Whom the Sergeant Adored

Dark-eyed Adela Velarde was 14 when she left Ciudad Juarez 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 Torreon 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 Obregon'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 Cafe 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 Torreon.

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