Talk:Morelos Commune

Proposal to Merge with Liberation Army of the South
This article has multiple issues. To begin with: the very title and framing of the subject. The term "Morelos Commune" seems to be the term of one particular historian. Now obviously, retrospective historiographic terms aren't forbidden in themselves, since we talk all the time about the Byzantine Empire and the Weimar Republic. But there needs to be more evidence that this is a notable term widely accepted by the scholarship. Speaking of which, the sourcing for this article is extremely weak. It cites one random unknown and highly partisan website run by an obscure professor, along with a passing mention on a couple pages of an obscure book.

Presenting it as an unrecognized state is questionable, since Zapata did not (unless I am sorely mistaken) have separatist ambitions or claim the status of a national government. Therefore this topic should be treated as the local, social-revolutionary dimension of the (original) Zapatista movement, which already has an article.

I suggest, then, that this article be deleted, and that a section be added to the ELS about social revolution in Morelos. It will need new and better sources, possibly from Hispanic scholarship if no Anglophone sources are available. I can't make any suggestions in that regard, since I am neither well-read on this topic nor able to read Spanish. This Adolfo Gilly person mentioned on the "Global Learning" page might be a good starting point, however.

Also putting an NPOV tag on here, for obvious reasons. Nicknimh (talk) 13:36, 28 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm torn on this. I agree that the sourcing in this article is pretty weak. I also agree that framing the commune as an unrecognized state is inappropriate and, imo, a clear case of "Wikipedia brain". But "Morelos Commune" (coined by Adolfo Gilly) is a term that has been widely adopted by the literature, not just Edward Kantowicz . I think it should continue to be used to describe the governing structures set up by the Zapatistas in Morelos.
 * I oppose merging this article with Liberation Army of the South, because as suggested by its title, that article should focus on the military unit. I could be convinced to broaden the scope of this article into a discussion of the Zapatista movement as a whole, making the Morelos Commune into just a section. SilverStar54 (talk) 16:42, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The Morelos Commune is notable in its own right, and additional academic and non-academic sources discuss it. Upon a cursory search of Google Scholar, I find 24 academic articles and books specifically mentioning the Morelos Commune; the Marxists Internet Archive has three documents in 1993, 2001, and 2010 mentioning it; The Anarchist Library has two documents mentioning it in 2002 and 2022; and plenty of other non-academic sources discussing it. The fact that the Morelos Commune article as it stands now is stubby is not a compelling reason to me for a merger given the notability highlighted by other sources, and due to its distinctive governance. Just improve the article (something I may contribute to when I am free again). 4kbw9Df3Tw (talk) 05:02, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I went through the Google Scholar results mentioned above and added a number of them to the bibliography of the article. It seems that Nicknimh is correct in saying that Adolfo Gilly coined the term, as this is stated repeatedly in many of the sources. However, I think it has received enough coverage as to meet general notability guidelines and the article should be kept in a rewritten form. The copious unsourced information in the article needs to be removed and replaced with something cited to reliable sources. That the term is a neologism certainly needs to be stated in the article, so as not to give the impression that this is what the Zapatistas called it. --Grnrchst (talk) 16:20, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Infobox removed
I'm going to remove the current infobox because it gives several false/misleading impressions: SilverStar54 (talk) 20:59, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
 * 1) That the Morelos Commune was an official administrative subdivision of Mexico. It even links "commune" to "municipality", which is not what the "commune" in "Morelos Commune" even means.
 * 2) That the Commune had an official flag, coat of arms, and motto. Contemporaries didn't even use the term "Morelos Commune", so how could it have had any of these things? The article should certainly describe the symbols used by the movement, but putting two of these as official in the infobox gives the reader a misleading impression of simplicity.
 * 3) The borders of the Morelos Commune fluctuated a lot during the revolution. If a map of the Commune is included in the article, it should be one that conveys this fluidity.