This important book begins with the story of how some 60 soldiers and armed civilians arrived at the home of agrarian leader Rubén Jaramillo in the early afternoon of 23 May 1962, and forcefully removed him, his wife and their three sons. ‘A few hours later, the bullet-riddled bodies of the five family members were found on the outskirts of the Xochicalco ruins, an archaeological site near Cuernavaca’ (p. 1). Like the opening account of the murder in Gabriel García Márquez's Crónica de una muerte anunciada, even though one knows what is going to happen, this brutal state crime creates a tension that keeps one reading this well-written history of a long-standing movement in mid-twentieth-century Morelos.

This is a story about how state repression radicalised a movement that initially and then repeatedly mounted opposition to the government within available legal channels. The Jaramillista movement was born in 1942 out of a joint worker–campesino strike against management's abusive power and corruption at the state-run Zacatepec sugar cooperative. After strike leaders were subjected to unlawful arrests, assassinations and disappearances, a group of armed campesinos led by Jaramillo fled to the mountains. Officially pardoned, in 1946 Jaramillistas founded the Partido Agrario Obrero de Morelos (Agrarian Labour Party of Morelos, PAOM), running Jaramillo for governor of the state. The PAOM lost through a combination of fraud and brutal repression, which once more drove Jaramillistas underground. In 1952, they backed General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán's opposition campaign for president and, again, Jaramillo for governor. Elections were fraught with fraud and repression, compelling Jaramillistas to turn to armed struggle once again. After yet another official pardon in 1959, campesinos under Jaramillo's leadership proposed redistributing land and creating a large agro-industrial project on the Michapa and El Guarín plains in western Morelos. After failed appeals for government support, the Jaramillistas invaded these lands. They were forcibly removed by the army shortly before Jaramillo and his family were assassinated.

Tanalís Padilla makes an important contribution to the literature based on meticulous original research, challenging the myth of the hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) between 1940 and 1968. For the movement, Padilla analysed interviews with surviving Jaramillistas, earlier generations of oral histories, manifestos, speeches, newspaper articles, and correspondence between Jaramillistas and government officials. She adds to our scant knowledge of the state's repressive apparatus during this period with intelligence reports from the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (General Directorate of Political and Social Research) and documents on the ‘dirty war’ from the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Directorate of Security), declassified in 2002.

A welcome inclusion is the chapter on women's incorporation into the Jaramillista movement and the way in which women ‘proved central to the social networks that sustained the party and the guerrilla group’ (p. 25). Indeed, women organised to prevent strike-breakers from entering the sugar refinery during the Zacatepec strikes; they carried weapons and planted explosives during the underground years; they acted as Jaramillo's bodyguards at social events; and they participated in the 1959–62 Jaramillista takeover of the Michapa and El Guarín plains. Women's involvement was especially visible during the 1952 Henríquez Guzmán campaign, as illustrated in a magnificent photograph of a massive campesino march where women in festive dress and rebozos walked at the centre of a human river flanked by men. Padilla describes well the contradictions Jaramillista women faced in a male-dominated movement and society. As was the case with most social movements at the time, they struggled both for participation within their own movement (they even formed a ‘feminine sector’) and for the movement's involvement in national politics.

Padilla occasionally replaces such contradiction and complexity with more simplistic views of state–society relations. This is particularly so in her analysis of agrarian matters. She sees agrarian reform beneficiaries as ‘clients of the state and, by extension, of the newly emerging official party’ (p. 41), rather than adopting the more nuanced view articulated by Jonathan Fox and Gustavo Gordillo in which the ejido organisation served not only as a form of governmental control but also as a resource for independent mobilisations. This view is reinforced by the idea that ‘the post-revolutionary government decreed all land and resources to be the property of the nation, to which campesinos could be granted access’ (p. 40). This conflation of two different legal matters obscures the fact that ejido land was collective or ‘social’ (not national) property. This is important because it greatly complicates Padilla's interpretation of Jaramillo's Michapa and El Guarín project, where a complex agrarian matter is reduced to a simple opposition between modernising Jaramillistas allied with a faction of ejidatarios against invading ranchers, local political bosses, bribed workers, co-opted ejidatarios and the federal government. While no one reading this book can doubt the official and elite recourse to corruption and violence that took place, many questions remain. For instance, Jaramillo wanted to take over ejido lands on the basis that they had been left idle, but only individual ejidatarios lost their rights to a parcel when it was left idle, not the entire collectivity. Required was an expropriation of social property, a complicated legal matter undertaken in those years only for federal projects involving the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX), the Federal Electricity Commission, the Ministry of Public Transport or the Department of Agriculture. Moreover, that the head of the Department of Agriculture had initially authorised such a project did not make it any more legal. What it does is show the manipulation of law by all sides – part of the complexity that was the hallmark of state–society relations at the time.

In the end, this does not so much detract from her work than suggest avenues for further inquiry. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata is essential reading for those interested in Mexican politics and history, the Mexican Left, peasant movements and women's history.