José María Morelos-Agrarian Reformer

T HE EMINENT nineteenth-century Mexican historian, Lucas Alaman, wrote a brilliant five-volume history of the Mexican revolution for independence, and though it was the product of considerable scholarship, it was not without a pronounced pro-Spanish bias. Born in Guanajuato of distinguished Spanish ancestry, Alaman viewed the revolution basically as a hideous uprising of the rabble against legally established authority, and as a result he was rarely sympathetic any of the revolutionary leaders. Thus, for example, Alaman insisted that Jose Maria Morelos regarded the movement he led not only as a struggle for independence but also as one involving proletarian against proprietor, ind therefore recommended the Congress of Chilpancingo in the fall of 1813 a radical socio-economic program that included a redistribution of the land. The communists and socialists of our day, he wrote in 1850, to whose systems Morelos leaned in considerable degree, will recognize completely their principles in some of the points which he recommended the Congress. 1 And this, he added

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