The burro at the palace.

Stolidly planted before the National Palace under the enormous Mexican flag, Chaparo Sancho seemed singularly unimpressed. He buried his head in a sackful of corn husks and ruminated with placid delight--which is only natural because Mr. Sancho is a small, brown, sixteen-year-old burro with a soft, white underbelly and an ostentatious bray.

In the year since Chaparo Sancho (literally, "Shorty Cuckolder") and the octogenarian Indian farmer Don Pedro Jasso arrived here to protest the illegal sale of communal lands in San Luis Potosi state, they have become a living logo for the struggle of Mexican farmers.

A heavy-set, sun-scorched gentleman of eighty-six who wears trademark faded denim overalls and a battered white sombrero, Don Pedro speaks with all the vehemence of the nearly deaf. He is also as stubborn as, well, a donkey. "They're the same animal," dryly comments his son and translator Tomas.

"My grandfathers are the Huachichiles. We are the owners of our land," booms Don Pedro. But marriages and business deals have transferred control of the Bienes Comunales (communal land councils) in San Juan de Guadalupe, just outside the state capital, to outsiders who have allegedly sold off the land illegally to the encroaching city. San Luis Potosi has come so close to the communal land that Don Pedro's homestead now sits only 300 feet from the major road that encircles the state capital.

Clutching a fistful of papers, Pedro Jasso displays a presidential decree dated 1954. He says it establishes that "not one meter" of Huachichil communal land can ever be sold. "You could roll a stone from Romero to San Isidro to Tumba Calzones down to the dam, and all of that would be ours," the farmer heaves, casing the broad esplanade of the Zocalo as if it, too, were Huachichil land.

Despite a 1992 arrest order charging the accused culprits--a pair of speculators both named Juan--with fraudulently selling off 537 acres of Indian turf, the "Juans" have never spent a day behind bars. Instead, the comuneros of San Juan de Guadalupe have been repeatedly jailed for protesting the speculators' transgressions.

When Don Pedro's son Margarito was arrested on the pretext that he had stolen items from a construction site on communal land, Don Pedro and Chaparo set off on foot and hoof for Mexico City in June 1997 to discuss the matter with President Ernesto Zedillo. The two marked a trail so fellow commune dwellers might follow them easily. Their colleagues caught up with them in Guanajuato to report that the governor had released Margarito. But Don Pedro and Chaparo traveled on to Mexico City to protest the continuing theft of their land and to petition for a meeting with Zedillo.

More than one year later, they are still waiting for the president. Their planton, or encampment, has been one of the longest in recent Zocalo history. Disgruntled with the government's avoidance of his request, months ago Don Pedro threatened to move his camp to the White House in Washington to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its effects on rural existence in Mexico. But, he says, he couldn't get a passport for Chaparo.

Mexico's poor and Indian campesinos were the backbone of the nation's landmark social revolution (1910-1919). Since then, with the sole exception of the six years Lazaro Cardenas was president of the country (1934-1940), agrarian reform has slipped to the back burner, only to flare up whenever peasant massacres occur in states with poor and Indian farmer populations, such as Guerrero and Chiapas. Like Don Pedro, at least 60 percent of all poor farmers in Mexico are indigenous people.

The transnationalization of agricultural production, a consequence of NAFTA, has converted thousands of campesinos (peasants) into minimum-wage workers on their own land. NAFTA has brought massive imports of cheap corn and grain, displacing Mexican farmers from their own corn market and threatening their continued existence on the land. Mexico will import nearly fourteen million tons of corn in 1998.

Farmers, peasants, and commune dwellers have filed more than 100,000 new complaints with agrarian tribunals since 1994--the year the Zapatista Army rose up in armed protest over the plight of Mayan farmers. Since that year, the amount of land under cultivation has dropped from sixty-seven million acres to forty-two million acres, according to studies done at the Autonomous University of Chiapas.

During their seasons on the Zocalo, the farmer and his burro have witnessed multiple demonstrations, patriotic holidays, the arrival of 1,111 ski-masked Zapatista rebels, pitched battles between rival street-vendor gangs, unrelenting sun, drenching rain, impossible pollution, and the misguided efforts of the British-based Donkey Protection League to rescue Chaparo from a dissolute life of perpetual protest. Impounded at a university veterinary school where the donkey protectors checked for alleged owner abuse, Chaparo received a clean bill of health. His growing coterie of fans met his triumphal return to the Zocalo with jubilation. Nonetheless, Chaparo seemed to enjoy the comforts of academic life--so much that he now sometimes retires to the school when urban stress becomes too much to bear. "He'll soon have his degree," deadpans Tomas.

Chaparo's groupies bring him bread and tortillas, carrots, candy, and elotes (new corn) every day. "He likes the attention," Don Pedro laughs. A steady parade of chilangos (Mexico City residents) and their children line up to pet the perfectly patient burro and deposit a coin in the donation can--proof that just under the surface of every chilango lurks a campesino.

Pedro Jasso has known the pleasure of Chaparo Sancho's company since the donkey was three years old. "He only had two teeth top and bottom when I got him, but he looked strong," the farmer recounts. "I know my animals. I have cows. Why deny it? It's been published in the papers. Chaparo helps me to bring the milk around." Don Pedro thumps the burro's flanks. "He's a good worker."

At night, Pedro Jasso and Chaparo Sancho bed down at a nearby teachers' union hall. This causes hardship for the profes (professors) because burros sleep very little, preferring to munch and fart and bray the hours away. Still, during his extended stay in the big city, Chaparo has learned urban smarts and is now potty trained (he uses street drains), which causes Tomas to contemplate building the beloved burro his own bathroom back home.

Don Pedro is less keen than his four-hoofed companero about the marvels of the megalopolis. "It's all crime and contamination to me. I just don't feel right here. I'm always surrounded by these buildings."

As their first year on the Zocalo drew to a close, Don Pedro and Chaparo pondered a return to San Luis Potosi. While they were thinking about it, the governor of San Luis Potosi, Fernando Silva Nieto, offered to prosecute the "Juans." But for now, the farmer and his burro have decided to stay.

San Luis Potosi is not a hospitable place to return to these days. The cold winter wiped out 700,000 tons of basic grains all over Mexico. Drought followed. Cattle were dying in the north of the country and the national cattle raisers' group feared that twenty million head were at risk. Thousands of forest fires, many of them the result of burn-offs by poor farmers to prepare the earth for seed, flared out of control in the center and south of Mexico, bringing fresh devastation.

For 100,000 campesinos in San Luis Potosi state, disaster is at the door. "The situation is grave," state Secretary of Agriculture Clemente Mora told an emergency meeting in the state capital at the end of May. This year could be the second consecutive growing cycle in which the farmers of San Luis lose their harvest.

Even as summer rains moved in over the nation, the coming harvest hangs in the balance. All over Mexico, the continued existence of poor corn farmers on the land remains precarious. And in Mexico, corn is not just the stuff of life but the stuff of culture, too. The nation's first corn was grown over two millenniums ago at the sacred city of Teotihuacan. Now Mexico stares into a new millennium that may include no small farmers and no corn--if the neoliberal oligarchy continues to call the shots.

"We agreed to come here and endure, and Chaparo has been with us since the first day. He's our companero in this struggle. He's part of us," Tomas says. "Even if he wants to stay, we think he must go home with us. Surely, he can't refuse us."

As if he has been eavesdropping, the most famous burro in Mexico extracts his white muzzle from the sack of corn husks and his long ears elevate like antennae. Should he return to the hard-scrabble soil of San Luis Potosi or remain to bask in the adulation of the urban spotlight? Abruptly, Chaparo Sancho emits an obstreperous--if enigmatic--heehaw. And returns to his dinner of donated elotes.

Over the past year, John Ross, author of "The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the IME" has developed a fast friendship with Chaparo Sancho.