"I would rather die standing than live on my knees," Emiliano Zapata famously said. Many novels on him have been written in Spanish as well. This page has some wonderful words from one of Mexico's heroes, a revolutionary slain in April 1919. Emiliano José González Velázquez was born on January 11, 1879, in a small town then part of the Mexican state of Morelos, now in Mexico City. His parents were farmers who had moved to this area after losing their land in the Mexican-American war. When Emiliano was only seven years old, his father was killed by federal soldiers who came to collect a tax on all crops grown within a thousand square miles of any border city. His mother died when he was nineteen. Emiliano wanted to be a lawyer like his father but did not have the resources to study abroad so he worked as a schoolteacher instead. He married Isabel Villaseñor, with whom he had three children, and soon after began organizing local protests against the government. In 1904, he was imprisoned for two years without trial for leading an uprising against the government. When he was released, Zapata went into exile in Spain, where he learned to speak Spanish and became interested in European socialism.