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Ezequiel Padilla, as Secretary of Public Education from 1929 to 1930, helped to build Mexico's modern school system. He himself was born, the son of a local lawyer, in a mountain village in Guerrero, over the mountain ranges southwest of the capital. When his father died, his mother taught school so that he could have an education. He won a village scholarship to go to a state high school, a state scholarship to go to the University of Mexico, a Government scholarship for two years at the Sorbonne. He got his education in Mexico at the time when education was very hard to get. He is a living monument to the fact that the right to an education—which the U.S. has long taken for granted—is in Mexico a new and highly prized possession. When Ezequiel Padilla returned home from the Sorbonne in 1914, Mexico was still seething from the revolution which overthrew the 30-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz—a revolution which was temporarily balked of its gains by the assassination of Francisco Madero, who led it.
As a common soldier, Padilla joined bush-whiskered Emiliano Zapata, a tenant farmer whose legions of peon generals spread terror among the owners of great haciendas. One of the few incorruptible revolutionists, Zapata believed genuinely in the social revolution. All Mexicans remember his motto: "Man of the South, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
At that period Zapata, the wild-riding Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza were all carrying the agrarian revolt toward Mexico City. Padilla was "drafted" as a secretary to one of Villa's generals. In his incongruous stiff collar and city clothes, he joined the Villistas. Forced to flee in 1916, he went first to Cuba, then to Manhattan, which he reached penniless.
In New York he studied when he could at Columbia University, lived in the slums. From his sojourn he learned that Americans are "strong in business and materialistically inclined," but when he became ill in a dismal New York boardinghouse he also found that "the masses of the U.S. are more sensitive to the feeling of justice than the masses of any other country, and American democracy is the best democracy in the world."
After five years as an expatriate, Padilla returned home, became a deputy from Guerrero, Secretary of Public Education, then Minister Plenipotentiary to Italy and Hungary. He was a successful lawyer as well as a successful politician. (When he was appointed Foreign Minister in 1940 he registered his personal wealth—as the law requires—as $105,000.) His wife by his second marriage comes from a wealthy family. His home is at 84 Avenida Jalisco near the suburban heights of Chapultepec Park. He is today, not only a statesman, but a man of the world, popular in Mexican society.
The transformation of Padilla from a revolutionist in the hills to a man of property is a parallel to the transformation of Mexico. As a young politician, Padilla well remembered that the U.S. in 1846 fought Mexico over the uncertain Texas boundary and ended by taking a third of Mexico's territory, that it got another piece (by purchase) in 1853, that in 1914 it landed Marines at Vera Cruz, that it sent Black Jack Pershing into Mexico to chase Villa in 1916—all humiliations imposed by a big neighbor on a smaller one.