of life he reiterated his great love. It is said that his last words were to reiterate his love for her and he recited the last verse of his song:

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“If by chance I die in the campaign

and my corpse is going to be buried,

Adelita, for God's sake, I beg you,

“That, with your eyes, you are going to cry to me!”

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Days before he died, Antonio looked straight into Adelita's eyes and with his penetrating gaze of his blue eyes, he told her: “I have a gift for you in my backpack”, it was nothing more and nothing less than the famous corrido. So Adela gave it to the regiment's musicians and they started playing it right there.

Adela, with a broken soul, rose up as she carried the fruit of her love, she had a son, who also died serving in World War II.

Despite the loss of her love, she continued working with the soldiers.

According to history, Antonio Gil was the composer of the famous revolutionary corrido “La Adelita”, as he serenaded the infirmary train.

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She continued his fight

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In 1916, the Association of Veterans of the Revolution recognized Adela Velarde Pérez as a militant nurse since 19134 in the Northern Division, under the command of General Carlos Martínez, as well as in the Northeast Army in several regions (Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Torreón , Aguascalientes, Distrito Federal and Morelos. He had an outstanding participation against the usurper Victoriano Huerta.

 

After the Revolution

 

This action made her officially considered a veteran of the Revolution on February 22, 1941. When the Secretariat of Defense awarded her the Decoration of Revolutionary Merit while she was alive.

Twenty years later, the Congress of the Union gave him a lifetime pension. In 1962, she was named a member of the Mexican Legion of Honor.

 

 

Tribute

 

 

On November 20, 2014, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the Consulate of Mexico in Del Río, Texas, celebrated that day as the 104th anniversary of the armed movement in the Mexican Republic, and the first official tribute that was held took place there. to Adela Velarde Pérez, La Adelita.

The tribute was at the San Felipe cemetery, there in Del Río, Texas, in the United States, where more than 100 people gathered around her grave to pay tribute to the woman whose life and dedication to the cause of the Revolution inspired one of the best-known songs in the entire musical repertoire in Mexico, also translated into several languages.

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Where are his remains?

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In 1965 she married Colonel Alfredo Villegas. The marriage lasted until the day he died.

 

His remains rest in the United States because that was where they both lived until he died in 1971, on September 4 in Ciudad del Río, Texas.

 

 

 

Adela Velarde during her civil wedding with Colonel Alfredo Villegas, in 1961

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grave of Adela Velarde Pérez, in the San Felipe Cemetery, in Del Río, Texas.

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SIMA Ballet Folklórico tuvo el privilegio de participar en el homenaje a esta gran mujer, valiente guerrera y honrando a Adelita, como la bautizó Pancho Villa, de la misma manera reconocemos a todas aquellas mujeres que lucharon por sus ideales y de forma libre y con derechos que podemos disfrutar hoy.

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