MEXICO: Whom the Sergeant Adored

Dark-eyed Adela Velarde was 14 when she left Ciudad Juárez to join the army of General Venustiano Carranza. She became a nurse. Dressed in a green uniform cut from the curtains of a Pullman car, she rode through the Mexican Revolution on a grey hospital train under the watchful eye of a veteran head nurse named Leonor Villegas de Manon.

Though fiery-tempered old Leonor drove many a military wolf away from her girls, she never had to bother about a taciturn sergeant named Antonio del Rioarmenta. He was in love with young Adelita, but he was too shy to tell anyone about it. Instead he wrote a song for her, working out the tune on his harmonica. In the hospital train at Aguascalientes one day, he sang it for her:

Popular among soldiers was Adelita

The woman the sergeant adored,

Who besides being valiant was pretty,

And respected even by the colonel.

A few days later the sergeant’s general sent him across a bullet-swept street in Torreón for a canteen of cognac. Adelita saw him die.

A Symbol. By an ironic twist, the sergeant’s song became the favorite of Pancho Villa’s men, not of Carranza’s army, where it was born. For years, a guitar-strumming mariachi had only to play Adelita in the company of a Carrancista to get his guitar strings shot off. Carranza won the war, but Adelita has long since won the battle of the mariachi bands. Today, when a group of paunchy old boys gather in a cantina for an evening—Indians who robbed with Zapata, green-eyed Chihuahuans who followed Felipe Angeles, tall-talking Sonorans who fought from Obregón’s armored trains—they call for Adelita.

Because of the song, Adelita has come to symbolize all the sturdy women of the revolution—such scowling Amazons as Colonel Juanita, who commanded a regiment of Zapata’s best cavalry; the handsome, .45-toting blondes of the Café Viena in Guadalajara, who could pick out a tune by firing at piano keys; the thousands of soldaderas who followed their men into battle, gave birth in boxcars, somehow managed also to produce three meals a day.

A Namesake. In Mexico City last week, on the eve of the 38th anniversary of the revolution, a flashing-eyed, 18-year-old beauty named Rosa Maria Franco was chosen “Adelita 1948.” With rifle belts slung across her shoulders, she led a parade across the Zocalo and was wined & dined at Ciro’s.

The original Adelita had become matronly Adela Velarde de Perez, a secretary in a Chapultepec Park museum. A delegate to the Congress of Veterans of the Revolution, her only part in the fuss over her young namesake was to watch the parade from a crowded grandstand. It had been a long time since the bashful sergeant died in the streets of Torreón.