writing pancho villa’s revolution

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 Rebels in
writing
the Literary
pancho villa’s
Imagination
revolution
of Mexico

m a x pa r r a

university of texas press

Austin
Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2005

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should

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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of

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libr ar y of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Parra, Max.
Writing Pancho Villa’s revolution : rebels in the literary imagination
of Mexico / by Max Parra. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-292-70697-9 (cl. : alk. paper) —
isbn 0-292-70978-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mexican prose literature—20th century—History and
criticism. 2. Mexico—History—Revolution, 1910 –1920 —Literature
and the revolution. 3. Villa, Pancho, 1878–1923—In literature.
I. Title.
pq7207.m48p37 2005
868.60809358— dc22
2004030856
 A la memoria de
Benjamín Parra Banderas (1917–2000),
que se amanecía leyendo novelas de la revolución.
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 contents

acknowledgments ix

introduction 1

Chapter 1 13
t h e p o l i t i c s o f i n c o r p o r at i o n :
the calles er a, 1925 – 1935

Chapter 2 23
villa and popular political subjectivity
i n m a r i a n o a z u e l a ’s Los de abajo

Chapter 3 48
reconstructing subaltern perspectives
i n n e l l i e c a m p o b e l l o ’s Cartucho

Chapter 4 77
villismo and intellectual authority
i n m a r t í n l u i s g u z m á n ’s El águila y la serpiente

Chapter 5 98
s o l d i e r ly h o n o r a n d m e x i c a n n e s s
i n r a fa e l f . m u ñ o z ’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!

Chapter 6 120
t h e b at t l e f o r pa n c h o v i l l a
during cardenismo, 1935 – 1940
 viii writing villa’s revolution

137 Chapter 7
v i l l i s m o ’s l e g a c y

141 notes

165 bibliogr aphy

179 index
 acknowledgments

Writing a book is as much a social enterprise as it is an individual endeavor.

Strictly speaking, no one writes a book alone: the invisible presence of
others, like the submerged mass of an iceberg, is always there. Society
furnishes critical traditions, conventions, and emerging trends that frame
and condition, to a greater or lesser degree, how and what can be written;
financial sponsors enable or facilitate research and the writing process;
and no less important are the informal intellectual networks that often
surround and nourish the otherwise solitary task of producing an origi-
nal work.
I am grateful to UC-Mexus for providing a timely grant in the last
stage of the writing process and to my colleagues in the Spanish Sec-
tion of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San
Diego (UCSD), for their unfailing support during the years I worked on
this project. In the early stages of my research, Prof. Irene Matthews of
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, generously allowed me to read
two chapters of her book manuscript “Nellie Campobello: La centaura
del norte,” which was subsequently published in Mexico City. I am most
appreciative to her. An exchange of letters with Mexican poet, novelist,
and critic Jorge Aguilar Mora, now at the University of Maryland and
a Villista scholar, proved intellectually valuable, as did his writings. In
addition, Aguilar Mora made available to me difficult-to-find material
by Dr. Ramón Puente. Two outstanding UCSD graduate students, now
scholars in their own right, Brian Gollnick and Kenia Halleck, followed
my musings in independent and graduate seminars on subalternity and
intellectual culture in Mexico. Their incisive comments and questioning
helped clarify my ideas during the writing of this book.
In Mexico City, critic Evodio Escalante was openly receptive to my
ideas and suggested bibliographical references. Art historian Laura
González Matute revealed the existence of the Fondo Campobello, at the
Biblioteca del Consejo de las Artes, and shared journalistic material from
her personal files on the Campobello sisters. Prof. Edith Negrín, of the
 x writing villa’s revolution

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), read and provided

useful comments on Chapter 2. Jesús Vargas Valdés, a specialist in the
history of the state of Chihuahua and organizer of Villista conferences,
patiently answered my questions during numerous lengthy conversations
on the Villista movement and regional history. I deeply appreciate his
encouragement and disinterested support. Herzonia Yáñez graciously
provided room, board, and unfailing hospitality during many of my visits
to Mexico City and kept me updated about news directly or indirectly
related to my research.
I would like to thank the Centro de Estudios Literarios “Antonio
Cornejo Polar” (CELACP) for granting permission to publish segments
of my article “Memoria y guerra en Cartucho de Nellie Campobello”
(Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Sem. 1 [1998]: 167–186). An
abridged, and slightly modified, version of Chapter 2 was published as
“Villa y la subjetividad política popular: Un acercamiento subalternista a
Los de abajo de Mariano Azuela” (Foro Hispánico 22 [2002]: 11–26).
This book was originally written in Spanish and placed in the hands
of a professional translator. Dissatisfied with the results, I came to the
conclusion that I would have to rewrite the manuscript in English. In the
process, I expanded Chapters 1 and 3, completely rewrote Chapters 4 and
5, and added Chapter 6. I was fortunate to receive critical input and en-
couragement from two outstanding individuals. Anne R. Archer, of New
York City, read the entire Spanish manuscript and my first draft in En-
glish. A most lucid reader and a supportive ally throughout, she provided
thoughtful comments, editing suggestions, as well as keen interest in the
material, particularly on Campobello. Prof. Aníbal Yáñez from Califor-
nia State University, San Marcos, proofread the entire manuscript and
spent countless hours correcting and discussing with me subtle matters
of style and nuance. Whatever imperfections this book may have they are
less numerous, I am sure, than they would have been without his help;
my debt to him is most profound. My wife, Consuelo M. Soto, read the
manuscript and suggested corrections at different stages of my writing.
Her support and insightful comments made me rethink, for the better,
the connection between Mexico’s cultural politics and history.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention my father, Benjamín
Parra Banderas, who died after a long illness before the book was com-
pleted. In fact, caring for him and writing the book will always be inextri-
cably linked in my mind. An avid reader despite a limited education, my
father instilled in me a love of knowledge and curiosity about the world
around me. His passion for books became mine and set me on the path
that led me to write this book. I am forever grateful.
writing pancho villa’s revolution
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 introduction

history
On March 6, 1913, Francisco Villa and eight followers crossed the border
into Mexico from El Paso, Texas, with the aim of overthrowing the dicta-
torship of Gen. Victoriano Huerta. They had nine rifles and nine horses,
“500 cartridges per man, two pounds of coffee, two pounds of sugar, one
pound of salt.” 1 By the end of that year, Villa’s forces had swelled to
several thousand well-equipped men. The former social bandit was now
chief commander of a loose coalition of revolutionary forces known as
the Division of the North and controlled most of the state of Chihua-
hua.2 Six months later, Villa’s Division of the North crushed the federal
army in the city of Zacatecas, in central Mexico. After a brief truce with
competing revolutionary factions from other regions, Villa and his army
continued their advance south, unopposed, to Mexico City.
The impressive rise of the Villistas from a grassroots movement to the
undisputed masters of the country in the period 1913–1914 is a military
phenomenon still being unraveled and debated by historians.3 There is
general agreement that no other revolutionary mobilization in Mexico
had “the popular intensity and mass following” of Villismo, nor did any
other arouse such feelings of pride and power among the rural poor.4
The unmistakable message of Villa’s military success was that the years
of living in fear were over. The time had come to take by force what
rightfully belonged to the historically disenfranchised. This had a pro-
foundly liberating impact on the psychology of the downtrodden. The
rural masses’ bold acts of social transgression, unimaginable a few years
earlier, became commonplace.5
The change in popular mentality stunned the wealthy landowners and
the “decent people,” those who “dressed well, were rich, and were not
too dark.” 6 The colonial structures of Mexican society, still in place even
after a century of independence from Spain, were shaken to the core.
Arturo Warman summarizes the new social reality: “The ethnic barrier
 2 writing villa’s revolution

was torn down. To be a dandy or to look like one ceased to be a privilege

and became a risk. The revolutionaries killed some citizens because of
their manners and appearance. Skin color, attire and manner had been
instruments of oppression that, to a certain degree, functioned as a divid-
ing line between the opposing groups.” 7
Historical time accelerated in a matter of months. The rural oligarchy
abandoned its haciendas in the countryside and moved to the cities or left
Mexico altogether, seeking a safe haven abroad from the ragged armies of
hungry campesinos. Members of the rural oligarchy sensed that the revo-
lution was as much an attack on the city and urban culture as it was a war
against the dictatorial Huerta government. Well-to-do city dwellers, ter-
rified by the news of revolutionary soldiers looting stores and residences,
barricaded themselves in their homes. Few images better illustrate the
dramatic changes taking place than the photograph of Villa seated in
the presidential chair in Mexico City’s national palace alongside Gen.
Emiliano Zapata, the legendary agrarian leader from the south. Widely
reproduced in newspapers, the photograph of the uneducated but astute
revolutionaries was an eloquent statement of the people’s empowerment,
a visual reminder that the social order had been turned upside down.
Villa’s remarkable rise to national prominence, however, was short-
lived. During the course of the civil war that ensued among various revo-
lutionary factions after Huerta’s fall, Villa’s military power and social
appeal were severely eroded. Villista defeats in central Mexico (the Bajío
region) during the spring and summer of 1915, as well as defections and
betrayals within his own camp forced him to retreat to his home base in
the northern states of Chihuahua and Durango.
Back in Villista territory, the former cattle rustler and social bandit
disbanded what was left of his once-powerful Division of the North. A
few hundred faithful soldiers, determined to continue fighting, followed
him to the mountains. Taking advantage of Villa’s enviable knowledge of
the terrain, they waged a bloody guerrilla war against the newly installed
revolutionary government of Venustiano Carranza.
Villa’s weakened and regionally confined military activities diminished
his influence in national affairs, but his daring guerrilla actions and popu-
lar appeal continued to have a formative effect on the country’s social
and cultural imaginary. In March 1916, Villa crossed the border into the
United States and raided Columbus, New Mexico, in a calculated move
to exact revenge against a former ally (the United States) that now sided
with the popular leader’s foes and officially recognized Carranza. Wash-
 introduction 3

ington reacted to the attack on Columbus by organizing the so-called Pu-

nitive Expedition to search for and capture Villa in Mexican territory.
After ten months of fruitless searching, the U.S. expeditionary force
withdrew, and the legend of the indomitable Villa continued to grow.
The Hearst newspapers in the United States portrayed Villa as a symbol
of south-of-the-border lawlessness and made him and Mexicans in gen-
eral a target of racist commentaries.8 In Mexico, however, Villa’s raid on
Columbus made him a popular symbol of nationalism, forcing President
Carranza to intensify his campaign to discredit the rebel leader.9
In 1920, Venustiano Carranza was assassinated while fleeing a mili-
tary revolt by his own forces. With the death of Villa’s personal enemy
and unrelenting persecutor, the Villistas agreed to an armistice. The new
regime gave the “Centaur of the North,” as the Mexican press had chris-
tened him, the hacienda of Canutillo in the northern part of the state of
Durango. Although occasional statements to the press continued to make
the Mexican government uneasy about his intentions, Villa lived peace-
fully in Canutillo for the next three years.10 On a July morning in 1923,
he was ambushed and killed along with his escort in the nearby city of
Hidalgo del Parral. Personal and political enemies, with the acquiescence
and support of prominent government officials, were behind the assas-
sination (perhaps including Pres. Álvaro Obregón himself ).11
Henceforth, Villa’s place in the history of the revolution and the mili-
tary and cultural legacy of the Villista movement would not be disputed
on the battlefield, but on the terrain of the discursive and ideological
struggles of the postrevolutionary period.

politics and culture

The meaning of Villa’s rise and fall, the vicissitudes and ultimate neu-
tralization of Villismo, were hotly contentious issues in the politics
and culture of postrevolutionary Mexico. The official government ver-
sion of events discounted Villa as a revolutionary leader. His margin-
alization was due in part to the new ruling elite’s unwillingness to reha-
bilitate a military enemy they had personally fought. According to Ilene
O’Malley, however, the decisive factor behind the official neglect of
Villa was his popularity.12 Popularity “carried in it reminders of the power
of the popular classes when mobilized,” undermining the regime’s quest
for hegemony.13 The public’s enthusiasm for Villa irritated the coun-
try’s rulers, and they reacted by shrouding his name in silence, an act of
 4 writing villa’s revolution

“implicit denial of Villa’s importance” and “the only means to counteract

his fame.” 14
The popular revolutionary leader was, indeed, regarded by all seg-
ments of Mexican society as a vivid and forceful expression of the people’s
power, pride, and resilience. Even those who opposed him took delight in
mythologizing his controversial life and military feats, and the postrevo-
lutionary regimes’ slight did little to diminish Villa’s massive appeal.
Banished from the official memory of the revolution, it was in the
realm of culture, not politics, where Villa’s political and symbolic mean-
ing for the Mexican nation would be appraised and discussed. The gov-
ernment’s dismissal left the field open for Villa’s “image to be shaped
more by popular tastes, fiction writers, and journalists than by official
propagandists.” 15 The Villistas’ legendary violence and terror inspired
curiosity, fear, and admiration among the urban population, and the print
media gleefully exploited these sentiments. Tall tales ranging from the
critical to the folkloric, from the bizarre to the sympathetic, fueled the
public imagination. Hyperbolic accounts proliferated about Villa’s days
as a social bandit, about his arbitrary killings, brutal popular justice, un-
expected generosity, or improbable survival. His famed ruthlessness and
charisma along with his followers’ deeds and excesses were recounted in
the oral culture of legends, corridos, and popular myths.16
The collective fascination with Villa and Villismo was fruitful for lit-
erature. The epic spectacle of warfare and Villa’s adventurous life and
rise from poverty and banditry to revolutionary leader inspired novels,
novelized memoirs, short stories, and biographies. In the 1920s and the
1930s, decades of national reconstruction, over twenty books on Villa
and Villismo were published, an unprecedented number in a country
characterized by the paucity of its publications. The peak year was 1931,
when five works appeared— one biography, three novels, and one collec-
tion of short stories.
Villista literature was, by and large, the work of educated people who
had witnessed the revolution at close range and wrote about it based on
personal memory. Yet, more often than not, writers created their own
authoritative discourse and mythology about Villa and the revolution by
drawing on information from elite and popular sources, such as testimo-
nials, oral culture, military reports, and newspaper articles.17 These ac-
counts were written in a style accessible to the common reader; neverthe-
less, they were, to greater or lesser extent, elite versions of the historical
agency of subaltern groups that had participated in the revolution.
 introduction 5

Representations of Villa’s grassroots insurgency and of his personal-

ity articulated different and, at times, competing views about the class
and cultural “Otherness” of the rebellious masses. These views, in turn,
were symptomatic of a larger cultural war taking place: a war fought over
the dead, over how the Mexican people should remember their fallen
revolutionaries at a time when the meaning of the war, and therefore its
legacy for the present, was still unresolved. How should the dead be re-
membered? What was the meaning of popular violence? Whose memory
would prevail? These were critical questions because the answers touched
on issues of societal restructuring (e.g., the place of the uneducated mass-
es in the new order) and political legitimation (who has the right to speak
for the nation). Villista literature participated, directly or indirectly, in
this cultural war.
Violence was a recurrent, often dominant, theme for Villista writers.
Their work, unlike other writings on the revolution, called attention to
the brutalities of war and the emotions associated with it: fear, anger,
hate, revenge, guilt, denial, and so on. “There is no record of the culture
of violence and disruption in the many monographs dedicated to the rev-
olution, although it is registered in a masterly way in the novels, stories
and memoirs of the writers,” notes Enrique Florescano.18 Villista litera-
ture, then, furnishes a privileged site from which to explore the popular
revolution’s culture of violence and how it was represented, debated, and
incorporated into postrevolutionary culture.
This book examines the cultural and political construction of Villismo
in postrevolutionary literary discourse. It focuses on narratives that
highlight the different aesthetic and ideological positions taken toward
the movement during the years of national reconstruction (1925–1940),
when literature became another battlefront in the social struggle for he-
gemony. A dominant concern throughout the book is the treatment of
popular consciousness, understood as “politicized forms of knowledge
and popular identity.” 19 How did writers represent popular conscious-
ness? What role did these representations play in discursive and ideo-
logical wars of the period? What did they do for the creative process of
imagining a nation’s collective identity?
My strategy engages theories of identity as they relate to subaltern
positionalities and relates them to larger issues of cultural and political
history. Recent critical developments in the social sciences and humani-
ties have reopened the question of popular politics in rural movements.
These theories are grounded in the idea that the inner workings of rebel
 6 writing villa’s revolution

identity and the modes of expression of cultural politics are far more sub-
tle, culturally bound, and contentious than previously acknowledged. By
stressing the internal logic of popular movements and thus recognizing
the intricate nature of subaltern epistemology, these revisionist trends
critique the conventional images presented by liberal rationalist currents.
This often-patronizing tradition portrayed a popular movement beset by
intellectual naïveté, political anarchy, and arbitrariness. This book’s em-
phasis on questions of local identity, subaltern positionality, and popular
politics is therefore intended to problematize idées reçues about popular
violence and political consciousness. The book also reexamines the posi-
tion of intellectuals vis-à-vis popular culture and social movements in
Mexico’s modern history.

subaltern and regional perspectives

Subaltern studies is a revisionist trend in the social sciences and the hu-
manities toward reassessing the historical agency of subaltern groups,
particularly in times of social upheaval. It provides a broad, useful frame-
work for the themes addressed in this study.20 Subalternist scholars are
concerned with the “analysis of how subalternity was constituted by
dominant discourses.” 21 They try to explore the “fault lines” of dominant
discourses as a way to generate alternative accounts of popular rebellion.
Ranajit Guha, a prominent member of this school, has specifically stud-
ied what he calls “the domain of subaltern politics” in popular rebellions.
Guha’s research on rural insurgencies in nineteenth-century India focuses
on the semiotics of transgression, that is, on the rebels’ radical rupture
with the basic code that organizes relations of domination and subordi-
nation in society. Some historians have contemplated the applicability of
this approach to the study of the Mexican Revolution.22
This book is also informed by the renewed interest in regional his-
toriography. Traditional studies on revolutionary literature implicitly
privilege the conceptual framework of “nation” and modern nationalism
(identification with national space and a centralized state apparatus). This
is the case with the so-called literature of the Mexican revolution (Castro
Leal, Dessau et al.). I distance myself from such currents by emphasizing
“region” as opposed to and in dialogue with “nation.”
The concept of “region” is a critical component in the study of Mexi-
can history and culture. As Eric Van Young has explained, “the varied
and difficult topography of the country . . . produce[s] an enormously
complex arrangement of climatological zones, micro-ecologies, subcul-
 introduction 7

tures, and local histories. This luxuriant and confusing variety has played
a central role in the evolution of Mexico’s history and in the conscious-
ness of Mexicans as portrayed in their politics, art, social thinking, and
mentalidad.” 23 During the revolutionary war, regional and local identi-
ties, more than explicit political affiliations, were key unifying factors
behind popular mobilizations. The concepts of region and regionalism (a
self-conscious, cultural, political, and emotional attachment to a specific
territorial homeland within the space of the nation, sometimes called
“patria chica”) are therefore useful analytical tools in that they place sub-
altern insurgencies in their own unique revolutionary dynamic, rooted
in local historical processes and cultural practices. These concepts are
critical to understanding how regional rebels define themselves and their
participation in the war. For example, an examination of the geography
and history of the northern Mexican region that became Villista territory
reveals that even before the revolution there existed a violent tradition of
frontier culture with its own valued forms of social identity.
Subaltern studies and regional historiography have different agen-
das. The former is openly political, speculative, and liberationist in its
objective; the latter falls, for the most part, within the confines of con-
ventional historical scholarship. Both overlap, however, in their effort to
highlight the importance of primary networks of sociability (kinship, ter-
ritoriality, local cultures) in the construction of collective identities and
in understanding the epistemology of popular mobilizations.24 Regional
historiography is interested in studying the array of local identities that
resist or try to negotiate their integration into the larger community of
the nation on their own terms.25 Subaltern studies, on the other hand,
includes discourse analysis and takes a critical distance from the ideology
of nationalism.
My work on Villismo does not strictly adhere to either school. Both
provide a critical horizon that has stimulated my thinking on the cultural
politics of popular rebellion and on how subalternity is represented in
cultural discourse. I have found Guha’s methodology for reading domi-
nant narratives “against the grain” particularly useful in examining the
cultural construction of popular subjects in canonical works written by
liberal-minded authors, such as Mariano Azuela.26 Regional historiog-
raphy brings to the discussion a historical specificity that has been lack-
ing in the study of revolutionary literature. This facilitates the scrutiny
of how certain subaltern practices are culturally processed—how and
why they are highlighted, reworked, deemphasized, or silenced in liter-
ary discourse.
 8 writing villa’s revolution

My approach to Villista literature engages critical and theoretical dis-

courses that position subaltern and regional subjects as central foci of
analysis. I concentrate on literary works that represent the key positions
and narrative strategies adopted by authors who wrote about the theme
of Pancho Villa and the Villista armed movement in the age of recon-
struction. Villista literature during these years can be divided into three
periods. The works of all three periods express the distinct ideological
and aesthetic positions toward Villismo at the time during which they
were published and illuminate the status of the debate and the evolution
of the dominant cultural politics toward popular revolutionary subjects.
The first opens the debate on Villismo in the nation’s literature dur-
ing the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles, from 1924 to 1928. Mariano
Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1916; 1925) and Martín Luis
Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente (The Eagle and the Serpent, 1928) are
thematic and stylistic breakthroughs that, I will argue, are nevertheless
still enmeshed in the intellectual mores of the prerevolutionary period in
terms of their portrayal of the rural masses. Both Azuela and Guzmán,
I contend, wrote works that in the act of representing rebel subjectivity
simultaneously tried to control and suppress it by employing a social phi-
losophy anchored in notions of private property, individuality, and bour-
geois nationhood. Azuela and Guzmán represent two modalities of urban,
liberal, postrevolutionary thought (populism and elitism, respectively).
The second stage, from 1929 to 1935, the years of the Maximato (when
General Calles, no longer the president, remained Mexico’s strongman),
signals a shift toward a more radical view of Villa and the revolution
and draws heavily on the popular myths of regional culture. Rafael F.
Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Let’s Ride with Pancho Villa!, 1931)
and Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México
(Cartridges: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico, 1931; 1940) are
the two works from this period that illustrate this new emphasis, despite
their different objectives and styles.27 Unlike Azuela’s and Guzmán’s early
work, these writers’ work explicitly makes Villista forms of cultural and
political community the centerpiece, albeit for very different purposes:
Campobello, to defend a regional identity under siege (popular regional-
ism); Muñoz, to enhance and capitalize on the brutalities of war (market-
oriented sensationalism). Both, however, delve into the internal conflicts,
contradictions, and limitations of what one critic has called the “alterna-
tive rationality” of subaltern culture.28
The third period covers the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, from
1934 to 1940. Villista literature during the Cárdenas years was in many
 introduction 9

ways a by-product of the state’s populist cultural policies and attempted

to incorporate Villa into the official memory of the nation. Martín Luis
Guzmán’s “new” Villa in the monumental (and apologetic) Memorias de
Pancho Villa (Pancho Villa’s Memoirs), and Celia Herrera’s reaction to
the official effort to institutionalize Villa, Villa ante la historia (History
Judges Villa), are contrasting narratives representative of this stage.
The relationship between literary production and historical context
is critical to my analysis of the cultural construction of popular subjects.
Because of this, I present as much as possible of the circumstances under
which each author wrote. This is particularly necessary since I do not
study the works in strict chronological order: I pair Azuela with Cam-
pobello and Guzmán with Muñoz in order to highlight the contrasting
alternative narrative strategies and positions vis-à-vis popular subjects.
Chapter 1 locates the production of Villista narratives in the context
of the social struggles for hegemony during Callismo. It summarizes the
Callista politics of national reconstruction and its contradictions, with an
emphasis on the Mexican state’s endorsement of the social leadership of
the emerging middle class and the importance of official nationalist cul-
tural policies in shaping the literary trend toward social and revolution-
ary themes. I discuss Villa’s regionalist, anticentralist politics and how,
after the revolution, his position (antagonistic to Calles’s) continued to be
a fundamental point of contention in the debates over the incorporation
of the rural population into national life.
Chapter 2 provides a revisionist reading from a subalternist perspec-
tive of Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, one of the classic novels on revolu-
tionary Mexico. I begin by briefly discussing the “discovery” of this work
by Mexico City’s intellectuals in 1925 and synthesize the conventional
reading of the novel. I then assess the contribution made by Azuela’s
novel to the process of suppressing popular political subjectivity in the
dominant discourses of the postrevolutionary period. In the last section
of the chapter, I read the novel “against the grain” in order to examine
marginal areas of knowledge as they bear on the domain of popular poli-
tics. By exploring textual spaces that reveal the presence of an alternative
popular politics centered on General Villa, I critically reassess Azuela’s
thesis regarding popular subjects’ lack of political rationality.
Nellie Campobello’s approach to Villismo in Cartucho differs from
that of Azuela in that her narrative style re-creates a vision of the past
that is not external to the world of the characters themselves. In Chap-
ter 3, I argue that three subaltern perspectives are at work in Cartucho:
the regional (as opposed to the national); the domestic/maternal (as op-
 10 writing villa’s revolution

posed to the public/male); and the child’s (as opposed to the adult’s).
These interlocking perspectives reinforce each other and reaffirm, albeit
not without contradictions, the collective identity of a community under
siege by supraregional military forces. A key element discussed in this
chapter is the author’s elaboration of a discourse that counters the ideol-
ogy of centralism through the use of poetic devices that originate in oral
culture.
The focus in Chapter 4 is the reconstruction of authority in elite cul-
ture through the description of subaltern themes and subjects in Martín
Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente. My analysis focuses on the author’s
aesthetic approach to the revolution (atelismo) and his use of the “civiliz-
ing code” as a narrative strategy of domination, which, I argue, produces
overdetermined pronouncements about subaltern subjects. A second
section examines the dual construction of Villa: as the necessary “low-
Other” on whom the narrator constructs his own self-identity and sta-
tus; and as the epic hero whose legendary attributes represent “positive”
qualities associated with a popular Mexican identity. Insofar as the epic
Villa is defined by his antagonism to the Mexican state, he represents a
contradiction to the narrator’s civilizing project. Yet this contradiction is
rearticulated and ultimately deflected by subordinating the stories of the
epic hero to the dominant discourse of integrative nationalism.
¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! by Rafael F. Muñoz is a by-product of urban
readers’ demand for blood-and-glory tales about the revolution in news-
papers and magazines. The author’s narrative strategy, based on the exag-
gerated treatment of soldierly male bonding, was designed to appeal to
the reading public’s craving for morbidly violent anecdotes. The process
by which Muñoz put readers vicariously in touch with a world that was
both “uncivilized” and “natural,” and the relevance of this Otherness to
the formation of the country’s cultural identity, are the subjects of Chap-
ter 5. Like Martín Luis Guzmán, Muñoz exploits the military mythology
of Villismo to shock and horrify his readers; unlike Guzmán, however,
Muñoz approaches and judges General Villa in this novel through the
eyes of Villa’s soldiers, thereby placing the logic of violence within the
region’s radical military culture and mythology. In doing so, Muñoz is
able to move beyond Azuela and Guzmán’s liberal views on violence and
introduce popular images of frontier war culture that will be integrated as
valued features in the cultural construction of “Mexicanness.”
Chapter 6 discusses the role of Cardenismo in the efforts to rehabili-
tate General Villa. This provides the context for analyzing Martín Luis
Guzmán’s monumental Memorias de Pancho Villa and Celia Herrera’s Villa
 introduction 11

ante la historia, both outgrowths of Cardenista policy. I study the stylistic

qualities that make Guzmán’s apologetic Memorias the greatest piece of
populist literature of the period and contrast the author’s “new” Villa
with the “old” and more critical representation of him in El águila y la
serpiente. The chapter ends with a brief review of Celia Herrera’s Villa
ante la historia. This work, originally written to prevent Villa’s institu-
tionalization and as a response to Guzmán’s Memorias, summarizes the
anti-Villista views of a regional middle class and is an important domestic
source of Villa’s black legend.
The final chapter discusses General Villa’s fate in official historical
memory after 1940 and summarizes my subalternist-regionalist read-
ing of Villista literature. I conclude that representations of subaltern
subjects in this body of work reorganize our understanding of the past
in that they oblige us to reconsider forms of identity and community
that have been partially suppressed or discredited in the process of mod-
ern nation-building. These forms are particularly relevant, in the age of
globalization, to the collective task of reconceptualizing Mexico’s iden-
tity, culture, and politics. I also propose that this conceptualization of
Otherness produced two distinct narrative genealogies in postrevolution-
ary Mexico— one canonical, the other marginal. The latter needs to be
further explored if we are to have a more comprehensive understanding
of Mexican literature and its evolution.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
 t h e p o l i t i c s o f i n c o r p o r at i o n :
Chapter 1
the calles er a, 1925 – 1935

The Calles era, the years when Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles ruled Mexico,
first as president, from late 1924 to 1928, and then as the behind-the-
scenes de facto ruler of Mexico between 1929 and 1935, was a period of
transition and turmoil. The general faced the formidable task of rebuild-
ing a country devastated and divided by war, and this became the single
overriding concern of his rule. For him, reconstruction and the entry
into modernity meant imposing the regulation and order of a centralized
government and the development of a capitalist economy. In many ways,
this was a continuation of the national project of the prerevolutionary pe-
riod (the Porfiriato). Unlike what happened in the previous era, however,
the new project did not— or could not— exclude the rural masses and
sought to incorporate them.
To establish state hegemony, Calles had to contend with several im-
pediments, such as the continuing peasant revolts in the countryside and
the regional power of military caudillos. He succeeded in neutralizing
the caudillos by appointing them to military governorships and other
administrative posts, where they had access to the state coffers and could
retain local power and privilege. Calles’s move to reorganize and take
control of the country’s unions and certain regional agrarian movements
was, however, met with severe opposition. To deal with the independent
labor movement and with the Cristero movement (in the Bajío region)
from 1926 to 1928, he had to resort to violence.1
Economic reconstruction originally reflected the Liberal dream of
creating a country of small, productive landholders. Land distribution in
the form of communal property (or ejidos) was a first step, or transitional
form,2 as Calles put it, to prepare for a society of small landowners.3 After
he took office, however, his position on economic reconstruction came
to mean the protection of landowners and the abandonment of agrarian
reform. A growing emphasis on productivity favored the agricultural-
capitalist approach of large estates over the self-sufficient practices of the
 14 writing villa’s revolution

small farmers and prompted Calles to turn toward a more conservative

agrarian policy.4
As had occurred in the Porfirian era, President Calles’s push toward
industrialization had a disorganizing impact on the peasantry, but helped
consolidate the rise of the social protagonists of modernity: the new
bourgeoisie; a growing working class; and the middle class in the cities.
The middle class was particularly favored in the regime’s reconstruction
efforts, for it carried the values of economic individualism and social mo-
bility as well as the urban manners and literacy necessary to implement
the project of capitalist development desired for the nation. During the
presidential campaign of 1923–1924, candidate Calles repeatedly singled
out the middle class as having a progressive leadership role in the trans-
formation of the country. The middle class was the “third” and, in many
ways, the ideal class because, according to Calles, it had the “cultivated
talent of the capitalist” and the “decisiveness and character of the pro-
letariat.” 5 The model class to be emulated by the rest of society, it was
urged to take its rightful place at the forefront of the new Mexico.
The social and cultural implications of the future president’s call were
profound and far-reaching. Mexico’s rural masses, who provided the bulk
of the revolutionary fighting forces, would be displaced as the principal
force in the creation of the new order. The middle, and not the lower,
class would be the primary beneficiary of the government’s policies.
The masses, however, refused to be dismissed so easily. Years of vi-
olence, partial victories, and complex negotiations on the part of the
masses in the economic, social, and cultural spheres would follow before
the government was able to incorporate this segment into the project of
modern nationhood.
A cornerstone of the Calles presidency and perhaps its most enduring
ideological legacy was the redefinition of the relationship between the
revolutionary regime and the people. Calles represented the emergence
of an explicitly elitist ideology in the ranks of the revolution. This elitism
can be perceived in the official idea of the revolution. Until Calles’s rise
to power, the revolution had been associated with the popular uprising
and the war itself. Calles’s predecessor, for example, Pres. Álvaro Ob-
regón, had been the supreme commander of the constitutionalist forces
and a revolutionary hero. He did not need to justify his position as chief
of Mexico’s revolutionary state because he embodied, figuratively speak-
ing, the revolution. Calles, on the other hand, a secondary military figure
in the revolution, did not enjoy Obregón’s public recognition. His presi-
 the politics of incorpor ation 15

dency required the creation of a populist ideological apparatus to help

legitimate his tenure in office.6
Calles catapulted the idea of “the revolution” to the future, Guillermo
Palacios has argued, to stress the actions to be taken by the government
for the benefit of the people. This shift in the semantics of revolutionary
rhetoric relegated the masses to the essentially passive role of being mere
recipients of the government’s populist policies. The revolution was
what was to come, a constructive phase. The past, or destructive phase,
should cease to be the primary source of the revolutionary government’s
legitimacy.7 Thus the Mexican state would be “popular” not because of
its social origins but because of its tendencies and dedication to social
progress.
The rationale behind this exercise in directed democracy under the
guidance of the new political elite was the old class-bound assumption
that the rural and urban poor were unprepared to participate judiciously
in the direction of the country. The new concept of the revolution in-
volved a top-down effort (which eventually succeeded) to reestablish re-
lations of subalternity in which class and culture again played a pivotal
role in societal restructuring. Callista ideology, in short, proclaimed and
justified the separation of the revolutionary ruling group from its “popu-
lar” base.8
A key shift in revolutionary rhetoric, then, took place during the
Calles regime. The “revolution” was conceptualized as a forward-looking
process, an ongoing movement of tasks and commitments to be accom-
plished, open and potentially unlimited in its possibilities. The past, that
is, the armed struggle, was to be treated by state ideologues as a fait ac-
compli, a discrete historical period whose importance was to illuminate
the inevitability of the new power.
Yet this revolutionary past was too recent and alive in people’s con-
sciousness to be erased easily. In the state’s everyday struggles for le-
gitimacy and power, there continued to be a need to invoke the popular
rebellion. Thus the Calles regime oscillated between alliances with and
celebrations of the revolutionary masses, on the one hand, and repression,
on the other. This contradictory approach to the masses was imbedded in
the discourse and praxis of Callismo, but was also an expression— one of
many possible expressions— of the ideology of modernity itself advanced
by Mexico’s socially progressive forces.
Culturally, Calles followed his predecessor’s policy of attracting writ-
ers and artists, garnering their cooperation, at times subsidizing them, to
 16 writing villa’s revolution

accelerate the creative process of locating, defining, and exhibiting the

“soul” of the nation.9 State-sponsored cultural nationalism was a key ele-
ment in the reconstruction effort and was aimed at promoting the pro-
duction of artistic and literary works that would arouse positive emo-
tions of identity, pride, and lofty ideals among the population. Inspired
in ethnic and vernacular motifs, it was meant to instill feelings of belong-
ing and loyalty to the patria, or homeland, and to downplay class and
regional cultural differences. Cultural nationalism encouraged collective
unity and, consequently, became a powerful vehicle in the official effort
to inhibit social practices hostile or antagonistic to the Mexican state.
The production of a nationalistic discourse was the work of state ideo-
logues and supporters of the regime, but also of critics and challengers
among the revolutionary elites;10 thus, a multiplicity of opposing views
proliferated. Ultimately, however, no matter how conflicting or criti-
cal, these views could all be integrated into the logic of nationalism and,
therefore, benefited Calles’s reconstruction efforts.11
In literature this trend in the cultural agenda took hold in 1925, shortly
after the incoming minister of culture, José Manuel Puig Casauranc,
called for the production of literary works that depicted the social reality
of the country and the suffering of the people and encouraged readers to
think about and search for “real reforms.” 12 Literature, at this point, was
expected to become an agent of national integration.13
The new literary policy had an immediate impact among writers and
critics. In 1925, it triggered a polemic among Mexico City’s intellectuals
over the artistic merits of Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, a novel about
popular rebels during the revolution. At stake was the renovation of
Mexican literature, a change in style and sensibility more conducive to
the aesthetic appreciation of the country’s social reality. The debate con-
fronted the old literary guard with younger writers who tacitly enunciated
ideas of revolutionary progress anchored in concepts such as “modern,”
“urban,” “Mexican,” “social,” and “development.” 14 The language of the
debate, however, also included authoritarian and patriarchal expressions,
such as the insistence on the desirability of a “virile” (i.e., popular, frank,
epic, and revolutionary) Mexican literature and the repudiation of “ef-
feminate” (weak, indecisive, and bland) forms of writing. The gendered
language of the critics captured a unique phenomenon of the period: the
rise of “machismo” as a socially acceptable expression of self-worth and
(political) power. Because manly aggressiveness was associated during the
war with popular resistance to oppression, it remained a positive (i.e.,
revolutionary) behavioral attribute after the war—a quality readily em-
 the politics of incorpor ation 17

phasized and exploited in the hero-cult discourse of the state and in the
elaboration of the nation’s cultural identity.
The polemic surrounding Azuela’s novel was symptomatic of the rapid
changes that took place in the literary world during Calles’s presidency.
The debate led to the republication of Los de abajo in 1925 and to the de-
mise of “colonialista” literature, a trend in vogue in the early 1920s whose
themes were inspired by the colonial era. The republication also marked
the end of the “exercise of literature out of phase with the immediate
historical reality.” 15 From then on, a distinctive kind of realistic narrative,
closer to popular speech and revolutionary themes and characters, would
dominate literary production.
The debate over Los de abajo was also a debate over the immediate past
(the revolution) and its outcome, and as such it signaled the moment when
Mexican literature became another battlefront in the social struggles for
hegemony. The ways in which literary discourse dealt with the revolu-
tionary war and the rise of the masses projected the fitful and unresolved
process of redefining social relations of power in Mexican society.
It is telling that the republication of the Villista novel Los de abajo oc-
curred at a time when Mexico City was beginning to reconquer its for-
mer position as the nation’s cultural center, from which it had noticeably
slipped during the war. The reconstitution of the ciudad letrada, or “let-
tered city,” to use Ángel Rama’s term, a place which confers official rec-
ognition and prestige on cultural production, gained momentum when
the elite, urban intelligentsia acknowledged and came to terms with the
reality that the popular revolution was a valuable literary theme.
Ironically, between 1923 and 1924, there was a proliferation of Villa
biographies published outside of Mexico. In Los Angeles, California, and
San Antonio, Texas, homes to large numbers of Mexican exiles, Villa’s
brutal assassination in July 1923 sparked the production of these narra-
tive works. Some of them would even undergo several reprintings. The
biographies were hastily written and rushed into print in an effort to capi-
talize on the commotion in the Mexican exile communities Villa’s death
caused.16 Most of these exiles lived along the U.S.-Mexico border, a re-
gion close to the revolutionary leader’s field of military operations.

The assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928 triggered a

political crisis that unexpectedly prolonged Calles’s control of the mili-
tary and political life of the country. A few months after Obregón’s death,
General Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Na-
cional Revolucionario, or PNR), the official party of the revolution. Es-
 18 writing villa’s revolution

tablished as a coalition of diverse political interests, the PNR’s raison

d’être was to bring together those faithful to the government as well as
disgruntled allies to negotiate the presidential succession and the distri-
bution of political power throughout the country (governorships, etc.).17
The founding of the PNR effectively defused, or at least weakened, at-
tempts to destabilize the still-fragile postrevolutionary order.18 Imme-
diately after the birth of the official party, the campaigns for national
unity intensified with the process of institutionalizing the revolution and
centralizing power. Significantly, Villa was the only major revolutionary
figure who did not benefit from the conciliatory spirit of the national
unity campaigns in 1929 and 1930.19 New elections were hastily arranged
for 1929, and the PNR candidate won, albeit fraudulently.20
This inaugurated the period known as the Maximato, during which
three presidents (hand-picked by General Calles) briefly occupied the
national palace. But real power remained in the hands of the former chief
of state, who assumed the role of jefe máximo de la revolución (supreme
chief of the revolution). The Maximato is a complex transitional period
in Mexico’s modern history, molded as much by the internal dynamics
of Mexican politics as by ideological and economic pressures from the
outside world.
During this period, the jefe máximo reached the conclusion that
land distribution (social justice) and commercial production (capitalist
economic growth) were incompatible goals, because neither small pri-
vate landholdings nor the ejido were economically efficient. Reluctant
to break up productive agricultural estates, in 1930, Calles declared the
revolution’s land reform program a failure and threw his support behind
market-oriented large landowners.21 The Mexican government’s recon-
struction policy by the end of the Maximato had become one of growing
social and economic conservatism. Intensified persecution and repression
of workers (particularly Communists) were the order of the day.22
On the other hand, the constant mobilizations by independent peas-
ants’ leagues and workers’ unions forced the government to try to incor-
porate them into the PNR or to weaken their demands. This pragmatic
move enabled the regime to destroy “independent centers of power based
on the organized support of the peasants and workers.” 23 At the same
time, however, agrarian leaders within the state itself (who had joined the
official party) increasingly articulated peasants’ needs and prevailed in
keeping the discussion of agrarian reform alive and on the government’s
agenda.24
 the politics of incorpor ation 19

Events in the international arena also contributed to the radicaliza-

tion of sectors of the PNR government. The establishment of a workers’
state in the Soviet Union, the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal in
the United States, and the general crisis of world capitalism after 1929
weakened the case for the liberal ideology of individualism and laissez-
faire free-market policies, already under siege.25 The turn to a reformist-
leftist ideology was most visible in the Ministry of Public Education
(Secretaría de Educación Pública). There, a Marxist intellectual, Narciso
Bassols—with the support of many state governors—successfully pushed
a socialist education program grounded in basic notions of social justice
and a militant anticlericalism.26
Thus, during the Maximato, Mexico’s postrevolutionary regime
was mired in internal contradictions and undergoing a process of self-
definition that was being contested and negotiated from without and
within the government itself. Conservative and radical positions coexisted
under the wide banner of official nationalism, attesting to the fact that
ideological positions had not yet completely hardened. Calles’s procapi-
talist economic policies, however, increasingly collided with peasants’
and rural workers’ demands for land distribution and with the prolabor
and anti-imperialist sentiments of the times.

villa and the politics of incorporation

The convergence of several factors made the Calles era the most produc-
tive in terms of Villista narrative. On the one hand, Villa’s tragic death
in 1923 made him (i.e., the legend of his cruelty and violence, his daring
military movements, the controversy surrounding his contribution to the
revolution) the subject of public curiosity for years. His embodiment of
many popular qualities and the “virility” valued in the emerging post-
revolutionary culture no doubt inspired many writers. On the other, the
government’s literary policy of encouraging writers to deal with themes
that promoted social awareness fostered, ironically, the production of
Villista narratives at a time when his legacy was being silenced in the
world of official politics.
Class and culture played a significant role in the shaping of Villa’s
image. Writers and journalists were mostly of urban, middle-class back-
ground. Unlike Villa, they “had only minor political grievances or social
differences with the regime and its leadership.” Therefore, “their treat-
ment of Villa was broadly compatible with the regime’s ideology and the
 20 writing villa’s revolution

dominant culture.” 27 There were, of course, exceptions (as we shall see),

but the norm was to concentrate—for purposes of dramatic effect— on
the violent aspects of his personality. The political motivations behind
Villa’s actions were seldom emphasized, or were brushed aside. In post-
revolutionary Mexico, particularly among the upper and middle classes
(though also among some segments of the masses), politics was still per-
ceived to be a matter reserved for “civilized” men. And Villa, a semiliter-
ate, rough man from the countryside, did not belong in that category.
This was particularly true in the writings of middle-class intellectuals
who supported and even joined the revolution but whose social mobil-
ity after the war was threatened by the growing political pressure of the
lower classes. Prominent authors José Vasconcelos and Martín Luis Guz-
mán, for example, obliquely convey this social anxiety and spirit of compe-
tition in their assessments, and disqualification, of the two major leaders of
the popular revolution, Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa. Vasconcelos
writes: “After the death of Zapata, who was the disgrace of Zapatismo,
there remained his best aides, the learned and the self-sacrificing; those
who did not take land, or execute people with voluptuous pleasure, or
participate in the excesses committed in the name of the revolution by so
many.” 28 And Guzmán: “Would he [Villa] put his force at the service of
principles that either did not exist for him or were incomprehensible to
him? This was the dilemma: either Villa would submit to the fundamen-
tal principles of the Revolution, and, if so, he and the Revolution would
triumph; or Villa would follow nothing but his own blind impulses, and
he and the Revolution would go down to defeat.” 29
Notwithstanding the differences in tone (Vasconcelos is openly scorn-
ful; Guzmán is condescending— condescension being a veiled form of
contempt), in these passages Zapata and Villa are seen as obstacles—
messengers of gratuitous violence, corruption, or naïveté—to be removed
or subordinated if the revolution is to move ahead. Significantly, intel-
lectual culture operates as a class instrument (invoked to sanction—im-
plicitly—the desirable social hierarchies) in both examples. Vasconcelos
and Guzmán, it follows, are voicing a conservative revolutionary (even
counterrevolutionary) position wherein popular violence is condemned
while class violence is wielded—at the discursive level—against those
who made the revolution possible.30
Despite this dismissal of Villa, a study of his politics and mentalité
is necessary to understand not only the Villistas, but also the different
ways in which the movement was represented in the Calles era. Villa’s re-
gionalist approach to politics put him on a collision course with General
 the politics of incorpor ation 21

Carranza in 1914. Carranza wanted to reestablish a “strong, centralized,

powerful Mexican state . . . [in order to] guarantee Mexico’s indepen-
dence and its development into a modern, capitalist nation.” 31 Actions
such as Carranza’s effort to try to impose a governor of his choice in
Chihuahua infuriated Villa and his followers, who were hostile to any
outside control of regional politics. Before the war, during the Díaz dicta-
torship, “political centralisation was the necessary and immediate prereq-
uisite of agrarian dispossession and concentration [of land].” 32 President
Venustiano Carranza first and, subsequently, Presidents Álvaro Obregón
and Plutarco Elías Calles all pushed for a centralized Mexican govern-
ment in order to consolidate their power, better control the affairs of the
nation, and implement a single project of economic development.
In contrast, the autonomy and interests of Mexico’s regions were at
the heart of General Villa’s politics. At the height of his power in the fall
of 1914, Villa proposed a “national solution of decentralization” (“una
solución nacional de descentralización”). Friedrich Katz summarizes and
comments on Villa’s political thought:
First each municipality, then each state, should hold local and state
elections in order to establish local and state authorities. This accom-
plished, there should be elections for Congress and for president of the
republic, who cannot be a member of the military, but a civilian. What
was behind the Villista proposal was a broad project for the decentral-
ization of political power; as an example of this, agrarian reform should
be carried out in each state without a unified national project. In this
sense, Villa is in some ways heir to nineteenth-century tradition, when
the federalists, who sought a decentralized regime, fought the central-
ists. In part this reflected the fact that Villa’s overriding interest was in
his homeland, Chihuahua and Durango, the north in general, and he
left it to others to make the decisions about the rest of the country.33

Instead of a centralized state, Villa envisioned a nation politically orga-

nized through horizontal alliances of relatively independent regions and
local towns and villages. Founded on the decentralizing notion of patria
chica, his program offered another way of “imagining” the nation’s politi-
cal community. It was an alternative project whose feasibility was attacked
by the postrevolutionary regimes, which were struggling to centralize the
control of politics.34
Villa’s ideas on nationhood led him to oppose and fight any revo-
lutionary plan that would weaken the autonomy of the patria chica and
strengthen and expand the centralization of political power. His behav-
 22 writing villa’s revolution

ior regarding this matter was akin to what Alan Knight calls “peasant
patriotism.” This type of patriotic sentiment or primordial nationalism
emerges from below and is expressed as loyalty to organic groups (the
clan, the ethnic group). Peasant nationalism, writes Knight, associates
the specific defense of the local community with the defense of the
country itself, is hostile to state attempts at centralization, and, instead,
seems to aspire to a “greater” homeland made up of a federation of “small
homelands.” 35
For Villa, indeed, the first geographical source of identity with the
patria was his home region; the nation in its entirety comprised a second
circle of identity. The combination of concrete, local loyalties and the
more abstract allegiance to the nation-state defined Villa’s patriotic senti-
ment. From this perspective, the military defense of the home region was
the most immediate and irrecusable form of nationalism.
During the reconstruction period, the Mexican postrevolutionary state
was still in the process of formation and open to multiple pressures and
proposals. Literature was one of the arenas where the viability, merits,
and limitations of various ideological projects for nation building would
be debated. Questions of class and culture (middle versus popular classes),
territoriality (region versus nation), political ideology (centralism versus
decentralization), and conflicting notions of nationalism (modernizing
versus primordial) mediated the discussion. This web of contentious is-
sues, critical points of reference in the investigation of Villista culture,
frames my discussion of the literature.
 villa and popular
political subjectivity Chapter 2
i n m a r i a n o a z u e l a ’s Los de abajo

mexican literature discovers a social class

In October 1914, physician and novelist Mariano Azuela joined the troops
of Villista general Julián Medina in Guadalajara with the rank of colo-
nel. “I then satisfied one of my greatest longings,” he wrote many years
later, “to live together with the genuine revolutionaries, the underdogs,
since until then my observations had been limited to the tedious world
of the petite bourgeoisie.” 1 The novelist’s encounter with the “genuine
revolutionaries,” that is, the peasants who had taken up arms against the
federal government, had a decidedly literary goal: to observe their world;
to immerse himself in its atmosphere and language; and, eventually, to
write a work that would reveal the human dimensions of the armed con-
flict. Azuela’s contact with the Villista army also provided an invigorating
spiritual antidote to the conventional and socially rigid world of which
he was a part, and it proved to be a productive experience. A year later, in
October 1915, a newspaper in El Paso, Texas, began publishing his cam-
paign notes in installments under the title Los de abajo: Cuadros y escenas de
la revolución actual (The Underdogs: Views and Scenes from the Current
Revolution).2
Azuela’s literary project was innovative. Los de abajo was not centered
on the petite bourgeoisie, as had been most literary production during
the Porfirian dictatorship.3 Instead, Azuela focused on the popular classes,
whose overwhelming presence during the revolution, especially between
1913 and 1915, had become a human reality that Mexico’s dominant so-
ciety could no longer ignore. This change in focus from one social group
to another incorporated new social terrain, expanding the human register
of the Mexican novel and giving it a breadth previously unknown.4
Azuela is credited with founding the “novel of the masses” in Mexico.5
He accomplished this in three main ways. First, for the first time in the
history of the Mexican novel, he assigned the role of protagonist to the
“bajo pueblo,” the rural lower classes. The construction of this collective
 24 writing villa’s revolution

character was unprecedented at the time in Mexico. It demanded inno-

vative narrative techniques that used montage sequencing, quick cuts in
action and setting, and a rapid, nervous tempo as the author moved back
and forth from the affairs of the masses to those of individuals.
Second, Azuela was able successfully to re-create the language of the
masses, which he collected during his months of campaigning with the
Villistas. The great number and variety of colloquial expressions that ap-
pear in the novel are strongly rooted in the forms of popular speech.6
Third, Azuela’s narrative offered a view of “a social division among the
characters, between the guileless and the spontaneous (of rural extrac-
tion) and the opportunists and corrupt (of urban extraction).” 7 These
three elements, along with the readily identifiable events that make up
the historical background of the novel guaranteed its overwhelming truth
effect.
Despite these elements and formal innovations, Los de abajo went
largely unnoticed for ten years. The reasons for this neglect by Mexico’s
literary critics are not difficult to ascertain. Literary criticism, a precari-
ous enough activity even under normal circumstances, was necessarily
brought to a halt by the revolutionary war. This hiatus lasted through the
early 1920s. In addition, the fact that Azuela was a writer from the prov-
inces who was living outside the literary circles of Mexico City delayed
the appreciation of his undeniable skill as a novelist. Finally, time had to
pass for a new cultural climate to emerge in Mexico, one inspired by the
social struggles of the revolution and stimulated by the state’s cultural
policy, before Azuela’s Los de abajo could begin to receive the recognition
it deserved. Beginning with Calles in 1924, the revolutionary govern-
ments began explicitly to favor the production of literary works with a
social orientation and designed to contribute to an understanding of the
recent conflicts and to instill in readers an awareness of the social prob-
lems facing Mexico.8 This cultural policy was largely directed not at the
rural classes but at an urban, middle-class population that needed to be
educated about and “sensitized” to the terrible reality of abuse, exploi-
tation, and violence that reigned in the countryside. Azuela’s audacious
look into the world of revolutionary peasants began to achieve renown in
the context of this predominantly urban cultural project.
Critics have extensively analyzed the history of the discovery of Los
de abajo by Mexico City’s intellectual elite and its eventual acceptance as
the quasi-official text of the revolution.9 Briefly, the “discovery” happened
in the context of a 1925 debate “that may be taken as the foundation
of the revolutionary political and cultural project desired for twentieth-
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 25

century Mexico.” 10 Azuela’s novel came into its own in the course of
this controversy between the old guard of literary critics and a younger
group of emerging middle-class intellectuals who were in many respects
more attuned to the social and aesthetic changes taking place in Mexico
and abroad. The old guard bemoaned the fact that no truly “virile” (i.e.,
revolutionary) literature existed, able to express the courage, epic spirit,
suffering, and redemptive meaning of the armed struggle in Mexico. The
new critics pointed to Los de abajo, at the time a little-known novel by
an unknown writer, as evidence that such literature did indeed exist. A
lively debate ensued for several months in Mexico City’s newspapers.11
As the novel gained notoriety, Azuela’s focus on peasant rebellion became
exemplary of the literary nationalism espoused by the postrevolutionary
regimes, and his work eventually came to be regarded as the paradigmatic
text of the revolution.
Three basic questions are posed by this gradual institutionalization of
Azuela’s Los de abajo within modern Mexican culture. First, what image
does a Liberal writer molded by the positivist education of his time con-
struct of the rebellious peasant, and what vision of society does this image
support? Second, what are the structural factors that place ideological
limits on Azuela’s narrative? Third, is it possible to extract from the novel
itself a subaltern perspective on the peasant revolution, a perspective that
may even run contrary to the author’s own ideas? A rigorous rereading of
Azuela is required to answer these questions, paying particular attention
to the symbolic dimension of Villismo in the novel.
The sociohistorical structure of Los de abajo parallels the history of the
Villista movement in Jalisco between 1913 and 1915, as Stanley Robe has
demonstrated.12 Villismo is not, however, merely a historical point of ref-
erence. Mónica Mansour has observed that the distant, ethereal figure of
Pancho Villa is the “implicit axis of the novel.” 13 The cultural semiotics
at work in this novel can readily be discerned by studying the construc-
tion of the figure of Villa as well as the attitudes of the characters and of
the narrator toward him.
Two very different and antagonistic conceptions of the revolution fuel
this semiotic. The dominant conception is that of the narrator and is
articulated through a discourse that tends to distance itself from events.
It rejects what Villa represents for the masses, that is, popular power as a
valid revolutionary option. It tends to be explicit in the ironic commen-
taries of the narrator and in the voices of characters with a more sophis-
ticated cultural background, forming a cohesive discourse that shapes the
specific ideological attributes of the text.
 26 writing villa’s revolution

The less-articulated conception is expressed primarily in the actions

and the speech of the peasant characters, who offer the only real hope
for social justice. It is made up of peasant actions and popular dialogue,
is subordinated to the first, and is used to validate it. Thus, Azuela elects
to circumscribe and resemanticize the different forms of popular revolu-
tionary consciousness that enter into the elaboration of the plot.
The only possibility of glimpsing a subaltern perspective of the popu-
lar revolution, of even partially recovering “autonomous” peasant con-
sciousness and political orientation, is to not get caught up in the novel’s
semiotic. This implies a reading that is more attentive to the cultural
perspective of the characters represented in Los de abajo. A summary re-
view of orthodox interpretations of the novel is in order, not to surpass or
reject these interpretations, but to argue for new methods and forms of
evidence that challenge or question the accepted readings and show their
limits. A brief description of the novel’s principal social actors, as well as
the relationships between them, is also required, since it is through the
characters that the author formulates the meaning he intends to assign to
events. I shall discuss other historical and cultural references about peas-
ant consciousness in order to examine the novel’s ideological premises
regarding revolutionary discourse. Finally, by drawing on recent subal-
tern studies regarding recovery of the voice and world vision of the op-
pressed and marginalized,14 I shall develop an exegesis which argues for a
broader understanding of the political subjectivity of the peasant inher-
ent in the text.15

the text
Peasants
The novel’s protagonist, Demetrio Macías, is a serrano, or mountain
dweller, from Juchipila Canyon, a “pure-blooded Aztec” (“indígena de
pura raza”) who embodies the virtues and the limitations of the Mexican
peasant.16 Azuela uses him to present his ideas regarding the failure of the
popular peasant movement. Macías cuts a heroic profile—he is fearless,
proud, and unaffected. He is not moved to revolutionary action by po-
litical credos, about which he is almost completely ignorant, but by more
basic principles: the right to live free of harassment; the preservation of
his human dignity. In his instinctive struggle against injustice and his
spontaneous armed rebellion, Macías is the incarnation of a prototype:
the “unconscious” revolutionary. His rebelliousness derives from a hun-
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 27

ger for justice, and this, not adherence to a particular political program,
drives his actions.
In the first and longest section of the novel, the protagonist is the vic-
tim of political boss don Mónico, an abusive and unjust authority. Macías
has to flee to the sierra in order to save his own life. He wages a guerrilla
war against the federal army, which is pursuing him and his followers
and fellow fugitives from justice—his compadre Anastasio Montañés, La
Codorniz (Quail), Pancracio, El Manteca, Venancio, and others.17
A festive atmosphere reigns among Macías’s troops in this first mo-
ment of regional conflict. Despite the risks, armed struggle has a liber-
ating effect on them: it allows them to leave behind the misery of their
everyday existence and to open the doors to adventure; it gives them the
opportunity to reaffirm their worth and dignity as men, to act with great
independence.
The pastoral, almost idyllic, existence of the serrano rebels is interrupted
and transformed by the arrival of the upstart “Curro” (Tenderfoot),
Luis Cervantes. Under his influence, Macías and his guerrillas join the
Constitutionalist Army, distinguishing themselves on the field of battle.
Macías is made a colonel and then quickly ascends to the rank of general.
But military promotion carries a price: from the moment that the serrano
rebels leave their home territory and enter into a revolutionary dynamic
that is beyond their control, they lose their freedom of action. Spatial
displacement takes a psychological toll, and the meaning of the struggle,
which previously was so clear to them, becomes hazy and uncertain.
In the second section of the novel the peasant revolution undergoes
a process of moral degeneration. The early skirmishes are relatively be-
nign compared with the later abuses of popular power, a change that is
registered in the behavior of the armed masses. With the defeat of the
federal army, the underdogs’ rise to power leads to looting, unruliness,
promiscuity, and a thirst for collective revenge. Two new characters
come to the fore, güero (blondie) Margarito and La Pintada (War Paint),
each of whom personifies different aspects of the degradation and cor-
ruption brought on by the triumph of the popular revolution. Margarito
symbolizes the barbarity and cruelty that are unleashed by war. Typical
of his actions are his abusive and brutal behavior toward civilians and the
sadistic way in which he kills a captive federal soldier.
La Pintada, on the other hand, represents a different phenomenon:
the massive and brutal incorporation of women into the country’s public
life under the extraordinary circumstances of a popular, revolutionary
uprising. In order to get ahead, to survive and to gain respect in a male-
 28 writing villa’s revolution

dominated world, La Pintada resorts to masculine behaviors typical of

a war culture—bravery, arrogance, and self-sufficiency. Macías’s troops,
however, continue to see her as nothing more than a sex object.
Lascivious, impetuous, and violent, La Pintada is a complex figure. On
the one hand, she is dependent on her “man,” güero Margarito, although
he is not her man all the time. On the other hand, she does exactly as she
pleases, with little regard for the men around her, and leads a dissolute
life. As a character, she stands halfway between the soldadera (the female
soldier who accompanied men on the campaign but who also performed
traditional tasks such as cooking and washing) and the independent
woman, as Carlos Monsiváis, has noted.18
Using these two emblematic characters, La Pintada and güero Mar-
garito, Azuela seeks to depict the popular rebellion’s slide into moral de-
generacy. Anarchy, chaos, and lack of conscience reign among the troops.
Both characters disappear from the plot once their didactic function has
been fulfilled.
The final and shortest section of the novel opens with an improbable
letter that Venancio receives in the midst of the campaign. The reader
learns that güero Margarito has committed suicide and that Pancracio
and Manteca ended a dispute over a game of cards by stabbing each
other. The message is clear: the revolutionary forces have entered a self-
destructive phase as a natural consequence of the degenerative process
that marks the peasant movement. After a looting incident, people from
Macías’s own region repudiate his troops. Macías and his men return to
Juchipila Canyon transformed; they are wealthier but disoriented, and
more estranged than ever from their land. Despite these setbacks, they
maintain themselves as a combat-ready unit until they are all killed in
an ambush.
The thesis of the novel, expressed in the demise of Macías and his men,
is unmistakable: the peasants are the genuine revolutionaries, but their
overwhelming ignorance, lack of formal education, and dearth of clear
political goals precludes the possibility of a felicitous end to the armed
struggle. The implication is that without educated leaders to formulate
a political program from above that represents the will of the masses,
the success of the revolution is doomed. Thus, the paternalistic populism
of Mexico’s postrevolutionary governments found in Azuela a convinc-
ing, if involuntary, spokesperson. Interestingly enough, despite Azuela’s
belief that the revolution would surely fail without educated leaders, the
intellectuals portrayed in the novel are ineffectual; Azuela’s deep-seated
pessimism belies his convictions regarding their historical mission.
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 29

Intellectuals
A second group of more cultured characters from a different social
class fulfills the ideological function that the rustic characters from the
Juchipila Canyon region appear to be unable to realize. This second group
provides a critical perspective on the revolutionary war that gives politi-
cal, historical, moral, and aesthetic meaning to the armed uprising. The
three characters who perform this task are Curro (Luis Cervantes), who
uses his cultural capital for personal ends; Alberto Solís, who represents
the Liberal tendencies of the middle-class revolutionary intelligentsia;
and Loco Valderrama, who infuses that same Liberal thought with his
own peculiar poetry and melodrama.
Cervantes is a former medical student and journalist who represents a
different type of revolutionary. He belongs to the urban middle class and
in many ways is the antithesis of Macías, the serrano leader. Curro deserts
the federal troops and joins Macías and his men when he realizes that the
balance of power is shifting in favor of the rebels. Ambition leads him to
see in the revolution a unique opportunity for quick enrichment. Cer-
vantes is central to the plot as the character that links Macías’s regional
rebellion with the national revolutionary war. But it is his own ambitious
self-interest that dictates that he convince Macías and his men to join
forces with the Constitutionalist Army. In a long speech, he explains to
the peasant leader the meaning of his own military actions:
You do not yet realize your lofty noble function. You are a modest man
without ambitions, you do not wish to realize the exceedingly impor-
tant role you are destined to play in the revolution. It is not true that
you took up arms simply because of Señor Mónico. You are under arms
to protest against the evils of all the caciques who are overrunning the
whole nation. We are the elements of a social movement which will not
rest until it has enlarged the destinies of our motherland. We are the
tools Destiny makes use of to reclaim the sacred rights of the people.
We are not fighting to dethrone a miserable murderer, we are fighting
against tyranny itself. What moves us is what men call ideals; our action
is what men call fighting for a principle. A principle! That’s why Villa
and Natera and Carranza are fighting; that’s why we, every man of us,
are fighting. (55–56)

Cervantes articulates the principles of the revolutionary movement

for the guerrillas, providing Macías and his troop the national vision and
consciousness they lack. In order to convince them to abandon their na-
 30 writing villa’s revolution

tive soil and become part of a larger movement in which they will no
longer be in control, Cervantes uses high-sounding rhetoric, weaving a
verbal web around his audience. Cervantes begins his speech as an exter-
nal onlooker (“you”) and concludes by speaking from within the guerrilla
group (“we”). On a discursive level, he identifies himself as an underdog
rebel, even though he is not one of them and will abandon the peasant
rebels when the time comes. Macías’s reply to Curro’s speech attests to
the intoxicating effect that the latter’s words have had on the popular
leader’s consciousness: “Hey, there, Pancracio . . . pull down two more
beers” (56).
Macías decides to leave Juchipila and join forces with the Constitu-
tionalists, and thus begins a successful military career that will eventu-
ally see him promoted to the rank of general following the key battle of
Zacatecas. But as a result of his conversation with Cervantes, the protago-
nist also begins to express a sense of cultural inferiority: “Ain’t it wonder-
ful to be able to read and write!” (57), he exclaims, reflecting on Curro’s
words. These feelings of inferiority lead him to accept a division of labor
within the revolution. Because of their lack of formal education and high
culture, he and his men assume a strictly instrumental role that precludes
genuine revolutionary agency. Thus begins his military subordination to
other forces and other leaders.
Cervantes’s motive in urging Macías to join the Constitutionalist
Army is simply greed. He correctly anticipates the triumph of the revo-
lutionaries and the spoils of war that will be theirs to pick and choose:
“revolutionists or bandits, call them what you will, were going to depose
the Government. Tomorrow would therefore belong wholly to them. A
man must consequently be on their side, only on their side” (40). No
other character comes close to Cervantes’s exploits as a calculating thief.
He leaves the country as planned, having reaped all possible economic
benefit from the war.19 Significantly, he will also be the only survivor
from Macías’s troops.
In addition to Cervantes, the upwardly mobile demagogue, another
key figure in the novel is that of the idealistic revolutionary intellectual, a
figure who stands for Mariano Azuela himself. The author, nonetheless,
is present neither “as a character, nor as an axis of action but, rather, as
an eye that sees through the lens of his ideal conceptions.” 20 In order to
express these “ideal conceptions,” Azuela employs a literary technique
typical of the nineteenth-century realist novel, whereby an incidental
and passing figure becomes a central prophetic character. This transitory
presence in the first part of the novel is Alberto Solís, the disillusioned
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 31

intellectual. To a lesser degree, Loco Valderrama plays a similar role in

the third section.
Solís plays the part of the prescient character, the one who is able to
anticipate the course the guerrilla war will take and to diagnose the causes
of its eventual demise, which he attributes to a lack of “ideals” (81). Be-
fore dying, Solís condenses into two words what he calls “the psychology
of our race”: “Robbery! Murder!” (81; original emphasis). Solís considers
the Mexican peasant to be flawed for reasons of racial heritage. The un-
derdogs’ innate propensity for violence is symptomatic of the problem.
Lacking the ideals that might mitigate what is presumed to be a con-
genital defect, the peasant is condemned to thwart the positive labors of
the revolution. His self-destructive instincts are what condemn him to a
subaltern position in society.21 As events unfold, Solís’s judgment about
the masses’ propensity to steal and murder is explicitly played out in the
second and third parts of the novel. This is an unmistakable sign that this
character’s point of view is Azuela’s own.22
The jester poet Loco Valderrama also makes a very brief but signifi-
cant appearance in the novel. His allegiance to the revolution is due to
its sublimity—for him it is an aesthetic rather than a historical experi-
ence. He likens the revolution to a “volcano in eruption”(136) and re-
marks: “What do I care about the stones left above or below after the
cataclysm?” (136). His poetic image is echoed later by Macías when the
leader’s wife asks why they continue to fight. Macías throws a stone into a
ravine and tells her: “Look at that stone; how it keeps on going . . .”(147).
The rebel leader’s identification with the stone suggests that he has be-
come Valderrama’s naturalistic image.
Solís’s cynical disillusionment and Valderrama’s political nihilism con-
verge in a pessimistic view of the revolution characteristic of the intel-
lectual middle class to which Azuela belonged.23
The centrality of Solís’s opinions makes it clear that the prerogative to
decide the meaning of the events narrated is assigned to the class that he
represents, and that its version of history is to be seen as History itself.
In this sense, the technique of postulating an image or behavioral norm
for the revolutionary peasant and then having it unfold in the plot reveals
that for Azuela subaltern characters are little more than stock figures,
despite their apparent free will. The underdogs’ raison d’être as a nov-
elistic presence is to validate and personify the cultural expectations that
the revolutionary middle class has of them. In this regard, it is useful to
remember what Stanley Robe has to say about the novel’s protagonist,
Demetrio Macías. Reconstructing step by step Azuela’s stint as a Villista
 32 writing villa’s revolution

from 1914 to 1915, Robe points out that Macías is less sophisticated
than either Col. Manuel Caloca or Gen. Julián Medina, the two his-
torical figures that Azuela used as models to create his character. “The
political awareness of Caloca and Medina, the latter in particular, has
escaped Demetrio completely.” 24 The real historical characters’ astute-
ness and political qualifications were inconsistent with the author’s ideo-
logical plan.25

The Condensation and Negation of History

Through the personal story of Demetrio Macías, Azuela relates a con-
densed version of the history of the rise and fall of the popular revolu-
tion.26 In fact, developments in the novel are historically situated by key
events that symbolize stages of the revolution in each of the novel’s three
sections.
The first section of the book registers the initial, isolated outbreaks
of popular rebellion. As these coalesce and are transformed into a single
revolutionary force, they successfully confront the regime of the usurper
Victoriano Huerta, who assassinated Pres. Francisco I. Madero. The up-
rising culminates with the defeat of the federal army in the decisive battle
of Zacatecas ( June 1914). Both historically and in the novel, this triumph
marks the high point of the popular revolution.
The second section describes both the excesses of the revolutionaries
once they attain power and the spectacle of the revolutionary forces split
by internal divisions. Vying for power are the Villistas on one side and
the Carrancistas on the other. Macías and his staff attend the Convention
of Aguascalientes (October 1914), which is an unsuccessful attempt to
resolve the differences between the revolutionary armies.
The third part of the novel marks the definitive decline of the popular
movement and the gradual dispersion of the rebellious peasant armies.
The historical referent in this case is Villa’s military defeat at the hands
of the Carrancistas in the battle of Celaya (April 1915).
Thus, the novel’s social and historical framework captures the rise and
fall of the popular revolution between 1913 and 1915. Another set of
internal referents, however, contradicts the novel’s own presentation of
social and historical events. The failure of the struggle is attributed not to
splits and divisions within the revolutionary forces but to deeper natural
forces. This is a world in which everything is predetermined: “Beneath
the appearance of historicity, Azuela’s ideas are actually based on a natu-
ralistic vision.” 27 Violent images of the revolution that depict it as a tor-
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 33

nado or a volcanic eruption render useless the efforts of the men fighting
for social change.28 Solís declares that the revolution is a “hurricane: if
you’re in it, you’re no man . . . you’re a miserable leaf, a dead leaf, blown
by the wind” (73). With this image of a “dead leaf ” the fighter is reduced
to someone who does not govern his own actions. The poetic image nul-
lifies the revolutionary’s significance as a historical agent.
The circular movement of the plot is another element that reduces
the popular uprising to a natural process. The novel begins and ends in
Juchipila Canyon with almost the same cast of characters. In the end,
however, the underdogs do not rise from the earth, “their legs and chests
naked, lambent and dark as old bronzes” (19), but are reabsorbed into
it, victims of enemy bullets. The lives of the characters are governed by
cycles, like nature, like the seasons. The novel’s naturalistic images oblit-
erate any potential for transcendent human actions.

ideological structure and the

hegemonic culture of the revolution
Jean Franco has observed that meaning in Los de abajo is constructed
through the roles or functions assigned to the characters within the nar-
rative. The actions of the taciturn Demetrio Macías are in sharp contrast
to the verbosity of Cervantes. Curro speechifies and preaches, he names
Macías colonel, he articulates the ideals of the revolution, he invents.
Franco points to the existence of a dichotomy between action and dis-
course that is borne out by the text’s linguistic characteristics. Discourse
is particularly susceptible to distortion and manipulation to the extent to
which it can be abstracted from real situations.
According to Franco, the attributes of the other characters can also
be reduced to binary oppositions: nature/culture; sincerity/corruption;
spontaneity/calculation. Macías is spontaneous, sincere, and natural;
Cervantes is calculating, corrupt, and learned; Margarito is corrupt and
boorish; and so on. This system of oppositions and contradictions sug-
gests that Azuela’s novel is structured around the absence of an ideal syn-
thesis: there is no character capable of combining the spontaneity and
natural virtues of the peasant world with the prudence and rationality
of the intellectual. These structural limitations rest on what for Azuela
is an irreducible dichotomy: body-peasant /mind-intellectual. The novel,
Franco concludes, precludes the Gramscian notion of the peasant as the
organic intellectual of the revolutionary struggle.29
The idea that there is a fundamental contradiction between the very
 34 writing villa’s revolution

nature of peasant existence and the rationality of intellectuals was until

recently an implicit axiom in historical studies of the Mexican Revolution.
This idea, an outgrowth of modern ideological prejudices toward tra-
ditional societies, has shaped interpretations of the nature, motivations,
and results of military actions that were not organically linked to the
world of urban political culture. One of the foundational texts of modern
Mexican historiography, Frank Tannenbaum’s Peace by Revolution (1933),
underlines this antithesis in its presentation of rural uprisings during the
revolution: “The uprising itself . . . was not responsive to any plan. It was
incidental. It was pragmatic. . . . It was essentially the work of the com-
mon people. . . . No organized party presided at its birth. No great in-
tellectuals prescribed its program, formulated its doctrine, outlined its
objectives. . . . There was not a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Montesquieu, a
Diderot in Mexico. . . . There is no Lenin in Mexico.” 30
Tannenbaum’s analysis presents a Eurocentric perspective. Modern
European history, with its political parties, intellectual leaders, doctrines,
and objectives, becomes the norm for locating the peculiarities of Mex-
ico’s revolutionary phenomenon. This method affords Tannenbaum a
closer understanding of his object of study and at the same time distances
him from it. To the extent that he recognizes the relative unimportance
of intellectuals (understood to be urban figures) as historical actors, Tan-
nenbaum is obliged to focus his analysis on the reality of the peasant
world. But insofar as the logic of this argument disregards the potential
for peasant thought, there is no possibility of comprehending popular
rebellions on their own terms. Within this interpretative framework, the
U.S. historian ends up in agreement with Azuela. The armed rebellion is
viewed as a natural force (“[u]nheralded and unguided . . . like a cyclone”)
and “spontaneous” in character (i.e., not premeditated).31 Tannenbaum’s
vision, however, differs from Azuela’s in that it offers an unequivocally
positive evaluation of popular “spontaneity,” finding in it the originality
of the revolutionary forces that long to destroy the feudal and capitalist
structures of the country. Despite this distinction, both authors share the
same intellectual prejudice toward the peasantry, whereby their military
actions are seen as unplanned, improvised.
A few years later, in 1939, Alfonso Reyes, member of the prestigious
Ateneo de la Juventud and a prominent figure in the intellectual life of
Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, repeated Tannen-
baum’s thesis in an interpretive essay on Mexico’s modern culture: “The
Mexican Revolution sprang from impulse rather than from an idea. It was
not planned by encyclopedists or philosophers, more or less conscious of
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 35

the consequences of their doctrine, as was the French Revolution. It was

not organized by the dialecticians of social warfare, as was the Russian
Revolution.” 32
With Reyes it becomes clear that Tannenbaum’s exegesis of the revo-
lution was fully accepted and integrated into the intellectual discourse of
Mexico’s cultural elite. Years later, this hermeneutics would be strength-
ened and radicalized in another classic text on Mexican national culture,
Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950).
Paz’s ideas have a similar slant, but his style is far more dramatic. He as-
serts that the difficulty of formulating “the confusing aspirations of the
people in a coherent system become obvious as soon as the Revolution
ceased to be an instinctive event and was established as a regime.” 33 Paz
elaborates: “The Zapatista and the Villista movements—twin factions,
one in the north and one in the south—were popular explosions that
proved almost wholly incapable of incorporating their truths, more felt
than thought out, in an organic plan. They were a point of departure, an
obscure and stammering expression of the revolutionary will.” 34
The antithesis between popular revolution and intellectual rational-
ism (or nature versus culture) in this canonical text once again establishes
structural limits on how the revolutionary phenomenon may be inter-
preted. Paz refines the commonplaces implied in this contradiction: the
campesino masses are an invigorating force, but they are not nor can they
be the brains of the revolution. As a result, the deeper meaning of their
military actions must be interpreted for them. Implicit in Paz’s descrip-
tion is the following political program: Mexico needs a paternalistic po-
litical structure because the masses—Villistas and Zapatistas—are im-
mature (their aspirations are “confused” and “stammering”).
Paz’s text, like those of Azuela, Tannenbaum, and Reyes, each covering
a genre representative of high culture (essay, novel, and historical study,
respectively), reveals a discursive practice that, with varying inflections, is
part of the process of shaping a hegemonic culture. The view these intel-
lectuals have of the popular revolution is akin to what Eric J. Hobsbawm
calls archaic, “pre-political” movements. According to Hobsbawm, the
lack of an explicit ideology, organization, or program reveals that these
mass movements are composed of individuals or groups with little or no
political consciousness, who have not yet found a suitable language to ar-
ticulate their aspirations in the world.35 This approach to rural uprisings
has resulted in their being interpreted as spontaneous mass actions whose
leadership, by definition, must depend on protagonists from outside of
the peasant world (urban intellectuals, political parties, etc.).
 36 writing villa’s revolution

Antonio Gramsci provides a useful counterpoint to Hobsbawm.

Gramsci notes that pure spontaneity has no historical reality; that is,
there are always traces of consciousness in unstructured mass move-
ments.36 Decades later, Ranajit Guha reexamined Gramsci’s proposition.
Guha affirms that the error of seeing peasant movements only in terms
of spontaneity derives from two closely related ideas about organization
and politics. The conscious character of a movement is associated with
that which is “organized” in the sense of (1) “conscious leadership,” and
(2) well-defined objectives, with a program that specifies its particular
components and the means for achieving them. The same equation holds
if the term “politics” is substituted for “organization.” Those who make
that substitution, Guha argues, have the additional advantage of identify-
ing consciousness with their own norms and political ideals. Activities of
the masses that do not conform to those ideals can then be characterized
as unconscious or, by the same token, as prepolitical.37
Gramsci’s and Guha’s writings can be productively applied in a re-
visionist approach to the Mexican Revolution, for they belie a steadfast
cultural tradition that insists on the spontaneity of popular rebellions. In
his assessment of intellectuals and the Mexican Revolution, Alan Knight,
though not aligned with Gramsci and Guha’s subalternist views, writes:
“It is no longer possible to deny peasants intellectual and ideological
attributes. . . . Numerous studies on peasants demonstrate that peasant
consciousness is more complex, and contains more intellectual elements
than was previously supposed. . . . In spite of what some observers of the
period and later historians have said about popular leaders supposedly
being manipulated like puppets by their scheming secretaries, evidence
points to the contrary.” 38
Knight’s commentary implies skepticism about the ways that “ob-
servers of the period and later historians” have represented peasant sub-
jectivity. These representations, as I have already noted, are bounded
by a structural dichotomy in which the space occupied by the peasant
subaltern is determined by factors that contradict intellectual rationality:
spontaneity, instinct, lack of political consciousness, naïveté, and there-
fore ease of manipulation. Azuela’s text and the writings of Tannenbaum,
Reyes, and Paz are different instances of an ambivalent cultural process
that, at the very moment of representing the revolutionary agency of the
subaltern peasant, proceeds to simultaneously and, to varying degrees,
suppress it.
Given this context, the task of recuperating the political culture of
the subaltern in a work such as Los de abajo is absolutely necessary for a
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 37

critical reevaluation of postrevolutionary Mexican culture, but also an

extremely complex undertaking. An entire intellectual tradition linked to
the dominant ideology produced by the revolution itself and embodied in
the logic of the plot works against such an act of recovery. As Knight sug-
gests, however, it is no longer possible to adhere to the old interpretive
schemes. It is necessary to break with them and develop new historical
reference points as well as new reading strategies, both of which should
aid in understanding Azuela’s operative categories. The text is obviously a
representation of the will of the author. As Guha writes in another con-
text, referring to the various kinds of documentation available on peasant
insurgencies, “these documents do not get their content from that will
alone, for the latter is predicated on another will—that of the insurgent.
It should be possible therefore to read the presence of a rebel conscious-
ness as a necessary and pervasive element within that body of evidence.” 39
Guha proposes new methods of reading that permit the reader to per-
ceive within the text itself that Other will that the author would prefer to
suppress. Reading against the grain implies a process of deconstruction
that leads to questioning the “lines of power and hierarchy” of the docu-
ments.40 In order to recover the cultural and political specificity of the
peasant rebellions, it is necessary, first, to identify how subaltern culture,
as represented by the official and elite culture, is distorted, and, second,
to discover the social semiotics of the peasant insurgents’ strategies and
cultural practices.41 Put another way, it is a matter of establishing which
are the inherent alternative discourses that might be available to the read-
er in these hegemonic accounts of the rebellious peasants, despite the
will of the author. This way of reading is especially useful for analyzing a
realist, testimonial novel like Los de abajo. While not an official document,
the novel is a canonical text within modern Mexican culture, sanctioned
by the state, semiofficial and even didactic (in that it is required reading
in the public schools).42

Los de abajo: traces of a subaltern perspective

Most interpretations of the popular revolution that began to be written in
the 1920s were based on controlling and suppressing peasant subjectiv-
ity. I have already outlined the basic elements of this operation as they
appear in Azuela’s novel and in the writings of other postrevolutionary
intellectuals. It is important to note, however, that this process of hege-
monic formation does not consist of the simple, top-down imposition of
a single point of view. In order to have the power of persuasion, the hege-
 38 writing villa’s revolution

monic process must also incorporate, co-opt, and rearticulate a number

of potentially contradictory discourses. Therefore, we must be able to
see through these discourses to find those instances that contradict the
dominant ideology of the text. We begin from the general premise that,
in spite of authorial intention, dominant versions of the revolution inher-
ently contain remnants of alternative discourses. By locating these frag-
ments, it should be possible to recognize the different types of subaltern
agency that are at work in the text and use them to reveal the political
forms and subaltern cultures that have been distorted or silenced.
In order to recover the subaltern perspective in Los de abajo, we
have to identify and give new meanings to the traces of autonomous ini-
tiative of subaltern groups in the text. This is no simple matter, since
Azuela’s world view induces him to emphasize situations in which blind
impulse prevails, especially scenes of looting and abuse, although these
made up only a small portion of the popular armed actions during the
revolution. Our assumption, nonetheless, is that these traces, even if oc-
curring in a negative context, express the popular consciousness of revo-
lutionary phenomena. That is to say, these fragments reveal politicized
forms of understanding and identity that are not accessible through con-
ventional political language (which belongs to the educated social sec-
tors). They can be perceived in oral histories and in the body language
of the characters, precisely the kind of details that Azuela the novelist
knew how to capture so well. These scattered traces, however, because
of their very fragmentary nature, do not coalesce into a coherent subal-
tern discourse. In 1915, when the novel was written, that clarity of vision
had not yet been achieved either by popular movements or by the more
educated sectors of the revolution. The most we can hope for is to rein-
terpret Azuela’s portrait of the armed peasant movement and to point out
a systematic process of suppression that has obscured a fuller and more
evenhanded understanding of the popular revolutionary struggle and its
motivations.
An indispensable strategy for this kind of analysis is to remain skepti-
cal, to not regard the ideologies present in the text as natural and in-
evitable. Rather, they should be understood as artificial and motivated
constructions.43 Decentering ourselves as readers opens the door to the
possibility of a reading that, up to a certain point, goes against the logic of
the text. This also requires that we distance ourselves from conventional
understandings of history as well as from received notions about the na-
ture of politics and of intellectuals, as Florencia Mallon suggests in her
study of the political and cultural practices of the subaltern.44
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 39

In terms of the plot, it is useful to recall the two functions that Roland
Barthes proposes—nuclei (cardinal functions) and catalyzers (complemen-
tary functions)—in his discussion of narrative events and the logic con-
necting them.45 Important events, or nuclei, form part of the hermeneutic
code. They advance the plot and resolve doubts; they cannot be removed
or substituted without disrupting the logic of the narrative, because “the
action[s] to which [they refer] open (or continue or close) an alternative
that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the sto-
ry.” 46 Minor events, or catalyzers, are not crucial in this sense. They can
be deleted without altering the logic of the plot, although the omission
will clearly impoverish the narrative aesthetically. They are what might
be called necessary fillers, ancillary or circumstantial elements, or factors
of verisimilitude responsible for the milieu, and so on.
The nuclei are narrative moments that produce critical junctures for
the way events develop; they are the plot’s hinges. In Los de abajo the most
important narrative nucleus postulates the following problem: Demetrio
Macías can continue to fight in his home region or choose to leave it and,
along with his men, join forces with the Constitutionalist Army. The so-
lution to the disjunction between the regional and the national struggle
in the first part of the novel is crucial to the plot and to the novel’s ideo-
logical message. It is therefore necessary to pause and consider closely
how the author addresses it.
The framework in which this dilemma is introduced and resolved is
a conversation between Macías and Cervantes (53–56), the most exten-
sive dialogue in the novel. Cervantes urges Macías to join Gen. Pánfilo
Natera’s troops. The guerrilla leader’s personal pride and his spirit of in-
dependence keep him from abandoning his home territory: “I don’t like
the idea of accepting orders from anybody very much. . . . Well that’s all
I want, to be let alone so I can go home” (54). Cervantes, however, finally
persuades Macías to join the rebel army: “It is not true that you took up
arms simply because of Señor Mónico. You are under arms to protest
against the evils of all the caciques who are overrunning the whole nation.
We are the elements of a social movement which will not rest until it has
enlarged the destinies of our motherland” (55).
Cervantes’s speech convinces the protagonist to leave the regional
struggle and join the national revolutionary movement. It therefore
marks a key moment of transition. José Joaquín Blanco, one of the most lu-
cid interpreters of the novel, writes: “Luis Cervantes pushes him [Macías]
to join the Villistas. . . . Cervantes is the channel that leads Macías to
Villa.” 47
 40 writing villa’s revolution

Other events of lesser importance, catalyzers, which are not part of

the hermeneutic code and, consequently, are not meant to influence
the course of events, contain information that complicates or contra-
dicts rather than complements the preceding nuclei. Before his dialogue
with Cervantes, the narrator explains that, while recovering from a bullet
wound to his foot, Macías “was busy thinking of the best route by which
to proceed to Durango” (43). The existence of an itinerary suggests that
Macías was already entertaining the idea of leaving Zacatecas and enter-
ing Villista territory (the state of Durango, between Zacatecas and Chi-
huahua, the stronghold of Villismo). The existence of this plan is con-
firmed when the protagonist recovers completely from his wound and
rejoins his men: “They began to discuss various projects to go northward
where, according to rumor, the rebels had beaten the Federal Troops all
along the line” (49). This suggests that even before hearing Cervantes’s
patriotic exaltations, and independent of them, the guerrillas were con-
sidering leaving their home region and taking up the struggle in the na-
tional theater.
What remained to be determined were the specific conditions of this
participation, not the reasons for its undertaking. According to this nar-
rative logic, the military isolationism Macías defends in his dialogue with
Cervantes is either a contradiction in the novel’s plot or signals a lack of
confidence regarding the terms of participation. But this concern is very
different from the limiting regionalist vision of the struggle that Curro
seeks to attack in his speech. As catalyzers, however, the meaning of these
passages—a plan of action collectively discussed, signaling subaltern po-
litical agency—is quickly lost from view as it is subordinated to a textual
logic oriented toward the negation of autonomous initiative.
These passages raise the following question: What motivated Macías
and his men to seek out the revolutionaries in the north? The answer can
be deduced only from the subsequent behavior of the guerrilla fighters.
But Villismo, both as a popular military movement and as a subjective
phenomenon, clearly establishes the implicit ideological and emotional
horizon for the rebels’ actions. In this regard, Azuela maintains a curi-
ous duality. On the one hand, he insists on presenting Macías as a minor
leader lost in the struggles between the political factions of the revolu-
tion. When he has to vote for a provisional president in the Convention
of Aguascalientes, he does not know if he should take the side of Villa
or Carranza: “President, what? Who in the devil, then, is this man Car-
ranza? I’ll be damned if I know what it’s all about” (123).
On the other hand, the entire course of action of Macías and his men
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 41

reveals an affinity—albeit one that is not altogether uncritical—with the

Villista struggle. In fact, throughout the text, the actions, language, and
psychology of Macías and his men indicate that the mythical persona of
Villa is their main ideological referent for questions of cultural and class
identity and forms of popular political knowledge.
The adherence to Villismo is shaken in the last part of the novel but
not broken by the news of Villa’s defeat at the battle of Celaya. At first,
the guerrilla fighters receive the news with incredulity, and only Deme-
trio wrinkles his brow “as though a black shadow had passed over his
eyes” (135). The confirmation of the defeat has a definitive impact on the
consciousness of the characters. With the myth of the invincible Villa
shattered, the promise of power and popular justice fades, and the morale
of the troops begins to diminish. Codorniz pragmatically summarizes the
new situation: “What the hell, boys! Every spider’s got to spin his own
web now!” (136). The Villista army begins to disband. The struggle con-
tinues, but with the fall of Villa, “they marched forward through the can-
yon, uncertain, unsteady, as blind men walking without a hand to guide
them” (141). Macías’s forces, however, remain loyal and die as Villistas
on the road to Cuquío to fight the Carrancistas.
The profile of the revolutionaries in the novel cannot be dissociated
from the populism of Villa’s movement. It is therefore important to spec-
ify what Villa represents in the text and what social and political project
he validates. During his first period of brilliant triumphs on the battle-
field, Villa, the charismatic leader who attracted thousands of country
people like him to his cause, acquired the attributes of an invincible war-
rior in the eyes of the disinherited masses. He came to symbolize a series
of diffuse forces that converged in the revolution to put the people into
power. In the first section of Los de abajo, the force of this myth is such
that it even attracts some enemy soldiers serving under Gen. Victoriano
Huerta. They are attracted by the possibility of exacting revenge against
the federal army, which drafted them against their will (the hated “leva”),
or by the chance to acquire “shiny new silver coins” (34). Villa not only
represents the prospect of righting injustice and poverty, he also becomes
a canvas onto which the heterogeneous and contradictory desires of the
combatants are projected.
The search for social recognition, the class hatreds, the desire for re-
venge, the hunger for authority, all converge on and become exaggerated
in the popular construction of this patriarchal figure. Güero Margarito,
the novel’s worst example of the atrocities someone can commit in the
wake of newly acquired power, appeals to the Villa myth while destroy-
 42 writing villa’s revolution

ing bottles and windows in a cantina: “Send the bill to General Villa,
understand?” (125), he tells the waiter.
Legendary stories that captivate and excite the popular imagination
are woven around Villa. As one of Natera’s soldiers says to Anastasio
Montañés, “You ought to see Villa’s troops! They’re all northerners and
dressed like lords! You ought to see their wide-brimmed Texas hats and
their brand-new outfits and their four-dollar shoes, imported from the
U.S.A. . . . They’ve got cars full of clothing, trains full of guns, ammuni-
tion, food enough to make a man burst!” (78). Among Macías’s ragged
soldiers, this exemplary tale of abundance, where all of the endemic needs
of the lower classes disappear, responds point by point to what Macías’s
compadre demands at the beginning of the novel: “By God, if I don’t own
a Mauser and a lot of cartridges, if I can’t get a pair of trousers and shoes,
then my name’s not Anastasio Montáñez!” (20). In Villismo, what one
is meets what one wants to become; it is the point where reality and the
desires of Macías’s tattered troops meet.
Moreover, Villa and his movement lent social legitimacy to actions
severely censored by a long tradition of respect for social ranking. Villa
sanctioned the rancor and hatred accumulated during a lifetime of op-
pression and privation and their attendant contortions, excesses, and des-
peration; Villismo validated the joyous transgressions of privileged social
spaces and hierarchies. La Pintada states: “Soldiers don’t sleep in hotels
and inns any more. . . . Where do you come from? You just go anywhere
you like and pick a house that pleases you, see. When you go there, make
yourself at home and don’t ask anyone for anything. What the hell is the
use of the revolution? Who’s it for? For the folks who live in towns? We’re
the fancy folk now, see? Come on, Pancracio, hand me your bayonet. Damn
these rich people, they lock up everything they’ve got!” (89; emphasis
added). For Azuela, this statement (and many others like it) exemplifies
the abuse of power and the arbitrariness unleashed by the triumph of
the peasantry. His message is that the excesses of the revolutionaries are
antagonistic to the revolution. Moral degeneration is inevitable. As Ruffi-
nelli correctly observes, “This is not the way revolutionaries should act;
this is how bandits act, according to the bourgeois code.” 48
At a remove from the bourgeois code, however, La Pintada’s impetu-
ousness hints at other glimmerings and shades of meaning that are pro-
foundly motivated by race, class, and culture. Having grasped that author-
ity is for once in the hands of “los de abajo,” La Pintada launches a frontal
attack on the sacred principle of private property. She embodies the drive
to overturn the usual social hierarchies, the immediate, unstoppable, and
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 43

abrupt desire for the redistribution of wealth. Her actions are consonant
with the struggle for power. This political goal is made manifest in the
violent transgression of privileged social spheres through actions that de-
note the negation and inversion of the established order; it is precisely
this project which the narrator tries to discredit with the image of La
Pintada. The crude, rudimentary way in which La Pintada articulates her
hunger for power, however, does not invalidate it politically. Her actions
and her declaration that “we’re the fancy folk now, see?” (89) are a literal
enactment of the collective aspirations incarnated in the myth of Villa.
The narrator comments directly on this myth: “Villa the reincarnation
of the old legend; Villa as Providence, the bandit, that passes through the
world armed with the blazing torch of an ideal: to rob the rich and give to
the poor. It was the poor who built up and imposed a legend about him
which Time itself was to increase and embellish as a shining example
from generation to generation” (77; emphasis added).
Characters such as Montañés and La Pintada make it possible to per-
ceive how the Villista mission to redeem with pride the rights of the
people was internalized. Also revealed are the contradictions that derive
from personal temperament and the intoxicating effect that power has
on the people, as in the case of guëro Margarito.49 Note, however, that
unlike La Pintada, the narrator does not share the point of view of the
revolutionary masses. The elaboration of popular myths that exaggerate
and end up distorting the real facts about Villa are to be deplored. The
narrator offers an ironic assessment: “Events as they were seen and lived
were worth nothing. You had to hear them narrating their prodigious
deeds, where, immediately after an act of surprising magnanimity, came
an extraordinarily bestial exploit” (77).
This critical view of the oral accounts, because of their propensity to
distort the reality of events, marks the cultural and class limits of the nar-
rator in his social representation of the underdogs. The narrator associ-
ates oral culture with illiteracy, ignorance, and social chaos. As a result,
orality is rejected as a source of knowledge about the popular revolution.
With this scathing, rationalist dismissal of the oral transmission of the
events of the war and their impact on the collective psychology, the nar-
rator misses an element crucial to a profound understanding of the men-
tality and cultural symbolism of the peasant revolution. On the one hand,
the intellectual Solís, whose perspective complements that of the narra-
tor, sees the soldier as a “miserable leaf,” thus minimizing his importance
as historical actor. For the soldiers, however, the myths forged by oral
tradition, with their distortions and embellishments, fulfill a radically dif-
 44 writing villa’s revolution

ferent purpose: they serve to invigorate revolutionary morale during the

war. Oral tradition celebrates armed rebellion as a popular exploit. In this
sense, it incites and mobilizes the masses; it encourages them to continue
fighting and to feel that their actions are worthy of respect. An alterna-
tive revolutionary discourse emerges from these folk stories, a discourse
that the narrator, located on “the other side of the division of classes,
with the ideological measure of the bourgeoisie,” 50 is sensitive enough
to reproduce, albeit in a fragmentary manner. He proves incapable of
fairly evaluating it, however. Compare the narrator’s dismissive commen-
tary regarding the soldiers’ stories of Villa’s “prodigious deeds” with the
animated account by one of Natera’s soldiers, who celebrates his leader’s
unpredictability with surprise and admiration: “If General Villa takes a
fancy to you, he’ll give you a ranch on the spot. But it he doesn’t, he’ll
shoot you down like a dog!” (78).
This account, of course, is inaccurate; it belongs to the realm of Villa’s
legend.51 But it is of a piece with the instantaneous code of virtues and
weaknesses established by the revolution, a code that differs from that of
the narrator and is, to a certain extent, incomprehensible to him. Hence,
it can only be partially stated in the novel. The soldier’s anecdote fore-
grounds Villa’s absolute power over his men’s lives: by turns he is as gen-
erous or as terrible as a Greek god, subject to unfathomable passions. In
the popular imagination, Villa personifies the extreme situations brought
on by the convulsive context of the revolutionary war, where chance en-
counters become destiny, both good and bad. The meaning of the an-
ecdote is simple and magnificently unsettling: with Villa we are thrust
into the revolution as the realm of the unexpected. It is a vision of an un-
predictable world of unknown reversals, strange bedfellows, unexplored
social formations, vital social promiscuity, a world full of seductions and
dangers that feeds on the masses’ appetite for life. The unsettled narrator
resorts to irony to undermine these war stories.
Again it is useful to call to mind the interpretation put forth by Solís,
the intellectual who is able to prophesy the coming failure of the revo-
lution and who portrays the revolution with metaphors that suggest a
naturalistic vision. Villa’s popular myth, on the contrary, suggests that
nothing is “natural” or predictable in war. Everything is subject to the
intensity of the moment, to tempestuous changes; the world becomes
relative and life becomes precarious and volatile, full of capriciousness
and fatal upsets, but also full of fortunate situations and unexpected pos-
sibilities, of great hopes and promises of social justice. This is a dual, car-
nivalesque world that enthrones and dethrones historical actors, freeing
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 45

them or eliminating them. This popular version of revolution literally

reveals an unscripted world, a world of that-which-is-not-written.
An alternative form of revolutionary consciousness emerges if we trans-
fer this popular version of the armed rebellion—the unscripted world,
with all its potentialities and contradictions—to the field of geography,
the incessant movement of Macías’s troops, their “nomadic existence: life
beyond the civilizing institutions that oppressed them”: “The unforeseen
provides man with his greatest joy. The soldiers sang, laughed, and chat-
tered away. The spirit of nomadic tribes stirred their souls. What matters
it whither you go and whence you come? All that matters is to walk, to
walk endlessly, without ever stopping; to possess the valley, the heights of
the sierra, far as the eye can read” (148).52
The spatial displacements or movements of the troops embody a sense
of freedom that does not correspond to an abstract conceptualization in
Liberal political discourse but, rather, to a passion rooted in the daily
lived experiences of the rural world: the ownership of the land. The diz-
zying growth of large estates during the reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz
made landownership virtually impossible for the majority of the popula-
tion. In this context, the soldiers yearn to possess the valley, the plains,
etc., to roam the regional terrain, free of fixed paths or prohibitive barri-
ers. This very movement corresponds to the founding of a long-yearned-
for social order, one in which los de abajo are the masters of the land and
of their own movements, physically and psychologically free from all op-
pression. This popular politics of space is explicitly stated in the only pas-
sage that alludes to a collective consciousness of the causes of the armed
uprising: “They spurred their horses to a gallop as if in that mad race
they laid claims of possession to the earth. What man among them now
remembered the stern chief of police, the growling policeman, or the
conceited cacique? What man remembered his pitiful hut where he slaved
away, always under the eyes of the owner or the ruthless and sullen fore-
men, always forced to rise before dawn, and to take up his shovel, basket,
or goad, wearing himself out to earn a mere pitcher of atole and a handful
of beans?” (61).
By characterizing the masses as a “pueblo sin ideales” (people with-
out ideals), Solís dismisses the prospect that they are capable of justice,
liberty, and respect for human dignity. These ideals are nonetheless in-
scribed in the bodily movements of the characters. It follows that Macías
and his men do not act according to the modern dichotomy of sense and
intellect, which privileges analytical reason and the tendency to dissociate
reflection from experience. Rather, the revolutionary behavior of these
 46 writing villa’s revolution

characters demonstrates an undivided sensory unity, where experience

contains, expresses, and is a form of reflection. For this reason, the in-
tellectual activity (and political consciousness) of Los de abajo is not
expressed as a program or a slogan but as a way of acting whose vital dy-
namic breaks with the unjust social order, a rupture that longs to become
permanent. This kind of thought in action is subversive, contradictory,
and liberating, and it finds its greatest point of expression in the Villista
movement. For this same reason, Villismo comes to embody a modality
of political action and a popular epistemology with which the peasant
characters in Azuela’s novel can tacitly identify.
In Los de abajo, Azuela represents the unscripted world—the popular
revolution—and subordinates it to the order of rational discourse. In the
process, he controls and suppresses peasant subjectivity. But the traces of
an alternative subjectivity that revolves around a historical experience of
Villismo can be perceived in the characters’ actions, their wanderings,
their direct and colloquial language, or in the narrator’s commentaries.
The elements of the novel that guarantee its credibility and longevity re-
side in the revolutionary vitality of this “other” world, even when in the
act of representing peasant subjectivity the author simultaneously tries to
suppress it.
Azuela’s greatest literary distinction, despite his lack of clarity and his
moralizing, is to have captured the equalizing force of the masses, armed
and on the move, tumultuous, disorderly, and destructive. The text re-
veals a world of intense passions, naked violence, looting and hatreds,
the longing for recognition and for revenge, and deadly diversions and
friendship spurred by alcohol, promiscuity, and libertine desires. And this
despite the narrator’s somewhat incongruent longing for moderation and
order in the midst of the chaos of war. In this sense, the novel represents
“a major step forward in [Mexico’s] Liberal literature.” 53 In effect, Azue-
la’s novel, at times in spite of itself, confers on the anonymous masses of
the revolution an epic face. This is the reason for José Joaquín Blanco’s
assertion that, notwithstanding the limitations of a writer loyal to the
narrow national project of liberalism, Los de abajo constitutes an admi-
rable attempt to break down class barriers within Mexican literature.54

Los de abajo served a fundamental role in the development of Mexico’s

modern narrative literature: it incorporated a complex and convincing
version of peasant subjectivity into the national culture, a version accept-
able primarily to the middle classes and the new intellectual elite.55 This
novel marks the rise of a new revolutionary narrative that identifies the
 political subjectivity in Los de abajo 47

interests of a modern, national society in the making with the subjectivity

of the Liberal middle class. In the process, popular political subjectivity is
reduced to a series of appealing archetypes that are repeated and imitated
from 1925 on by the “novelists of the revolution.” The actions of the
rural masses are depicted as instinctive, spontaneous, naïve, and so on,
through these stereotypes, and have predominated in Mexican culture
with few changes until the present day.56
The objective of this chapter has been to question this cultural con-
struct and reinterpret the political consciousness of the popular revolu-
tion in Los de abajo. With this in mind, I have attempted in the third
section of this chapter to give a reading of the novel that runs counter
to most accepted readings. The difficulty of this task resides in the frag-
mentary nature of the novel’s representations of the motivations of the
peasants. It affords us no more than glimpses of this popular political
subjectivity. For the same reason, it is impossible to reach definitive or
far-reaching conclusions. We know that Azuela’s depiction of how the
peasant fighters were manipulated by urban intellectuals is unsatisfac-
tory; a subalternist, against the grain, reading helps reveal this by dem-
onstrating the tensions between the internal logic of the novel and the
disparate elements of popular revolutionary thought included in it. Such
a reading signals the need, both cultural and political, to reevaluate the
representation of the agency of subaltern groups in works that, as a genre,
follow the paradigm of Los de abajo.
Azuela’s ideological views cut off and constrain the political subjectiv-
ity of the popular rebels to fit the political and social philosophy of pro-
gressive middle-class intellectuals. Only with a new generation of writers,
whose intellectual upbringing was affected—among other things—by
the Villista movement itself, and who did not reproduce the narrative
perspective of the middle-class intelligentsia, did an alternative and less-
restricted construction of the fighters’ subjectivity begin to be elaborated.
 reconstructing subaltern
Chapter 3 perspectives in nellie
c a m p o b e l l o ’s Cartucho

Few towns during the revolution saw events as bloody as those that oc-
curred in Hidalgo del Parral, a mining center in the state of Chihuahua
that was one of the gravitational centers of Villismo. In the course of
ten years, Parral suffered the violence of being taken no fewer than
twelve times by contending revolutionary forces.1 Its inhabitants lived
through sieges, fierce battles fought street by street, acts of revenge, tor-
ture, executions, and the grotesque spectacle of mutilated bodies lying
in the streets. The uncertainty of life, the daily deaths, the cruelty and
hatred of the contending factions, exacerbated at times by the enmi-
ties of local blood feuds, left an indelible mark on the population. Years
later, Nellie Campobello, who grew up in Parral, would turn to a store-
house of personal and family anecdotes and to collective memory to write
Cartucho.
Campobello’s Cartucho is neither a conventional novel nor a book of
short stories; it is a collection of short narratives, a “blend of autobi-
ography, history, and poetry” that powerfully evokes the extraordinary
violence and devastation of the armed struggle,2 and the psychological
impact it had on the consciousness of the population. The work’s force-
fulness and originality largely rest on Campobello’s unprecedented treat-
ment of memory, on her unusual ability to reproduce how people try, in a
manner consistent with their emotional needs and world view, to explain
and make sense of the disturbing experience of war. By resorting to the
narrative patterns of oral culture, the author effectively connects the act
of remembering the past and the dead to the preservation of community
in Villista territory.
Cartucho is a book about memory and identity, about memory and sur-
vival—individual and collective survival. The original edition contains
thirty-three stories, all inspired by Campobello’s childhood and family
memories of the war. The basic structure is that of “an adult, now resid-
ing in Mexico City, who looks back, recalls, and . . . relives her childhood
experiences.” 3 The child’s voice and point of view predominate, as does a
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 49

narrative technique based on understatement. The stories the child heard

or that were told to her by relatives and friends are an integral part of
her own memories. Hence the narrator not only rescues her individual
experiences, but also functions as a compiler of the intimate memories
of other characters, whose tragic, incongruent, or, at times, humoristic
recollections are registered in the text.
The stories are organized thematically into three sections: “Men of the
North” (seven stories); “The Executed” (twenty-one stories); and “Un-
der Fire” (five stories).4 All sections depict the streets and places close to
the family home in Hidalgo del Parral, which represents the slow accu-
mulation of knowledge about the external world characteristic of child-
hood. A gallery of colorful and tragic Villista characters emerges from
this limited visual field, all of them friends or acquaintances of the family
(most of them Urbinistas, or followers of General Urbina). The events
described are specific and local, assembled, at times, in an incomplete
and fragmentary way; only the details that excite her childish imagination
are mentioned. Thus the entire collection is never far removed from the
family setting.
Cartucho is unique in that the events narrated are not subordinated to a
value system that is external to the regional cultural world of the charac-
ters, as is the case with Los de abajo. Instead, they communicate an implicit
and explicit empathy and solidarity with a view of the world “from below.”
How does Campobello convey this view and for what purpose? What are
the limits and contradictions of writing about life in Villista territory in
the context of the politics of reconstruction? To answer these questions,
I propose a critical approach that focuses on three binary oppositions: the
child’s imaginative perspective as opposed to adult rationality; the female
and the domestic sphere over the public, male sphere; and the restricted
notion of regionalism in contrast to centralist or integrationist national-
ism. These perspectives intertwine and reinforce each other in the narra-
tive. The presence of one therefore implies the others and simultaneously
conveys the personal and the collective experience of the war. For the
purpose of my analysis, however, I examine these perspectives separately,
privileging the notion of regionalism, for it is here that rebel subjectivity
and the cultural politics of Villismo are most visibly at work. I read the
child’s perspective and the issue of gender closely in relation to region, as
both support the ideology of the latter.
Before examining these perspectives, it is necessary to locate the writer
and the production of the book in their proper historical and social con-
text and to sketch some of the book’s formal characteristics.
 50 writing villa’s revolution

nellie campobello and the writing of Cartucho

The struggle for survival—personal, social, and mental—is a central
theme in Nellie Campobello’s life and work. This struggle led her to
explore her creative self and to go as far as to invent for herself a whole
new persona. Her real name was María Francisca Moya Luna. She was
born in Villa Ocampo, Durango, in 1900, to a family of small landhold-
ers.5 When she was eight or ten years old, her family moved to Hidalgo
del Parral, Chihuahua, a few miles north of her hometown. Francisca
never received a formal education, but was taught to read and write by
her aunt. Later in life she would claim to have written a short novel at the
age of twelve.6
During the revolution, the Moya Luna family closely identified with
the forces of Villista general Tomás Urbina, who came from the same lo-
cality in northern Durango. At the time, loyalty to homegrown fighters,
primary networks of sociability (based on kinship, local origin, the com-
padre relationship between parents and godparents) determined revolu-
tionary attachments more than did political affiliation.
Little is known of Francisca’s adolescence and early youth other than
that she witnessed appalling acts of violence and learned of the death of
many family friends and acquaintances (mostly Urbinistas), a traumatic
experience that would eventually fuel the writing of Cartucho. She had a
child out of wedlock in 1919, and moved to Chihuahua City, where her
only child died of pneumonia two years later.
Shortly after their mother’s death in 1923, Francisca and her siblings
moved to Mexico City. With the support of Stephen Campbell, her
wealthy Anglo stepfather, Francisca and her younger half-sister Gloria
joined the affluent life of the American community in the capital, where
they were known as the Campbell sisters and studied classical dance.7 In
1929, she published a book of poems, ¡Yo! under the name Francisca.8
At around this time the sisters changed their last name to Campobello,
a Spanish adaptation of Campbell. For some time they had been per-
forming traditional Mexican dances in the capital and around the country
under the sponsorship of the revolutionary government. The wave of
postrevolutionary nationalism and the type of cultural work they were
engaged in probably explain why they changed their Anglo surname.
It is also true, however, that since her arrival in Mexico City the bright,
artistically oriented María Francisca seemed determined to bury her past
as a single mother and reinvent herself. The name changes, first from
Moya to Campbell and later from Campbell to Campobello attest to a
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 51

process of forging a new identity. The name Francisca also disappeared,

to be replaced by Nellie, her family nickname.9
Irene Matthews and Blanca Rodríguez believe that the Campobello
sisters traveled to Seville, Spain, in 1929 to perform as professional danc-
ers. If indeed they made it to Spain, their stay was cut short for reasons
that are unclear.10 What is incontrovertible is that in the fall of 1929,
the sisters were in Havana, Cuba, searching for work as dancers. They
quickly came to dislike the “night club” milieu in which they had to per-
form, but had the good fortune of meeting José Antonio Fernández de
Castro, a Cuban critic and journalist who knew everyone in Havana’s
cultural world. Fernández de Castro discovered that the temperamental
Nellie was a poet and took a keen interest in her work, encouraging her to
continue writing and publishing and promoting her.11 Furthermore, he
introduced the sisters to the African American writer Langston Hughes,
who at the time was visiting Havana. Hughes and Campobello became
friends, and he eventually translated some of her poems into English.12
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, out of curiosity after Fernán-
dez de Castro showed him Nellie’s book of poems, also met briefly with
her during a visit to Cuba.13 The sisters returned to Mexico in 1930,
probably in the late spring or early summer.14
Nellie Campobello’s stay in Cuba helped her define her new “self ”
and the kind of artistic endeavors she would undertake on her arrival in
Mexico. Her plan was to open a dance school for poor girls and continue
writing.15 The public school she had in mind materialized in 1931, when
she joined the state-sponsored Escuela Nacional de Danza (National
School of Dance) as a founding member. Cartucho, the first book penned
by “Nellie Campobello,” was published that same year. Miss Campobello
(la señorita Campobello, as she was called) had consolidated her new
persona.16 Thereafter she would be known as an independent woman, a
writer, a dance instructor, and a choreographer.
Campobello initially wrote Cartucho to give her own account of the
revolution in the north, which was different from the stories about
Villismo that were circulating at the time. In the 1920s and the 1930s,
when Plutarco Elías Calles ruled Mexico, it was not unusual for newspa-
pers and magazines to publish chilling accounts of the actions of Villa
and his soldiers during the revolution. “Francisco Villa,” Campobello
indignantly remembered in 1960, “was considered to be even worse than
Attila. All his men were classified as horrible bandits and murderers.” 17
These distortions, she said, drove her to write what she knew about the
movement: “Because of that I had to write, to tell truths in the world
 52 writing villa’s revolution

of lies in which I lived.” 18 Writing Cartucho was a moral and historical

imperative: “It wasn’t right not to speak out, knowing the facts. And so,
although I had not overcome my fear, I began to write little by little, in
my own way, and saving my notes.” 19 A sense of obligation, then, to the
dead Villistas was her guiding motivation.
It is difficult to establish when Campobello began writing Cartucho. A
few sketches were probably written in Mexico City, although in her intro-
duction to the 1931 edition, which is omitted in later editions, she men-
tions that the stories were written in Havana at the behest of Fernández
de Castro, after he heard her relate personal anecdotes about the revolu-
tion.20 These stories, she would recall decades later, were subsequently
read by poet Germán List Arzubide, a member of the estridentista move-
ment (an avant-garde poetic movement active in Mexico’s cultural and
political scene in the 1920s and the 1930s),21 who had stopped in Havana
on his return to Mexico from a trip to the Soviet Union. Impressed by
the originality and intensity of the stories, the enthusiastic List Arzubide
promised to have them published in Mexico.22
The first edition of Cartucho was produced by Ediciones Integrales, a
publishing house based in Xalapa, Veracruz. The place of publication is
significant. In 1931, Veracruz was a hotbed of radical revolutionary activ-
ity. The left-leaning governor, Adalberto Tejeda, had organized a power-
ful league of peasants armed to defend themselves against the landown-
ers’ private armies. Like many military caudillos, Tejeda was an ally of
the central government, which, nevertheless, wary of his influence and
power, would eventually move to divide and disarm his militias. It was with
Tejeda’s patronage in the early 1930s that a group of leftist intellectuals
associated with the estridentista movement founded Ediciones Integrales,
dedicated to the publication of antibourgeois, proletarian literature.
Cartucho, by the little-known Nellie Campobello, was the first book
published by Ediciones Integrales. Although not an antibourgeois text
in the Marxist tradition of social realism, Campobello’s collection of sto-
ries was an unusual and highly original piece of “committed” literature.
Each story operated within a social framework of ethical and aesthetic
values that was “popular” and “localistic.” The author’s narrative style,
elliptical and frequently grotesque, closely reproduced the oral sensibility
and ironic outlook associated with traditional storytelling. List Arzubide,
in the book’s preface, which also served to introduce the new publish-
ing venture, acknowledges the disturbing, subtle power of Campobello’s
writing style and perspective and, in a sly reference to his enemies in
Mexico City, contemptuously contrasts it with the style of “revolution-
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 53

ary” writers.23 He also quite insightfully declares that with Cartucho “we
have learned to read with the eyes of the dead,” 24 that is, from the point
of view of the vanquished.
The small world of Mexico City’s intellectual community welcomed
the publication of Cartucho and, according to Campobello, even the jefe
máximo, Calles, read it eagerly.25 Decades later, she wrote about the ad-
verse reactions that her Villista sympathies had provoked in some quar-
ters: “People who used to call themselves friends refused to greet me.
They wanted nothing to do with the defender, according to them and
their lies, of bandits. That is what the organized slander called them.” 26
Nevertheless, the critical reception of the book was favorable. In 1935,
Berta Gamboa de Camino, one of the pioneer scholars of the “novela de
la revolución,” praised Campobello for having written stories charged
“with intense emotion, with energetic strokes, in a language freighted
with tragedy. It is a sort of epic of the revolutionary novel, ingenuous,
rough, sometimes incorrect, but alive and real, breathing, full of human
feeling and deep pathos.” 27
Throughout the 1930s, after the publication of Cartucho, Campobello’s
visibility in the realm of public opinion grew considerably. She took it on
herself to restore the revolutionary image of Francisco Villa, who at the
time suffered from widespread political and cultural disapproval in ur-
ban Mexico. In 1932, on the anniversary of the guerrilla leader’s death,
Campobello published an article in which she unapologetically praises
Villa’s innate leadership qualities and his personal acts of violence. The
article, according to the writer, aroused the ire of the country’s strong-
man, Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles.28 Several other articles would follow.29
Campobello campaigned for a state pension for one of the Villa’s wives,
Austreberta Rentería, and their children. In an interview with journal-
ists arranged by Campobello, the widow revealed the existence of a 1914
memoir dictated by Villa to his secretary that was in her possession.30
Furthermore, sometime before 1939, Campobello traveled north to in-
terview Villista war veterans for a book on the military life of General
Villa.31 During this trip she also gathered folk legends from her home
region and compiled a number of corridos, or ballads.32
At around this time, Campobello also made revisions to the original
version of Cartucho, expanding it considerably. The second edition, pub-
lished in 1940, drops one of the original stories (“Villa”) and adds twenty-
four new ones for a total of fifty-six. Whereas in the first edition the sto-
ries are based on her own and her family’s immediate experiences during
the war, the new stories draw from a wider range of sources, including
 54 writing villa’s revolution

material from her fieldwork on Villismo (e.g., testimonials from veteran

soldier Ismael Máynez and from Austreberta Rentería [Betita], as well as
from her compilation of regional legends and corridos).33 In writing these
stories, Campobello chose to pursue the artistic path rejected by Azuela
in Los de abajo: to make the retelling and dissemination of the oral stories
of the revolution the raw material of her literary endeavor. Hence they
are not so much the product of a personal as of a social memory.
These new stories are distributed progressively throughout the sec-
ond edition: one is included in the first section, seven in the second, and
sixteen in the last. Consequently, as the reading advances, there is an in-
creasing move from the domestic to the regional sphere, enabling the in-
corporation of “a greater number of characters from various social ranks,
revealing the collective aspect of the struggle.” 34 The “innocent” child’s
point of view of the first edition, while never disappearing entirely, grad-
ually gives way to a broader awareness and perspective of the struggle.
The broadening of the narrative perspective, the epic quality of
many of the new stories, and other changes and rearrangements were
all intended to strengthen the book’s pro-Villista (and therefore anti-
Carranza) stance.35 The second edition of Cartucho was for Campobello
the final product of a decade of writing and rewriting stories about the
Villista movement in northern Mexico. It marked, along with Apuntes,
the culmination of a personal campaign to rehabilitate Villa in the pub-
lic’s memory.
My discussion of Cartucho follows the third edition, which comprises,
with minor exceptions, the sum of the stories written expressly by Cam-
pobello for this book during the reconstruction period.36

the narrative strategies of popular storytelling

Campobello’s narrative procedure is to reinterpret the memory of events
within the framework of poetic writing that reproduces the strategies of
oral culture. She uses several narrative techniques associated with oral-
ity. The first is to relate the circumstances under which the narrator be-
comes acquainted with the events being told, thereby transforming the
act of storytelling into a shared experience of repeating stories told by
others.37 In Cartucho the main narrator incorporates into her own voice
the voice of others—the mother, Severo, Pepita Chacón, the great uncle,
“El Siete,” the people, Chonita, and so on. Thus the narrator fulfills the
social function of articulating other people’s stories and ends up repro-
ducing a collective world view in which she participates and to which
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 55

she adheres. Individual and collective subjectivity converge, making it

difficult to separate one from the other. At times, this cultural intersub-
jectivity is explicitly emphasized with commentaries that begin with an
“I think,” in which the narrator introduces personal views that expand on
or corroborate the collective perspective of events.
Another technique is to eschew explanations, or at least to keep them to
a minimum. Surprising or unexpected episodes of the war are recounted,
but the psychological connections between one event and another are
withheld. Thanks to this technique of understatement, what emerges is a
latent pathos that surpasses the informational value of any given episode.
This also plays well into the need to re-create the limited understanding
of events characteristic of a child’s mind.38
These stories are also marked by a poetic style based on the abundant
use of colloquialisms from popular speech, such as redundancies (“Lle-
garon unos días en que dijeron que iban a llegar los carrancistas” [A time
came when they said the Carrancistas were going to arrive (6)], and “uno de
ellos dijo que le habían dicho” [one of them said he had been told (72)]), or
archaisms (“cuando me trujieron la nueva” [“trujieron” is an archaic form
of “trajeron”: they brought]). A rhythmic prose and verselike structure
reminiscent of the corrido meter is produced by poetic devices “such as
parallel structures, repetition, and anaphora” (“Abelardo Prieto, un joven
de veinte años, nacido en la sierra, junto a Balleza, en el mero San Ignacio”
[Abelardo Prieto, a young man twenty years old, born in the moun-
tains near Balleza, right in San Ignacio (81)]).39 The poetic principle of
phonetic attraction reinforces the rhythmic prose and stresses meaning
(“adormecido de dolor recitaba una historia dorada de balas” [numb with
pain, he would recite a story gilded with bullets (54)], and “los ojos de
mamá . . . re/cargados en el cañón de un rifle de su re/cuerdo” [Mama’s
eyes . . . resting on the rifle barrel of her remembrance (33)]).
These stylistic devices reveal an acute sense of rhythm and an appre-
ciation for the materiality of language. The auditory function of the com-
position, so attuned to oral sensibility, is twofold. On a practical level, the
use of mnemonic devices makes it easier to commit to memory the events
being related. Aesthetically, these devices prove to be very powerful and
evocative, allowing the storyteller to intensify the emotionality inherent
in the telling of tragic stories.
At the core of Campobello’s narrative poetics lies her penchant for the
grotesque, which derives from the collision between the violent and the
amusing in the accounts of mostly tragic incidents. The grotesque prin-
ciple informs the entire collection and is a defining element in the con-
 56 writing villa’s revolution

struction of the author’s ethical and aesthetic position, which is rooted

in regional popular culture. The grotesque functions most visibly at the
level of plot and imagery.
A recurrent and effective trope used to produce the effect of the gro-
tesque in Cartucho, and one of the most recognizable of oral narratives,
is metonymy. Campobello creates unusually charged, intense images by
singling out one detail or aspect that condenses the exceptionality and
pathos of the moment—a hand, a tray full of guts, a postmortem smile,
an anthill, a kiss, and the like. The bizarre or hyperbolic quality of the
images introduces a comical or festive element that stands, ironically, in
sharp contrast with the frightening or tragic nature of the incident. The
element of amusement aims to counteract and, ultimately, undermine and
shield—psychologically speaking—the narrator from the horrors of war.
“Colonel Bufanda’s Heart” is a case in point. The hated Colonel
Bufanda dies when “someone—no one knew who—fired a shot that hit
him near the left shoulder blade and exited through the pouch of his
jacket, pushing his heart out with it” (26). Bufanda’s body is thrown into
the middle of the street, “where his shattered skull lay clinging to the
rocks” (26). Yet his face, the narrator remarks, “had a look of satisfaction
on it” (26). And she concludes: “Bufanda gave his best smile to those who
were breaking camp. Everyone despised him, and they all gave him kicks.
He kept on smiling” (26).
The collision between the crudely realistic description (killing Bu-
fanda and then kicking his dead body) and the imagery (his undisturbed
smile) produces a grotesque scene that serves the ambivalent purpose of
highlighting the unexpected, horrendous, or macabre nature of the ex-
perience while humorously understating the shocking effect of witness-
ing such a brutal spectacle. The narrator’s emphasis on an ironic detail
(the smile) illustrates her seriocomic strategy for coping with gruesome
events.
Campobello’s metonymic technique is more than a personal strategy
to deal with and cushion the psychological impact of violent incidents.
The production of hyperbolic, memorable images is integral to the com-
munication technique of oral culture. In societies where a cultural econ-
omy based on orality prevails, the accumulation, preservation, and trans-
mission of notable events is not based on the written word. Therefore, a
number of mechanisms that place an enormous weight on memorization
have to be developed to ensure that the audience is able to retain and pass
on information considered valuable by the community. In the telling and
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 57

retelling of important events, “the storyteller and his audience have to be

supported by multiple and peculiar mnemonic tricks, skills, devices.” 40
One of these mnemonic strategies, consistent with an oral culture’s need
for narrative economy, is the production of shocking or disconcerting
images capable of arousing the collective imagination and facilitating
the mental retention of an incident. Campobello’s production of memo-
rable images takes its cue from this long-standing oral storytelling tech-
nique; in doing so, she assumes the values and world view that derive
from this popular cultural practice. The grotesque is a reliable aesthetic
and mnemonic instrument wherever the creation and storage of images
is required, such as in societies where oral culture is still predominant.
Connected to personal and collective survival and self-preservation, the
grotesque contravenes the reality of horror; it has the liberating power of
reaffirming and celebrating life through laughter in the midst of fear, suf-
fering, and death.41 Campobello’s narrative poetics effectively conveys,
through the grotesque, what has been called the “alternative rationality”
of oral culture.42

historical violence and

the regional world of Cartucho
Popular movements are rooted in regional histories. This is particularly
true for the Mexican Revolution, as proven by the lively debates among
historians since the 1980s.43 Villismo, for all its appeal and its impact
on the course of national events during the revolution, never ceased to
be a grassroots regional movement, though this became clear only after
Villa’s defeats in the battles of Celaya and León in the spring and summer
of 1915. Most stories in Cartucho take place during the historical period
between 1915 and 1919, when “the Villista ‘core’ reverted to its popular,
serrano roots.” Back in their home region, where they could count on
the support and sympathy of the locals, the rebels staged a recalcitrant
guerrilla war against the Carrancista government. “[O]nly gradually, as
war-weariness increased, and the Villista popular base atrophied, were
the guerrilleros forced to conscript and sequestrate, the social bandits
obliged to lose many of their ‘social’ attributes.” 44 Campobello’s stories
draw the reader into the military and human drama that took place in
Villista territory at this time.
The geographical boundaries of this world can be inferred from the
stories themselves. The numerous references, often couched in the for-
 58 writing villa’s revolution

mulaic manner typical of the oral raconteur whereby the place of origin
of the protagonist is mentioned, to specific towns delineate the territory
in question:
Bustillo had been born in San Pablo de Balleza (9) . . .
Bartolo came from Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango (10) . . .
Antonio Silva, born in San Antonio del Tule, near Balleza (13) . . .
José Rodríguez . . . had been born in Satevó (47) . . .
Tomás Urbina was born in Nieves, Durango (48) . . .
José Borrego came from the Indé District. Over by Mount
Gordo (67) . . .
Pablo Mares was one of ours, from our land (76) . . .
Ismael Máynez lives in the Allende valley, in the state of
Chihuahua (88).

This discourse of origins, at times invoked with genuine pride (Abe-

lardo Prieto was born “en el mero San Ignacio” [right in San Ignacio
(81)]), conjures up the image of a patria chica, or regional homeland. The
territorial community evoked by these geographical references extended
from northern Durango (Villa Ocampo, Nieves, Canutillo, Santiago
Papasquiaro, etc.) to southern Chihuahua (Hidalgo del Parral, San Pablo
de Balleza, Satevó, Pilar de Conchos, etc.).45 The map drawn by the nar-
rative roughly outlines a mining subregion that had as its head the town
of Hidalgo del Parral, in the province formerly known as Nueva Vizcaya.
Mining, it should be remembered, was the most important historical
stimulus in the formation of Mexico’s northern region, and Hidalgo del
Parral was an active mining center (despite various economic downturns)
until the twentieth century.46 Hence Campobello’s discourse of origins
brings to the fore an awareness of the existence of a collective identity sus-
tained by a deep-rooted sense of place. Even throughout the revolution-
ary period, the sense of belonging to and identification with the region
continued to be strong, notwithstanding the newly constructed railroad,
which accelerated the region’s integration into the national economy.
Geographic location and history are keys to understanding the cul-
tural contours of this world. From the colonial period until the close of
the nineteenth century, the northern frontier was a no-man’s land, vio-
lently fought over by Indians native to the area and immigrant settlers in-
tent on making it their new home. The Spaniards, in their effort to colo-
nize and take control of this region, established colonias militares (military
colonies) and missions throughout Nueva Vizcaya. The Spanish colonial
administration, and later the governments of Mexico’s independent re-
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 59

public, distributed land and arms to any settlers willing to move there
and wage war on the seminomadic tribes from the north, especially the
Apaches. During this period, the settlers “acquired military skills, arms
and the consciousness of constituting a special elite fighting against the
‘barbarians.’” 47
Geographical remoteness from Mexico City encouraged economic
self-sufficiency and opened the way for semipolitical autonomy, making
the region fairly independent from the rest of the country. Barry Carr
points out that geographic isolation facilitated the “survival of certain
semifeudal institutions such as private armies and the application of jus-
tice by private citizens, which continued to exist long after independence
had been won.” 48 In time, the violent struggle for territorial control cre-
ated a warfare society where social honor was bound up with personal
bravery and the ability to wage war; it also promoted, perhaps more than
in other regions, respect for patriarchal values.49 A long-standing bellicose
tradition, regional political autonomy, a code of honor with aristocratic
overtones—these were the factors that converged to shape the cultural
consciousness of the region’s inhabitants and their popular mythology.
The final defeat of the Apaches in 1886 dramatically altered the old
privileges accorded to the military colonies. With the northern border
fully secured, the Mexican government ended its policy of sinecures—
land, arms, and autonomy—in the region. Construction of the railway
was begun immediately, followed by economic development, particularly
along the border with the United States. Land values quickly increased,
and the great landowners of Chihuahua began to expropriate properties
belonging to their former allies, the military colonists, with the tacit or
explicit approval of state government. The colonists fought against their
gradual dispossession through legal channels and, at times, with violence.
Because they resisted an economic project of modernization that
turned these free villagers into disenfranchised workers, the militarized
serranos, writes Ana María Alonso, once viewed as the agents of “civiliza-
tion,” were now redefined by the Mexican state as the “new barbarians.”
The state now made every effort to ensure their acquiescence and obedi-
ence to the policies of the central government.50 The serranos’ struggles
against their new enemy, the Liberal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, would
continue intermittently through the turn of the century. Not surpris-
ingly, when the 1910 revolution erupted, the inhabitants of the former
military colonies were among the first to join the armed struggle.
The violent tradition of frontier culture was fully reactivated during
the revolutionary war, and Villismo was to be the insurgent movement
 60 writing villa’s revolution

that best embodied the bellicose and territorial mentality of the military
colonists.51 Forces alien to the region were by definition enemies, or, at
the very least, viewed with suspicion. According to one historian, the
Carrancista troops from central and southern Mexico that controlled the
major cities in the state of Chihuahua after 1915 were widely perceived as
an occupying army.52 General Villa himself, who is known to have labeled
revolutionaries from other regions of Mexico as “extranjeros” (foreign-
ers), clearly articulated this mentality,53 the warlike state of mind latent in
the everyday life of the people, the permanent state of alert against out-
side forces. Villa even envisioned the establishment of military colonies
throughout the nation for veterans of the revolution after the war.54
In Cartucho, the ideology of regionalism, emphasizing territorial iden-
tity and anticentralist politics, frames the viewpoint from which the sto-
ries are told. “Ismael Máynez and Martín López,” the final story in the
book, anecdotally and structurally provides an ideological closure that il-
lustrates the author’s intended message. The anecdote celebrates Villista
violence in the context of a struggle to defend and preserve a territory
under siege and renders conflict in spatial terms: an inside that wages
war against an outside. In this story, Villa’s troops ambush and rout
Carranza’s forces. Ismael Máynez, a Villista soldier who participated in
the battle of Rosario, south of Parral, near the border with Durango,
recalls: “What a pretty picture that was! In the entire five years of our
campaign against Carranza, we never saw so many dead changos at one
time. Two thousand eight hundred Carrancistas died. For Murguía, that
ambush was one of his biggest failures. Even more so, if you take into
account that at that time they considered us already defeated” (89). The
narrator comments at the end: “Mama said that the town of Parral had
celebrated that victory . . . The people of our land had beaten the savages.
Horses’ hooves would be heard again. Our street would be joyful once
more, and Mama would take me by the hand to church, where the Virgin
was waiting for her” (89).
For Máynez as well as the narrator, the massacre of Carrancistas re-
stores regional dignity and internal order. The Carrancistas are labeled
“savages,” a term formerly reserved in the lexicon of the frontier for
the seminomadic Indians from the north. The book concludes with a
resounding Villista victory over the outside invaders that reaffirms and
preserves the territory’s integrity.
Historically, however, the regional war did not end with this military
victory, which took place in 1917,55 but with Villa’s surrender in 1920,
which fell short of being a definitive defeat. The ending of Cartucho belies
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 61

historical reality, but it does reflect a nostalgic desire for epic greatness
and regional autonomy. The use of the conditional tense poignantly ren-
ders that longing: “Horses’ hooves would be heard again. Our street would
be joyful once more, and Mama would take me by the hand to church,
where the Virgin was waiting for her”(89). In fact, in the late 1930s, when
Campobello was working on this ending for the second edition, the en-
tire region was well along in the process of succumbing to the policies of
Mexico’s central government.

the reconstruction of subaltern perspectives

As mentioned earlier, Cartucho is a book about memory and identity,
about memory and survival. To understand how Campobello articulates
the idea of individual and collective survival, and the question of memory,
I propose an approach centered around three interrelated perspectives:
the child’s, the mother’s, and the region’s. The last is the most relevant in
terms of articulating a weltanschauung from “below” and therefore will
be treated more extensively.

The Child’s Perspective: Violence and Fantasy

“More than three hundred men shot all at once, inside a barracks, is
really extraordinary,” the people said, but our young eyes found it quite
natural.
nellie campobello, Cartucho

One aspect of Cartucho that has captured the attention of the critics is
the apparent indifference of the child narrator to the violence and death
surrounding her. Gamboa remarks on the innocence of those childish
eyes, which observe tragic occurrences with the same curiosity with
which other children watch the circus or a puppet show.56 Dennis J. Parle
is struck by the contrast between this conduct and the emotionality of
the mother and talks about the pathos that the juxtaposition of these re-
sponses produces.57 Manuel Pedro González, on the other hand, reacts
with irritation toward the child’s behavior when confronted with death.
He is repulsed by what he sees as the writer’s inhumanity: “The nor-
mal child does not react in this manner to blood and death, especially
girls—as in this case—who are generally more given to reactions of pity,
or at the very least, of fear and horror.” 58 Unfortunately, González’s criti-
cal assessment is more telling of his own moral and gender biases than
 62 writing villa’s revolution

of his analytical skills. A closer scrutiny of the text reveals precisely the
opposite, that these stories depict a profoundly human reaction to the
palpable presence of death and vividly display the mechanisms by which
the human psyche tries to protect itself in the face of danger.
Exposed to scenes of gruesome and at times unbearable violence
threatened the mental health of the population of Parral in Cartucho. In
order to withstand the psychological impact of the war and preserve a
sense of sanity, characters resort to various defense mechanisms. This is
especially true in the case of the child narrator, who, because of her age,
is particularly vulnerable to the daunting spectacle of death. In the stories
in which the child is also the protagonist, the basic defense mechanism
she uses to protect her mental health is to disassociate, or try to disassoci-
ate, her feelings from the horror of what she sees. “The Guts of General
Sobarzo” and “Grime,” among others, illustrate the narrator’s apparent
emotional numbness as she searches for ways to confront the overwhelm-
ing presence of death.
“The Guts of General Sobarzo,” for example, reproduces one of those
unusual incidents of the war: the gross image of a dead general’s guts
being carried away on a tray to the cemetery by two soldiers. The feroc-
ity of the fighting and the horror of the outcome—blood, suffering, a
dismembered body—are concentrated in those guts. Yet the child’s ap-
parently casual curiosity (“Guts, how nice!” [35]) denotes her will to inte-
grate the absurd scene into her everyday life, to incorporate the horrific
consequences of the violence into the normal experience of a girl who is
growing up in the middle of a war.59
In the most personal stories, the child’s mechanism of disconnect-
ing her feelings in the face of the disturbing realities of war is expressed
through the assimilation of tragic events into the world of childhood fan-
tasy. In some, the childhood perspective is manifested in the way the
narrator appropriates the adult characters and views them as toys or ob-
jects of entertainment (“Zafiro and Zequiel,” “From a Window,” “The
Dead”).60 In others, it comes from the realm of fairy tales, as when she
remarks of a beautiful woman who is visiting from out of town: “One
day a queen arrived at Anita’s house; she looked like a peacock” (10). In
another story we read: “Babis must have been wearing green trousers
and soldier’s buttons. How eager I was to see him. He probably looked
like a prince” (27). The element of fairy tale fantasy and its psychological
importance is fully developed in “Grime,” where the reader is told the
terrible fate of José Díaz, a handsome and elegant man. The story is also
an example of Campobello’s technique of combining two narrative levels:
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 63

one articulates the innocent fantasy world of the child’s imagination while
the other records and comments on the devastation and brutal reality of
war. The shifts between these narrative levels and the striking contrast
between them produces the ironic edge of the story.
In the first five paragraphs of “Grime,” the girl’s innocent imagina-
tion predominates. In her childlike reverie, she transforms José Díaz, a
delicate character (a dandy who always wears a suit, drives a red car, and
hates the sun), into a princely character. Díaz “wore a glittering sword
and gold and silver buttons,” she says. She then adds, tellingly: “or so they
seemed to my child’s eyes” (30). In fact, the original text does not use
the verb parecer (to seem) but the more suggestive empañar (to cloud or
to blur) to qualify the girl’s perspective. A translation closer to the sense
of the original would be “or this is what my eyes, blurred by the mist of
childhood, told me.” It is more than just “seemed”: the narrator empha-
sizes the inability to see clearly (and, therefore, to fully understand) that
is distinctive of childhood. This is a relevant detail in the analysis of the
story’s contrasting perspectives. Díaz, she imagines, is the perfect match
for Pitaflorida, her princess doll. The narrator assumes a child’s view and
tone of voice to convey the girl’s fantasy world: “I used to sit Pitaflorida
in the window so she could see him, and when I dressed her I’d tell her
the things he said. My doll was very moved” (30).Within this fairy-tale
setting the child projects the ethnic bias of the adult world represented by
Díaz: “I would never dream of marrying my princess to a swarthy type”
(30), she says, after learning that her conceited “prince” hates the sun.
Halfway through the story, the child’s imaginative game comes to a
halt when the need to recount the true fate of José Díaz produces a sud-
den change in perspective and narrative tone: “There was a seven-hour
battle, with the Villistas surrounded. The fighting was fierce” (30). Sig-
nificantly, this abrupt shift also mimics the matter-of-fact approach and
rhythmic narrative style of the corrido (“Hubo un combate de siete horas,
los villistas dentro. El combate era zumbido”).61 At this point the narra-
tion loses its subjective, childlike quality; an external, adult perspective
of events that is conveyed in a direct, realistic style not uncommon in
popular testimonial chronicles takes over.
Hereafter the second narrative level, without erasing the first, domi-
nates the story almost until the end. Following the battle between the
Villistas and the Carrancistas in the streets of Parral, the girl and her
mother go out in search of El Siete, the narrator’s thirteen-year-old
brother, who fought with the Villistas and is presumed dead. The scene
in town is Dantesque. They walk down streets littered with corpses lying
 64 writing villa’s revolution

in the most improbable positions; at times, they dispassionately turn the

heads of dead soldiers to see if one of them is El Siete. They do not find
him, but in a narrow street reeking with the smell of urine they discover
the body of José Díaz, “smothered in grime” (32).
The last two paragraphs provide the story with two endings, one for
each narrative level; both are charged with irony and indifference to-
ward Díaz’s tragic fate. In the first, the narration reverts to the infantile,
fairy-tale imagination. The dead body of José Díaz, found under sullying
circumstances, destroys the girl’s ideal image of him. Unable to mentally
assimilate an event of this magnitude, the child narrator copes with the
shock of death by deflecting it and constructing a narrative in which José
Díaz is unworthy of her doll: “No, no! He was never the beau of Pita-
florida, my doll, who broke her head when she fell out the window. She
never laughed with him” (30).
In this ending the girl takes refuge in her fantasy world to avoid con-
fronting the trauma of the violent death of someone she knows. She re-
sorts to denial (distancing herself from a violent event) because she wants
nothing whatsoever to do with such a tragic and disagreeable character.
Even in her fantasy world, however, violence and death cannot be to-
tally suppressed; they reappear, albeit in a displaced fashion: “My doll . . .
broke her head.”
In the final paragraph, the child’s blurred yet imaginative view is re-
placed by a realistic social perspective that is close in spirit to that of
the popular revolution: “Young, handsome José Díaz died devoured by
grime. He was shot so he would no longer hate the sun” (30).These words
of social contempt (he died “so he would no longer hate the sun”) suggest
that the immaculate, soft-skinned José Díaz deservedly lost his life be-
cause he was a vain, delicate, and well-to-do dandy. Popular revolutionary
justice based on the legitimacy of class and ethnic resentment is hinted
at in these ironic remarks about the demise of the ostentatious Díaz. In
contrast with the girl’s distancing mechanism, this paragraph signals a
moment of recognition (identification with violence) and vengeful ap-
proval of José Díaz’s horrible death.
It follows that the perception of beauty and cleanliness has opposing
values in the story, depending on which narrative perspective is at work.
Díaz’s elegant attire and clean-cut appearance are attractive qualities that
trigger the child’s fantasy and social markers of privilege that the revo-
lution seeks to destroy and is scornful of (from the popular, collective
point of view). The conflicting built-in perceptions of José Díaz that are
evident in the two endings of “Grime” illustrate Campobello’s tendency
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 65

to use a dual-perspective technique in stories where the child narrator is

also a central character.
The reactions to death in “Grime” and in other stories in the book
reveal a combination of social influences that reflect the adult world’s
values and the child’s personal strategies for confronting the tribulations
of the revolution. The girl attempts to put the horror of war behind her
by mixing facts with childish fantasy, that is, by altering reality, thus di-
minishing the impact they might have on her. This mechanism makes life
in a world full of death more bearable. In “Grime,” moreover, popular
social values like contempt for the well-to-do are also made explicit. To
better understand these social values, we must move beyond the limited
perspective of the child.

The Domestic/Maternal Perspective: Rebellion and Social Memory

Stories saved for me, and never forgot. Mama carried them in her
heart.
nellie campobello, Cartucho

Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has

been saved from nothingness.
john berger, Selected Essays

Dennis J. Parle has noted that the female character of the mother em-
bodies the tragic awareness of life that the girl has not yet developed,
because she is so young.62 The mother, in fact, although not a female
soldier, or soldadera (like the protagonist of the story “Nacha Ceniceros”
or the female character La Pintada in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo), is
a strong and dramatic figure. A compassionate person (“Mama was very
sympathetic towards those who suffered” [59]), she deplores war and
mourns the many lives that are lost. Yet the mother is also an active
Villista backer, not merely an “observer of the struggle but rather a par-
ticipant on the domestic front, a ‘collaborator’ who loves peace.” 63 In
“Pancho Villa’s Wounded Men,” she cures Villa’s wounded soldiers and
takes personal risks in her desperate effort to try to save their lives. Her
Villismo, however, does not blind her to the realities of war and gender
abuse. Aware of the perils experienced by young women during the war,
with a shrewd display of female solidarity, she reacts swiftly to protect
a niece from a Villista general in “Agustín García.” 64 She passionately
intervenes to save her son, nicknamed “El Siete,” from being executed
 66 writing villa’s revolution

by the Villistas in “My Brother and His Deck of Cards.” She accepts the
frightening vicissitudes of life in Villista territory as part of the uncer-
tainty brought about by war, but she regrets the excesses and calamities
and endures them with stoicism.
Besides compassion, strength, and female solidarity, the mother em-
bodies the epic faculty of memory,65 a quality vividly brought to life when
General Rueda (in “General Rueda”) and his soldiers burst into her home
in search of arms and money. Their hostile presence transforms that do-
mestic space into another revolutionary battlefront. General Rueda in-
sults the mother and orders his soldiers to destroy all the furniture during
the search in retaliation for her Villista sympathies. The soldiers fail to
turn up any arms and leave, but not before having “carried off what they
wanted” (33). Because it is virtually impossible for the unarmed woman
to fight the soldiers’ intrusion into her home, she endures the situation
in silence and without losing her composure. The mother’s outrage and
strength are concentrated in the look in her eyes: “Mama’s eyes, grown
large with revolution, did not cry; they had hardened, resting on the rifle
barrel of her remembrance” (33).
For the mother, the revolutionary struggle against abuse and injus-
tice represents a profound learning experience: it is the beginning of
consciousness; her eyes have been opened. It follows that she will not
allow herself to be provoked by the soldiers’ affronts. Her defiance is
concentrated in her gaze; her eyes, “hardened” by the experience of war,
acquire the metallic quality of a rifle, the symbol of the popular revolu-
tionary struggle. The figurative permutation of the mother’s eyes into an
instrument of war is the key to the story; it reveals that the arms General
Rueda’s soldiers seek in vain are located, in this case, in the mother’s sub-
jectivity and desire. The soldiers have raided the house and humiliated its
dwellers, but they cannot find and confiscate that which keeps the rebel-
lious spirit of the Villistas alive and intact: the weapon of memory. From
her mother, then, the child learns the subversive function of memory.66
What does the mother remember? Mostly, though not exclusively,
stories of personal integrity and resistance. By telling these stories, she
upholds pride in a regional identity under siege. She represents the do-
mestic, maternal world of oral culture, the world of women, of children,
and of the people, with all their beliefs and prejudices, as opposed to the
world of written culture, laws, public life, and virile pursuits. This kind of
popular and gendered knowledge produces exemplary tales, crucial to the
daughter’s upbringing, since it is through them that the mother passes on
to her the values and the vision of her people.
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 67

The importance of the maternal figure as a source of knowledge and

social identity is expounded clearly in the last two paragraphs of “Urbi-
na’s Men,” which were added in the second edition. In this final section,
the mother takes her daughter to visit her godmother. On the way, the
mother instructs her daughter on the norms of traditional society that she
ought to know: “You must kiss my comadre’s hand. She is your godmother,
your second mother” (40). The high point of this pedagogical encounter
occurs shortly before arriving, however, when the mother suddenly de-
cides to veer off the road. She says, as if talking to herself, “I’m going to
show my daughter something” (40), and she leads her by the hand to an
abandoned spot:
“Here it was,” she said, stopping by a blue stone. “Look here,” she
said to me. “This was the spot where a man died. He was our country-
man. José Beltrán. He kept firing on them until the last moment. They
riddled him with bullets. Here’s where it happened. Even down on his
knees, as God taught him, he fired at them and reloaded his rifle. He
took on a lot of them. He had been tracked down and followed to this
spot. He was eighteen years old.” She couldn’t go on. We left the stone,
and Mama didn’t say another word. (40)

The pilgrimage to the spot where José Beltrán died enacts an entire sen-
timental and political education. The mother’s brief but passionate speech;
her references to Beltrán’s stoicism (he never surrendered, he fought to
the end), to his youth and his territorial identity (“He was eighteen years
old,” “he was our countryman”); the use of anaphora to deepen the evoca-
tive effect (“Here it was . . . Here’s where it happened”); the contrast with
the silence that follows her words (“and Mama didn’t say another word”)
to convey a latent and contained emotionality, all of these elements
are meant to have an edifying effect. By reminding her daughter of José
Beltrán’s bravery, by paying respect to a local hero, the mother performs
the cultural task of assuring that certain of her people’s traditions of
struggle will not be lost or forgotten.67 In this passage, as in many others,
the mother assumes the responsibility for keeping the memory of the
dead alive. In short, she embodies the epic faculty of memory. 68
The mother’s stories extend the geographical consciousness and iden-
tity of the narrator, moving her out from the domestic world to the larger
world of her fellow countrymen. When she tell stories that touch on deaths
caused by the split within the Villista movement between the followers
of Villa and the followers of Tomás Urbina, the mother is particularly
overtaken by grief. In such cases, her heart goes out to the Urbinistas,
 68 writing villa’s revolution

men from northern Durango, her home region, the place toward which
her most intense memories are directed. For her, the emotional and so-
cial bonds of paisanaje, of identification with the people from her own
region, rule and precede any other kind of loyalty. And because many of
her acquaintances were killed, “[t]elling about the end of her people was
all she had left” (40).
Memory, storytelling, and epic grief combine in her accounts. A case
in point is the story of Santos Ortiz in “Urbina’s Men.” When Ortiz’s
chief, General Urbina, is put to death for betraying Villa, his troops
are obliged to sign papers declaring themselves Villistas or face execu-
tion. Santos refuses to sign: “Santos had told them he didn’t want to be a
Villista. No one wanted to shoot him, even the staunchest Villistas
pleaded for his life and had hopes of convincing him” (38). Ortiz’s sister
pressures him to change his mind and save himself; however, clinging to
an inflexible military code of honor, he chooses to die rather than to be
disloyal to General Urbina. Ortiz’s stubbornness sets the stage for his
inevitable execution, which is experienced not as an individual event, but
as an event of collective sorrow, as a shared disgrace brought on by the
unforgiving, merciless nature of war.
Ortiz’s dignified behavior in the face of death contrasts with the
mother’s inconsolable account. How she is described telling the story of
the tragic ending of Santos Ortiz is as moving as the story itself. With
“her voice sad and eyes filled with pain” (38), the mother begins to re-
member Urbina’s soldiers, and when she mentions Ortiz, her “voice
tremble[s]” (38). As her account of his death unfolds, she becomes ani-
mated, “very anxious to tell the tragedy of that brave man” (39). Signs
of her suffering are visible when the story approaches its climax: “‘Poor
Santos Ortiz,’ exclaimed Mama with tears in her eyes. ‘May God preserve
him in heaven’” (39– 40).
By describing the mother’s “performance,” the narrator enacts the
ritualistic and therapeutic elements involved in the narrative act of resur-
recting the memory of the dead for the bereaved survivors. Storytelling
assuages her grief because it satisfies an emotionally desirable need; it is
a survival mechanism for the individual (the mother) and for the culture
she represents.
For the adult narrator recalling her childhood, the mother is the vital
link between domestic space and the outside world, between family life
and social responsibilities. All the vital information about what it means
to belong to a specific region, or a patria chica, comes from her. And in
Cartucho this identity has a decidedly anticentralist political character.
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 69

The narrator learns through her mother to associate local identity

with notions of pride and military honor. This cultural code reaches its
full development in the stories that deal with regional issues and in which
the mother is also a participant.

The Regional Perspective: Constructing the Villista Mythology

What would happen to the people if their champions were irrevoc-
ably dead?
eric j. hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels

The twenty-four new stories included in the second edition of Cartucho

are not directly related to the narrator’s childhood experience. They are
stories told to her by others, sometimes many years after the events took
place. Transmitted to Campobello with a mix of admiration, astonish-
ment, humor, or tenderness, these stories are part of the region’s social
memory. As mentioned before, Campobello gathered many of them in
the mid-1930s, when she was doing field research in northern Mexico
for her historical book on Villa (Apuntes). Intended to praise and redeem
Villismo, the stories are largely responsible for the mythological con-
struction of the movement’s regional heroes in Cartucho. Campobello
even resorts to the folk wisdom of the corrido (“The Poor Man’s Song,”
“Abelardo Prieto,” “The Tragedy of Martín”) to reinforce the regional
and subaltern class outlook of the stories. The ballads celebrate the deeds
of fallen heroes, some of them anonymous, while denouncing political
and social injustice and confirming the degree to which the author’s aes-
thetics and politics are integrated. The new stories that were added to
and superimposed on the original collection imbue the text with an anti-
Carrancista, anticentralist political orientation not easily discernible in
the first edition.
In these stories, Campobello follows the “political poetic of oral his-
tory.” 69 The recurrent theme is resistance to outside domination and the
collective reaction to the death of local Villista combatants. Word of
mouth spreads the news, and the repetition and recollection of any event
simplifies and abstracts the story, molding it into a conventionalized nar-
rative plot, where the process of selecting certain elements and forgetting
others establishes paradigmatic relationships (a teaching, a moral truth, a
parable) with the present.70 These images, in turn, concentrate the social
values that give meaning to the life experiences of the collectivity.
“Pablo López’s Crutch” recounts the execution of one of the generals
 70 writing villa’s revolution

who led the attack on Columbus, New Mexico, “a deed that made him
a folk hero among the Villistas of the North.” 71 He is wounded in both
legs in the assault and captured shortly thereafter in Chihuahua and ex-
ecuted in the public plaza as a warning to the townspeople. A collective
perspective is articulated in this story, one conveying feelings of warmth
and affection for the tragic Pablo López: “Everyone had something to say
about the execution. Mama said they even cried for Pablito. She didn’t ac-
tually see it because she was in Parral. Martín told her all about it” (44).
Word of mouth tells the story of Pablito, as the mother affection-
ately calls him. The narrator re-creates this collective effort and adds her
own impressions, embellishing the facts. A fundamental antagonism is
established from the start between the people and the two enemies of
the people: the Americans, “who hated him [Pablo López], and wanted
to see him hanged from a tree” (44), and the Carrancistas, the military
force from outside the region whose version of the capture of the hero is
rejected by the masses. “To all appearances, Colonel del Arco had gone
looking for Pablo, despite the risks involved. Not everyone believes that.
They say the colonel was a dandy” (44).
Popular lore discredits the notion of the colonel’s valor by calling at-
tention to his genteelness (“[he] was a dandy”), a not-so-veiled expression
of popular contempt for well-to-do fatuousness. Pablo López, by con-
trast, is remembered for his calm demeanor on the day of his death. He
eats breakfast, drinks coffee, smokes a cigar, and smiles, as if his impend-
ing death has no bearing on his state of mind. Throughout the ordeal he
maintains a dignified silence, for selfless stoicism is beyond words: “He
didn’t complain, said no last words, sent no letters” (44). He breaks his
silence only when he spots an American among the crowd gathered to
witness the execution: “I don’t want to die in front of that guy,” he says
angrily (45).
In spite of his wounded legs, which prevent him from standing up, the
hero never appears lying down or fallen. A crutch— emblematic of the
dignity that sustains the character to the very last minute of his life—
helps him stand up straight. Only after his execution is there a “fall,”
but at this point another device—the poetization of death—is ready to
replace the symbolic role of the crutch: “The bullets took him down from
his crutch, and laid him out on the ground. The wounds from Columbus
no longer bothered him” (45). Death comes not as a disgrace but as a
relief, a rest that will free him from his suffering.72
In the final paragraph, the narrator explicitly merges her point of view
with that of the people: “I think Colonel del Arco was the type who prob-
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 71

ably perfumed his mustache and enjoyed his triumph, right down to the
heels of his elegant military boots” (45). Thus, in “Pablo López’s Crutch”
the derisive description of the enemy contrasts with the hero’s traits
(courage, insouciance, pride) that confer on him an image of strength
and honor. The crutch functions as a symbol of the hero’s integrity, and
the narrator also poeticizes his fall in order to lessen the impact of his
death.73
In other stories, death is recounted in the seriocomic, ambivalent
fashion typical of popular culture. One of several recurring images in
this ironic modality is that of laughter. In the medieval tradition, carni-
valesque laughter was associated with the denial of death (mockery) and
the affirmation of life (resurrection).74 Traces of this primary function of
laughter in the human psyche are evident throughout Cartucho, but this
idea is most completely developed in “José’s Smile.”
The story begins by describing how the narrator heard about the death
of Gen. José Rodríguez.75 Salvador, a neighbor from Segunda del Rayo
who served under Rodríguez, obsessively returns to the memory of his
general whenever he talks about the revolution. The narrator begins by
repeating Salvador’s words, but gradually she takes over the story, and in
her retelling of what happened her own ironic folk perspective emerges.
Victim of a betrayal, José Rodríguez dies not far from the Mexico-U.S.
border. “Everybody in Parral wept for José Rodríguez,” comments the
narrator (47). The same cannot be said, however, of the people of Ciudad
Juárez, where the bodies of Rodríguez and another man are laid out on
boards under a merciless sun and exposed to public curiosity. Nobody
knows who they are. The Carrancistas, who have taken control of the
town, are convinced that they are bandits. They are unaware that one of
them, the “strong tall one,” is José Rodríguez, the renowned Villista gen-
eral. Their ignorance prompts the following observation from the narra-
tor: “Laughing to himself, José Rodríguez was probably saying to them in
a friendly voice, ‘Anyway, fellows, let me rest a bit in the sun, lying here in
front of the people’ (but he didn’t say it, because José was actually mock-
ing them)”(47).
From the standpoint of the people of Parral, the exhibition of
Rodríguez’s inert body in the public plaza, as if he were a common crimi-
nal, denigrates the memory of this brave Villista. Therefore, the objective
of the narrator’s imaginative, if not festive, interpretation of the hero’s
grotesque death grin is to ward off and, ultimately, to deflect the listener’s
(the reader’s) attention from the reality of shame and dishonor. She does
so by introducing a causal logic that not only hides but also inverts the
 72 writing villa’s revolution

original meaning of the scene. Having failed to identify their victim, the
narrator’s rationale goes, the incompetent Carrancistas are unable to rec-
ognize the real and symbolic importance of their own action. Hence she
can playfully suggest that even in death Rodríguez continues to evade
and to mock his enemies. His posthumous laughter, a final bit of rogu-
ishness attributed to him by the narrator, ambiguously transforms José
Rodríguez’s tragic death into the symbolic triumph of the hero over his
enemies.
Although resistance to outside domination, specifically Carrancismo,
is a dominant theme in the 1940 edition, some of the stories touch on in-
ternal schisms, personal revenge, or the betrayals of Villa. “The enemies
were their cousins, their brothers, and friends,” the narrator observes in
one of the new stories (68). The treatment of these internal splits var-
ies greatly, reflecting the delicate complexity of the subject matter. One
narrative approach is to vindicate the protagonist in spite of his offenses,
because the storyteller esteems his personal attributes. This is the case in
“Tomás Urbina.”
Historically, the most serious conflict within the Villista movement
occurred when General Urbina, the pride of the Northern Division and
Villa’s right hand, abandoned his attack on El Ébano, the oil-rich center
he had been ordered to take by storm, and inexplicably withdrew to his
hacienda in Nieves, Durango. Shortly thereafter, accused of insubordina-
tion, he died at the hands of the Villistas. Urbina’s military retreat and
his refusal to be held accountable for his actions led to his demise. Some
historical testimony and popular lore have it that he had made a deal with
the Carrancistas.76
General Urbina was a native son of northern Durango, Campobello’s
patria chica, and his tragedy had a special impact on people from that re-
gion who had known him. The “Lion of Durango,” as he was called, had
been one of their own who had achieved great military prestige.77 Tradi-
tional bonds and ties of friendship that went back to their years as bandits
united Villa and Urbina. Urbina was known to be one of Villa’s closest
allies and his compadre (the godfather of his daughter). In a world ruled
by traditional loyalties and based on primary networks of sociability (kin-
ship, vicinity, territoriality), Urbina’s disloyalty to Villa, his commander
in chief as well as his intimate friend, subjected him to a heavy burden
of censure and disgrace. Yet for the people of Urbina’s home region, this
general’s courage would always be more significant than his weaknesses.
“Tomás Urbina” shows how Campobello, at the narrative level through
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 73

plot displacement, negotiates and resolves the dilemma of remembering

a local hero who betrayed Villa.
A number of people (the narrator’s great-uncle, el Kirilí, Martínez
Espinosa) tell the story of Tomás Urbina. The narrator brings together
these complementary voices and adds her own observations. Once again,
she begins by revealing how she came to know the details of the events
surrounding the death of Urbina (known as El Chapo): “My great-uncle
knew him well. ‘What they say about El Chapo is all lies,’ he said. ‘El
Chapo was a real man of the revolution.’ These curros [city boys] who
now try to make a saint of him never even met him! And he narrates, as if
it were a story” (48).
The story is conceived as a popular counterdiscourse: to set the rec-
ord straight by giving the local, testimonial version of the life and death
of the celebrated Villista, a version that differs substantially from the
stories generated in urban settings by the curros. As befits oral memory,
Campobello’s “true” version conforms to the conventionalized (tragic,
sentimental) plot typical of traditional narrative. The violent serrano way
of life that tempered the ruthless character of Urbina and instilled in him
the qualities needed to excel in the art of war are celebrated: “He knew
how to break in ponies, lasso animals and men” (48). Because he was able
to force men and beasts to submit to his will, and because of his skill with
firearms, his disposition, and his boldness, he rose to the rank of general
in the revolution. As events unfold, the crucial need to explain this for-
midable soldier’s betrayal of Villa in a story that aims to exalt his memory
leads the narrator to transport the reader abruptly from the epic world
of the revolution to the realm of love, death, and popular mythology. A
one-sentence paragraph marks the transition: “Urbina, the general, suc-
cumbed to Urbina the man” (48).
The conflict between civilian and military identity surfaces in this
passage, and the civilian wins: Urbina’s personal passions are stronger
than his military obligations. This twist allows the narrator to suggest
that it was the hero’s passions rather than his military irresponsibility
that caused him to stumble. According to this version, Urbina is in
El Ébano when he is notified of his wife’s infidelity back at his Nieves
ranch; it is never mentioned that he is assaulting a military objective.
The interloper who has defamed his honor is inevitably ordered killed
by Urbina. Yet the episode does not end there. The news that his wife is
holding a wake for her dead lover, honoring him in the bedroom of his
own house, proves too much for the general, who loses control of him-
 74 writing villa’s revolution

self: “Urbina learned of this, and it undid him completely. His emotions
exploded” (49).
The following scenes place Urbina at the Nieves ranch, and hence-
forth Campobello incorporates the accounts of two new informants (el
Kirilí and Martínez Espinosa). The narrative logic leads the reader to
infer that the general has left El Ébano and returned to Nieves, driven by
the impulse to confront his wife. In fact, with the change of scene and the
introduction of two new testimonies, the dramatic tension has been unex-
pectedly displaced to a different reality: the confrontation between Villa
and Urbina. Now the wife completely disappears from the story. The
subject of marital betrayal has been skillfully used to veil and therefore
to justify the real motive for his return to Nieves: his military betrayal,
which is referred to only in passing, as if it were no more than a rumor.
In Nieves, Villista soldiers ambush Urbina, wounding him and taking
him prisoner. Villa talks for a good while with his compadre and appar-
ently has a change of heart and is ready to let him go. But General Fierro,
Villa’s most famously murderous lieutenant, refuses to countenance a
pardon and presses Villa to give Urbina what he deserves. In the end,
Fierro (backed by the presence of troops loyal to him rather than Villa)
prevails over Villa’s objections, and Urbina is taken away and executed.
“Oral tradition,” writes Américo Paredes, “often forgets the faults of
its heroes, while extolling their virtues.” 78 Such is the case with Urbina’s
story. The upshot is that Urbina’s tragedy is obscured by a confusing web
of passion that, in accordance with a pattern common to patriarchal folk
narrative, claims adulterous treachery as the cause of the hero’s downfall.
In this case, the commonplace of female betrayal serves to conceal a mili-
tary betrayal, which is the real motive behind the actions that lead to the
death of the main character. Furthermore, the sentimental explanation of
the protagonist’s behavior helps humanize Urbina and hence mitigate his
culpability. Villa, who defends Urbina but to no avail, is absolved from
having condemned his intimate friend to death—he is simply outgunned
and unable to impose his will. With Urbina’s betrayal understated and
Villa ultimately not guilty of ordering his compadre’s death, the severely
tested traditional ties and values ruling this world remain unbroken.
Hence Campobello re-creates the selective process characteristic of
oral memory, whereby people elaborate stories that serve to hide, vali-
date, or deny certain aspects of historical reality at the level of collective
consciousness. In “Tomás Urbina,” a crisis within the Villista movement
is dealt with and resolved satisfactorily based on the testimonials of the
 subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 75

people of northern Durango by weaving a collective story that justifies

and preserves the integrity of the favored historical actors.
A common thread that unites “Tomás Urbina,” “José’s Smile,” and
“Pablo López’s Crutch” is the presence of a discourse of desire whereby
history is transformed into myth. The function of myth in Cartucho is
to erase, figuratively speaking, the fatal line dividing the dead from the
world of the living and the present. The symbols, poeticized images,
ironic inversions, plots from folk tales, and other literary devices in these
stories all serve the same ideological and sentimental objective: to rescue
the historical figure from the tragic circumstances of his death in an ef-
fort to ensure that his heroic status remains intact.79 Just as the emotional
coping mechanisms of the child who witnesses violence and death are
motivated by a basic instinct of self-preservation, the psychological value
of myths—the class myths of the Villista movement—is to safeguard the
rebel identity of those who did not prevail. The survival of the oppressed
requires that the local Villistas be shaped into memorable, exemplary
figures, for they are called to represent the collective ethos that is central
to the cultural functioning of the community that produces them.
The regional, the maternal/domestic, and the child’s perspectives
combine to construct popular subjectivities in which the protection of the
mental health and cultural identity of the collectivity is paramount. Yet
at the same time, these perspectives offer a contradictory, multiple, and
dispersed image of the war in Villista territory. Certain stories reinforce
each other in order to extol and to justify the actions of the Villista fight-
ers. In other stories, the description of the internal tensions and conflicts
within the movement reveal these same fighters as profoundly human, at
fault, antiheroic.80 By not suppressing contradictions, Campobello’s own
mythological construction of Villismo becomes a problematic site, where
power struggles and human nature forestall any essentialized or uncom-
plicated idealized image of subaltern rebellion.
As mentioned previously, the act of telling and retelling popular
anecdotes, structuring them into conventional and evocative images—
that is, the mythification of history—implies a metaphorical connection
between the storied past and the writing of the present. The question
then arises: what is this present for which it is so vitally important to
preserve the memory of the fallen soldiers? The present is the discursive
and ideological battles of the reconstruction era to determine the place of
Villismo and what it represents—regional sovereignty, anticentralist ide-
ology—in the social imaginary of the nation. In this political and cultural
 76 writing villa’s revolution

milieu, Campobello’s self-appointed mission was to ensure for herself and

for the vanquished a voice in the production of discourses about the revo-
lutionary past. By retrieving and rewriting regional oral histories, she
hoped to articulate an alternative, noncentralist, historical memory that
would validate and, ultimately, redeem for the nation the revolutionary
identity of the local Villista soldiers who died in the war.
Articulating a regional, popular, alternative memory of the war in Vil-
lista territory was important for Campobello because, as Adolfo Gilly
has written, the oppressed “more that anybody else, need the memory
of their own past which power wants to erase.” As the story of “Tomás
Urbina” suggests, however, this memory “also needs forgetfulness, just
as shadow when it accompanies light makes bodies visible.” 81 The stories
in Cartucho record, from the perspective of the vanquished, this double
movement of light and shadow, of memory and forgetfulness.
 villismo and intellectual
authority in martín luis Chapter 4
g u z m á n ’s El águila y la serpiente

Martín Luis Guzmán’s Iconografía, a book of photographs published in

1987, reveals a certain attachment to Mexico’s presidents, perhaps like no
other intellectual of his generation, or since.1 To be sure, his journalistic
work and political career, his literary prestige, and the fact that he lived
a long life may reasonably explain the inordinate number of photographs
in which Guzmán appears with the country’s leaders. Nevertheless, it is
difficult not to see in these images a man drawn almost instinctively to the
higher echelons of power. Guzmán’s presence in the photographs sug-
gests a tacit endorsement of the nation’s successive authoritarian regimes,
even though a careful review of his biography indicates that the doors of
the powerful were not always open to him. There were times, in the early
stages of his life as a public intellectual, when his political loyalty raised
suspicion and led on several occasions to a falling out with the nation’s
strongmen and to self-exile in 1915, and forced exile in 1923. It was dur-
ing these periods that he wrote some of his most memorable works, as
if he had to regain (or compensate for) his loss of presence and influ-
ence in the political and cultural arenas through the power of the pen. El
águila y la serpiente (The Eagle and the Serpent),2 an extensive testimony
of Guzmán’s participation in the revolutionary war, was written during
his second exile.3
The events leading to Guzmán’s expulsion from Mexico and eventu-
ally to the writing of El águila tell a cautionary tale, not untypical of the
time, of an ambitious revolutionary intellectual abruptly ostracized from
the nation’s top political circles. In 1919, Martín Luis Guzmán, a lawyer
by profession and a writer and journalist by calling, returned from exile
in New York to a country precariously pacified after the ravages of war.
What prompted his return was an offer to head the editorial section of
the daily El Heraldo de México. At the time, Guzmán was already a well-
respected and established writer. A collection of sociological essays on
Mexican politics, culture, and history, La querella de México (The Quarrel
in Mexico, in Obras completas, 1915), published during his years abroad,
 78 writing villa’s revolution

had earned him a name in intellectual circles. This was soon followed
by a second collection of essays, A orillas del Hudson (By the Banks of the
Hudson, 1920).
On arrival in Mexico City, he immediately became a political insider,
well connected in government circles and quite visible in the sphere of
public opinion. In 1921, he was appointed personal secretary to Alberto
J. Pani, minister of foreign affairs. A year later, he was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies (1922–1923) and founded the evening newspaper
El Mundo, which he owned and directed. By all appearances, his return
to Mexico was a political and financial success, and a promising future
seemed to lie ahead of him.
His good fortune, however, was to be short-lived. During the 1923
presidential campaign, Guzmán and his newspaper declined to support
the candidacy of Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles, Pres. Álvaro Obregón’s
handpicked successor, backing instead the opposing ticket of Gen. Adolfo
de la Huerta. In the face of growing government repression against his
campaign, de la Huerta issued a call to arms against Obregón.
The precipitous turn of events placed Guzmán in the perilous posi-
tion of having publicly endorsed a candidate who was now the leader of a
seditious military movement against the legitimate government. His fall
from grace was swift and dramatic. Warned that an order to have him
killed was imminent, the writer had to relinquish control of his newspa-
per and hastily negotiate his departure from the country in December
1923.4 Like other intellectuals who had found a place in the Obregón
regime (notably, José Vasconcelos), Guzmán fell victim to the volatile
world of power struggles between the military caudillos. He would never
make the same mistake— challenge the powers to be—again.
After a short stay in the United States, the author worked his way to
Europe, where he made a living writing for newspapers and magazines.
Although he settled in Spain and apparently became a Spanish citizen,
El águila y la serpiente was written “for the most part in Paris between
August 1926 and October 1927,” according to Juan Bruce-Novoa, and
published in periodicals in the United States and Mexico.5 The collection
appeared in book form in Madrid in 1928 and was a literary success, en-
thusiastically received first in intellectual circles in Spain, where the first
edition sold out in one month, and later in Mexico City.6
El águila offers the reader an exceptionally rich and varied canvas of
revolutionary Mexico. The narrative moves smoothly from Guzmán’s
travels over half the nation and abroad to the internal struggles within
the constitutionalist leadership, in which he was a minor participant, to
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 79

occasional run-ins with the rank and file. Memorably, El águila includes
incisive physical and moral portraits of key historical actors, most promi-
nently Francisco Villa, who is a formidable presence in the book.
Several factors motivated Guzmán to write about his own past in the
revolution. Among them was the need to support himself and his fam-
ily while living in Europe. Readership in Spain, the United States, and
Mexico could be guaranteed at the time by writing accounts of the Mexi-
can Revolution based on the authority of the “I” who sees, that is, on the
belief in the narrator’s privileged access to facts as an eyewitness. Cred-
ible “real life” stories about the war sold well, a fact that did not escape
the exiled writer’s attention. His subject matter, it follows, was partly
motivated by economic considerations.
Personal vindication was also a factor. At the height of the 1923–1924
electoral dispute, General Calles declared that the de la Huerta revolt had
had the social benefit of categorically separating “the false and the genu-
ine revolutionaries.” 7 In El águila Guzmán counters the charge of being
a “false” revolutionary and clears his name by chronicling his travails as
the young lawyer in the Constitutionalist and Villista movements, and
in the ephemeral convencionista government of Eulalio Gutiérrez, whose
collapse is recorded in the closing chapters of the book. By placing him-
self, as much as possible, in the middle of the conflict, the author records,
justifies, and perhaps magnifies the role he played in the war.
Sly references to his political enemies in Mexico were also in order. In
the chapter entitled “The Piety of General Iturbe,” for example, Guzmán
celebrates the revolutionary general’s public demonstration of religious
faith, thereby attacking, however obliquely, the moral and political le-
gitimacy of President Calles, who at the time was waging war against the
Catholic Church.8 Gen. Álvaro Obregón is labeled “a comedian” (70)
and ridiculed for concocting absurd historical metaphors in his speeches
(67). Furthermore, Guzmán’s frequent indictment of militarism and calls
for urban citizenship point toward the urgent necessity of civilian rule
in Mexico, and for a moral and political role for the intellectual class, to
which the author belonged, in bringing about this transformation.
Finally, writing El águila was the author’s mode of participating in and
contributing to the intellectual and political debates taking place among
the educated classes in Mexico City over the aesthetic dimension of
“Mexicanness.” The nationalist endeavor of locating the “soul of Mexico”
in the common people and the landscape is manifested in the vignettes
of popular characters and parade of unusual encounters, the portraits of
revolutionary leaders, and the vivid descriptions of the nation’s geogra-
 80 writing villa’s revolution

phy (the cities and the countryside). Thus the collection belongs to a
larger trend in Mexican literature that reflects the cultural propositions
and search for national identity typical of the period.9 In sum, writing and
publishing El águila reinserted Guzmán in absentia in the fray over the
meaning of the past and the direction of the country’s politics and culture
and served to rationalize his own role in the revolutionary struggle.
This chapter examines, first, the politics of Guzmán’s aesthetic ap-
proach to the revolution in El águila, which is based on the elitist ideol-
ogy of Arielismo. A dominant influence in the intellectual life of Latin
America in the first three decades of the twentieth century,10 the Arielista
school of thought advanced the belief that culture and the life of the
spirit should be the guiding principles in the social development of mod-
ern life; hence it is important to study this ideology in its relationship to
Guzmán’s ideas on social reconstruction and to issues of spirituality and
cultural identity in El águila.
I discuss the paradoxical role played by Gen. Francisco Villa in the au-
thor’s ideological scheme in the second and third sections of the chapter.
Villa’s prominence in El águila is such that Guzmán’s original title for the
book was A la hora de Pancho Villa (Pancho Villa’s Time).11 Unpredictable,
violent, ruthless, the unruly Villa is a permanent source of uneasiness for
the narrator, who is highly critical—and slightly patronizing—in his de-
piction of the popular leader. Yet Villa also concentrates enormous social
energies and acts as intensifier of the material forces moving the popular
rebellion. Like no other character in the book, he radically divides the
revolutionary world along lines of class and culture and comes across
as the popular embodiment of Mexico’s “manhood.” I shall discuss how
Guzmán’s representation of this radical version of Otherness can serve
the dual purpose of allocating popular subjects a distinguished space in
the nationalist imaginary and of advocating the resubalternization of the
masses in postrevolutionary Mexico.

arielismo and the aesthetics

and moral construction of otherness
El águila y la serpiente is divided into two parts. The first, “Revolution-
ary Hopes,” begins shortly after the assassination of President Madero
in February 1913, when Guzmán leaves the country and joins the Con-
stitutionalist movement at the U.S.-Mexico border. Personal adventures,
encounters with notable military leaders, and gripping stories about the
war—Venustiano Carranza, Francisco Villa, Álvaro Obregón, Felipe
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 81

Ángeles— ensue. The second, “The Hour of Triumph,” covers his re-
turn to Mexico City, where most of the action takes place, as well as the
Convention of Aguascalientes and the creation and downfall of the con-
vencionista government. It concludes when Guzmán deserts General Villa
and heads north, to the U.S. border, in early 1915.
Artistically, an essential feature in both books is the writer’s desire to
make of his contact with the revolution, however unsavory, a positive
aesthetic experience. Hence real life occurrences are systematically sub-
mitted to, and transformed by, the conventions of fiction writing. His
overwhelming concern for producing satisfactory literary effects takes
precedence over historical accuracy, as Guzmán himself acknowledged
years later.12

Plots, Characterization, and the Art of Composition

Each chapter in El águila, some more than others, constitutes a well-
wrought retelling of real or legendary episodes lived or heard of by
Guzmán in the course of the war. These incidents are placed in a narra-
tive framework of adventure and suspense, typical elements of a novel.
In some chapters, the plotting of events can be readily traced to pre-
established narrative molds. The opening chapter, “The Beautiful Spy,”
and the events that follow are a playful and slightly parodic imitation of
period spy novels or romance and intrigue on the high seas. “Murder in
the Dark” is plotted in the tradition of the classic whodunit. The deduc-
tive logic of General Hay, an improvised “investigator,” holds the key to
solving the mysterious case of a serial killer in the city of Culiacán. In
another story, “Pancho Villa of the Cross,” General Villa hastily issues a
countermand, in a race against time, to stop the execution order of 166
prisoners. Guzmán heightens the suspense by juxtaposing the inexorable
ticking of the clock, the passage of objective time, with the subjective
angst of the restless general.
Life as art or dramatic spectacle rules Guzmán’s construction of char-
acters. In representing Francisco Villa, Álvaro Obregón, Venustiano
Carranza, and other prominent generals, what matters most to Guzmán
is not their ideas or political programs, to which he pays little attention,
but their “personalities and their respective outlooks and behaviour.” 13
Performance replaces “hard” politics, Christopher Domínguez has noted,
because the writer chooses to see life as representation and his mission as
communicating how well or how poorly each revolutionary leader repre-
sents his role on the great stage of history.14 The leader of the Constitu-
 82 writing villa’s revolution

tionalist movement, Venustiano Carranza, is not judged a great politician

or a hero, “but at least he doesn’t fake his title: he knows how to be [play
the role of ] the First Chief ” (48). The opposite is said of Gen. Álvaro
Obregón. He “did not live in the world of matter-of-fact sincerity, but
on the boards; he was not a man of action, but an actor” (70). The good-
natured but politically naïve Gen. Roque González Garza is depicted as
an unwilling buffoon during the Convention of Aguascalientes (268–
270). Fiery speaker Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, on the other hand, who
dresses down to display himself more effectively as a “man of the people”
(266) and desecrates the Mexican flag in front of his rowdy audience,
plays—in a masterly manner, according to Guzmán—the political role
of the provocateur (267–273).
It follows that in writing El águila Guzmán consistently erred on the
side of art and readability. Events and historical figures gravitate toward
literary types, narrative models, and plots from the Western tradition, an
undertaking for which he was well prepared and, by all accounts, uncom-
monly gifted. As a result, chapters have, for the most part, a pleasurable
and entertaining appeal, though, in many instances, they are artistically
overdetermined.
Guzmán’s composition technique relies heavily on the careful re-
creation of human perception and sensations, or sensorial experience. In
this he follows the artistic sensibility of the modernista writers, particu-
larly Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Spanish poet of whom he admiringly writes:
“Sensoriality seems to be at the base of his intelligence of things. His
spiritual yearning is translated into relations or contrast of color, sound,
smell.” 15 Likewise, data and impressions—auditory and olfactory refer-
ences, matters of taste and consistency—are filtered through the realm
of the senses in El águila. Of Adolfo de la Huerta Guzmán recalls “the
extraordinary timbre of his voice, beautiful and rich in sonorities”; of
General Diéguez, his perennial smell of coffee, “not roasting or ground
coffee, but of coffee per se, the essence of itself, eternal” (100). Guzmán
is delighted when, from the ship that is taking him to New Orleans, he
unexpectedly sees in the reflection of the sun on the sea the natural phe-
nomenon known as “green ray,” one “of the most amazing sights I have
ever seen” (31).16 In San Antonio, Texas, he takes pleasure in the “aes-
thetic quality” of a breakfast where “[w]hite, or at most, cream, was the
predominant color. Butter melted on the steaming, fluffy pancakes” (35).
Consistency, color, smell, texture—all are sensorial stimuli, a feast of
the senses.
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 83

True to his personal inclination, however, detailed attention to the ef-

fects of light, line, color, and contrast are the primary tools of his compo-
sition technique. “Unless I can see a thing, a character, a scene, I cannot
describe it,” he once declared.17 It would indeed seem that for Guzmán
the aesthetic dimension of the revolution only became a reality when he
was able to transform it into a visual experience. An uneventful night
scene, soldiers silently smoking as they wait for the train in Maytorena
station, is a case in point. The feeble little lights of cigarettes enable visu-
alization and, in this particular case, what amounts to a quiet revelation:
“Sometimes the fireflies of the soldiers’ cigarettes carved out of the dark-
ness with their illumination the wavering lines of dark faces, the gleam of
buckles and rifle barrels, the shiny wood of gunstocks, the crisscrossing
of cartridge belts over the folds of dirty shirts” (75).
The contrasts of shadow and light, the depiction of lines and color,
underscore the vividness of the soldiers’ presence and give the scene a
pictorial quality. With a few quick strokes, as in the murals of José Clem-
ente Orozco, Guzmán evokes with a routine scene a simple but transcen-
dental reality: that of the ragged, dark-skinned, anonymous masses up in
arms, dignified by the fleeting sight of their weapons. Tenuous cigarette
tips—fireflies in the author’s poetic imagination—have briefly brought
out of the dark the popular face of the revolution.
Guzmán’s composition technique, uses of plot, and characterization,
inextricably combine and reinforce each other in El águila, elevating his
narrative account of life in revolutionary Mexico to the category of aes-
thetic experience.

The Arielista Tradition in Mexico

The writing in El águila is heavily influenced by the ideas of Uruguayan
social philosopher José Enrique Rodó. In his canonical essay Ariel (1900),
Rodó rules that the highest state of perfection humankind can aspire to is
to be found in beauty or aesthetic harmony.18 His social doctrine called
for the defense of “selfless spiritual idealism —art, science, morality, re-
ligious sincerity, a politics of ideas” over selfish interest and crass mate-
rialism.19 Inspired by the classics, Rodó assigned the greatest importance
to sensibility and beauty in the “education of the spirit” and opposed
these values to the utilitarianism of Anglo-American culture, which, he
wrote, equivocally preached success as the supreme goal in life.20 For the
Uruguayan thinker, material progress fulfilled its proper social function
 84 writing villa’s revolution

solely when subservient to the gospel of exquisiteness, intelligence, and

disinterest. In his essay, this gospel was expounded by the magisterial
figure of Ariel, whom Rodó identified with the region’s Latin /Hispanic
cultural tradition.21
The incorporation of the Arielista doctrine into Mexico’s cultural
and political life was carried out by an elite group of young intellectuals,
who founded the Ateneo de la Juventud in Mexico City in 1908. Among
them were future distinguished writers José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes,
and Martín Luis Guzmán. The ateneístas, or affiliates of the Ateneo, were
critical of the Porfirian educational system, which was rooted in positiv-
istic thinking and the scientific method. They welcomed and cultivated
metaphysical speculation and called for a return to the study of philoso-
phy and the humanities, areas of knowledge that had been banned from
their academic training. In their gatherings they read the classics and
discussed contemporary streams of thought, knowledge founded on in-
tuition, inspired by European thinkers like Bergson and Boutroux. They
also read Ariel and, echoing Rodó, believed intellectual labor should not
be reduced to utilitarian purposes, but should be a “disinterested activ-
ity,” founded on the act of contemplation and intellectual sympathy and
guided by the ethics of harmony and beauty.22 For this cognitive activity
they coined the term “atelesis,” a “spontaneous and spiritual energy,” in
the words of José Vasconcelos, unleashed from the chains of the material
world.23 Guzmán, for his part, wrote about the ideal of “vida atélica,” or
life illuminated by unencumbered intellectual curiosity, open to the plu-
rality of form and aesthetic contemplation.24
Arielismo, in its Mexican version of atelesis, summed up the reformist
ideology of a young generation eager to carve a niche for itself, with new
ideas and sensibility, in a cultural and political world still dominated by
the “científicos” of the Porfiriato.25 In this struggle, the ateneístas opened a
space for the emergence of a new kind of public intellectual, one whose
authority would be grounded on spirituality, humanistic culture, and ide-
alism. The influence and legitimacy of this authoritative position would
peak in the 1920s, after the revolution had destroyed the ancien régime
and the intellectual and political dominance of the científicos.

Arielismo and El águila

Two interconnected ideas of Arielismo had an enduring influence on
Martín Luis Guzmán and other intellectuals of his generation. The first
was Rodó’s insistence on the intimate relationship and, in fact, interde-
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 85

pendence between aesthetics and ethics, an idea profoundly ingrained

in ancient classical culture: beauty as a way of communicating virtue.26
The second was the notion of “spiritual selection,” a criterion of social
discrimination whereby Rodó envisioned aesthetic sensibility and intel-
lectual culture producing “natural” hierarchical divisions within society
that would be recognized and admitted by all.27
The first idea is critical to Guzmán’s aesthetic approach to the revo-
lution, for in his assessment of events he uses light to connote moral or
spiritual knowledge and meaning, as critics have pointed out.28 The ab-
sence of light eliminates visibility (the aesthetic experience), signals the
depravation of spirituality, that is, an inferior stage of human existence—
a world where moral turpitude or the lack of human virtue reigns. Stories
in which blind impulse or violence prevail over reason take place in dark-
ness (“The Race in the Shadows,” “The Carnival of the Bullets”). Beauty,
spirituality, and liberty, on the other hand, are associated with light, as in
Guzmán’s entrance to Mexico City in “The Return of a Rebel.” Culture is
defined as “luz y suavidad” (light and gentleness [360]); that is, it contains
aesthetic and moral qualities. At times, the author’s use of light alternates
between chapters to emphasize, by contrast, his didactic message. The
uplifting “The Piety of General Iturbe” thus follows the alcoholic de-
basement of soldiers in “A Night in Culiacán.” The former takes place in
broad daylight, and Iturbe, who has ordered the construction of a shrine
at the top of a hill, is portrayed as a man of superior moral quality.
Guzmán’s aesthetics and moral gaze are readily apparent in the treat-
ment of national space, which he divides into rural and urban zones. Rural
zones untouched by modern technology hold few redeeming qualities for
the Arielista Guzmán. In the northern sierra, inhabited by Yaqui Indians,
he breathes “a dense atmosphere of barbarism, incivility, of satisfaction
with the crude, the formless, the primitive and ugly, which made the
spirit shrink” (70 –80). In contrast, well-kept urban settings are spatial
metaphors of the moral beauty Guzmán associates with the presence of
modernity. The small city of San Luis Potosí, he remembers, “seemed
to me a species of urban paradise: such clean, well-paved thoroughfares;
such intimate, inviting squares; such well-laid-out streets; such pleasant
architecture! . . . There was something urbanized and domestic in the
surrounding country, a certain refinement which seemed to radiate from
the city to the countryside, from the city to the sky, and had a civilizing
influence on all alike” (259–269).
San Luis Potosí is aesthetically appealing because the rational norm
that precedes the exercise of modern citizenship— engineered, func-
 86 writing villa’s revolution

tional space; light; and public hygiene—has replaced the uncertainty of

chaos. An orderly, harmonious society is to be found in locations where
the domestication of space has been achieved.
Guzmán locates the geographic center of urban modernity in the Val-
ley of Mexico. In 1915, ateneísta Alfonso Reyes labeled the valley, literally
and metaphorically, the region “where the air is clear” and went on to
explain its invigorating effect on the life of the soul and the intellect.29
Likewise, Mexico City is the gravitational center of Guzmán’s spiritual
map of the nation inasmuch as it is the space most heavily endowed with
qualities of atelesis: transparent atmosphere, visual clarity, majestic set-
ting. It is a feast for the eyes that arouses the experience of the sublime:
“a world of serene happiness whose essential quality resided in the invari-
able achievement of equilibrium: equilibrium between design and detail,
line and color, surface and edge, mass and contour, the diaphanous and
the opaque”(192). Perfect harmony reigns in Mexico City. In the author’s
hierarchical system it is the symbolic seat of national values and power,
the inevitable locus of the country’s civilization and culture.
Guzmán’s aesthetic and moral geography presupposes the superiority
of city life—the site of modernity, civility, and rationality— over rural
existence, as well as the cultural and political hegemony of Mexico City
over the rest of the country. Thus in passages where the representatives
of the rural world overtake urban political space, Guzmán treats the
transgression with open sarcasm and contempt. In “Zapata’s Troops in
the Palace,” Gen. Eufemio Zapata is the custodian of the National Palace,
in Mexico City. When Zapata walked up the elegant staircase of honor,
writes Guzmán, he “looked like a stableboy who was trying to act like a
president . . . Every time he moved his foot, his foot seemed surprised at
not getting tangled in brush and undergrowth. Every time he stretched
out his hand, it seemed to feel in vain for a tree trunk or boulder” (327).
The narrator’s ironic description stresses the incompatibility of the rus-
tic man in control of the National Palace and the urban forms of polity
required to occupy, in his view, the political seat of national government.
The treatment of space in El águila, it follows, reveals the author’s fear
of the displacement of the urban code of life, refined and privileged, with
the raw power of rural Mexico.
The concentration of “spiritual” qualities in Mexico City sanctions
the dominance of city life and urban citizenship over the campesino tra-
dition of sociability and culture, shared by the majority of the popula-
tion.30 The location is also significant in that it amounts to an implicit en-
dorsement of the project of centralization, that is, of subordinating rural
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 87

Mexico to the political control of the capital city. Although the revo-
lution is fought in the country by—mostly—agrarian armies, to view
Mexico’s provinces or states as strong political entities is not contem-
plated in El águila. On the contrary, Guzmán’s spatial politics is at one
with the centralist ideology of Venustiano Carranza and Plutarco Elías
Calles, his bitter enemies.31
Along with space, Guzmán evaluates characters in accordance with the
criterion of “spiritual selection,” or moral Darwinism. At the apex of his
aesthetic, moral, and social order, or spiritual pyramid, are the educators.
Here Guzmán appears to closely follow Rodó’s enthusiasm for the figure
of the schoolteacher as a civic and moral leader whose function in society
is to inspire and elevate the youth of Latin America through culture.32
One pedagogue is Delfino Valenzuela, whom the narrator judges to be
above generals and presidents because he dedicates himself to the trans-
mission of knowledge and upholds the sacred principle of patriotism.
Another pedagogue is scientist Valentín Gama, a university profes-
sor who is asked to join the provisional government of Eulalio Gutiér-
rez. When the narrator visits his old professor he finds him “[b]arricaded
behind piles of books and instruments” and so absorbed in his medita-
tions that he appears “fleshless.” “It was as though matter were turn-
ing into spirit, as though the physical were being burned away in the
unquenchable flame of the soul” (332). Gama falls into the stereotype of
the brilliant but absent-minded professor, whereas Valenzuela is more of
a romantic figure. Both illustrate the desirable movement away from self-
interest and material gratification; they are cast as role models of a moral
order moved by civic duty and deeply seated patriotic feelings.
Valenzuela and Gama are, however, marginal figures in the turmoil of
the war, more spectators than actors; they represent the exception to the
norm in El águila. The characters that crowd Guzmán’s recollection are
generals, politicians, and soldiers who seldom rise above personal ambi-
tion or brute camaraderie. Few historical figures escape unharmed from
the judgment of the author’s moral reformism. Among them are Gen.
Felipe Ángeles, an archetypal “atelic” figure, “alone and melancholy, his
head lost in the stars” (50), and the sad and taciturn Rafael Buelna, who,
unlike other generals, is aware of the “moral tragedy” of the revolution,
the almost impossible mission of social regeneration; thus his depressive
mood. The romantic aura and deep spirituality that surround both men
are markers of their prominence in the author’s moral configuration.
Other characters occupy an intermediate position. Guzmán’s liking
for the Villista general José Isabel Robles, for example, is explained by
 88 writing villa’s revolution

the fact that the author surprises him reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
Robles may be a rude and, at times, violent soldier, but by reading one
of the classics he redeems himself in the eyes of Guzmán, who sees in
this personal inclination a sign of hope, a definite potential for moral
improvement.
The unruly revolutionary masses occupy the bottom of the spiritual or-
der. They are ignorant, violent, uncouth, and insensitive, the antithesis of
the vida atélica. The inebriated soldiers in Culiacán seem to Guzmán “the
soul of a huge reptile with hundreds of heads, thousands of feet, which
[crawl], drunken and sluggish” (94). Rodolfo Fierro, Villa’s brutal lieu-
tenant, personally—and joyously—kills three hundred prisoners in “The
Carnival of the Bullets” (163). When the ragged masses travel by train,
a symbol of modern transportation and progress, orderly comfort and
civility undergo a regressive transformation. The “distinction between
freight and passenger cars,” the narrator complains, “had disappeared;
coaches and boxcars were used interchangeably for the same purposes. As
a result the difference between people and bundles had disappeared.” In
the aisles and on the platforms of the coaches, he notices the rediscovery
of a long-forgotten “pleasure”: people “eating on the floor, amidst all the
dirt and rubbish” (126). The revolutionary masses are a depressing spec-
tacle, a repeated return to an earlier, undifferentiated state of chaos and
amorality, of self-willed degradation. They are filthy and subhuman, their
manners and mentality portrayed as a setback for the cause of civilization
and what Guzmán calls the main objective of the revolution: the “moral
regeneration” of the country.
Yet Guzmán is ambivalent about them. At times, the same ragged
masses are portrayed as the intimate, almost secret, purveyors of the
“spirit” of the nation. His poetic appraisal of revolutionary soldiers, “rifle
on shoulder, and hip as though grown to the shape of the revolver, sure
of their way, indifferent to their fate” (75), summons the presence of a
purposeful, courageous, even suicidal collective soul. The “intimate es-
sence of Mexico” (75), the narrator remarks, is located here. The emer-
gence of a new cultural consciousness can be detected in this and similar
passages. Mexicanness is not to be found in the manners of polite society
(Guzmán’s world), but in the resolute body movements of the Other the
narrator alternately fears, despises, and, at times, admires. Paradoxically,
this “essence” is marked by the fighters’ distinctive “manliness,” a quality
(the willingness to fight against oppression) the author finds unsettlingly
redeeming, especially when it comes to Villa.
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 89

Guzmán’s assumption that the aesthetic is the essential precondition

of the moral and his categorization of the revolution’s historical actors,
inspired by Rodó’s criterion of “spiritual selection,” reflect the influence
of the tradition of Arielismo in El águila. This ideological framework
condemns the masses to a social and political position of subalternity as
long as they remain morally indifferent to the prerogatives and values
of urban citizenship and culture. Yet, sporadically, the author sketches
evocative images of the fighting masses that attest to the rise of “spiritual
nationalism” among the Mexican cultural elite of the 1920s. It follows
that Guzmán’s aesthetic treatment of the rank and file in El águila entails
negotiating a symbolic place for the still-belligerent masses in the social
imaginary of the nation, an ambivalent enterprise that is most egregiously
condensed in the literary treatment of Gen. Francisco Villa.

constructing cultural subalternity:

villa and the civilizing process
In Part 1 of El águila y la serpiente the narrator mentions how in late 1913
he caught his first “glimpse” of General Villa in Ciudad Juárez. The city
had just fallen into the hands of the revolutionary forces, and Villa, then
a rising star in the Constitutionalist movement, was being sought by po-
litical agents and sympathizers. Guzmán was one of them. Lodged in El
Paso, Texas, Guzmán and friends Alberto J. Pani and Neftalí Amador, all
Liberal Maderistas, cross the border and make their way to Villa head-
quarters, located on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. As they walk, the
narrator observes, with a certain discomfort, the gradual disappearance
of external signs of urban life—first, the absence of public lighting; a few
blocks down, unpaved streets. At one point, sidewalks vanish altogether.
Finally, they arrive at their destination “in the blackness of the night”
(40), where the countryside begins. Figuratively, the spatial displacement
from north to south of the border is a journey to the world of the form-
less, of what has not yet been subjected, as on the American side, to the
civilizing principles of geometry and order. They have entered a more
primitive world.
In the poorly lighted one-room house that serves as headquarters, the
narrator finds Villa lying in the darkest corner. The visitors approach his
bed. Two chairs are placed in a semicircle for Pani and Amador; Guzmán
is invited to sit on the very edge of Villa’s cot, where the “warmth of the
bed penetrated through my clothes to my flesh” (42). More than the con-
 90 writing villa’s revolution

tent of the dialogue, Guzmán remembers being overtaken by a feeling of

estrangement:
For over half an hour, a strange conversation went on. Two absolutely
opposed categories of mind were revealed. Every question and every
answer from one side or the other made it plain that here were two
different, two irreconcilable worlds whose only point of contact was
the chance fact that they had joined forces in the same struggles. We
poor visionaries—for then we were only that—had come armed with
the feeble experience of our books and our early ideals. We came flee-
ing from Victoriano Huerta, the traitor, the assassin, and this same
vital impulse, with everything that was good and generous in it, flung
us into the arms of Pancho Villa, who had more of a jaguar about
him than a man. A jaguar tamed, for the moment, for our work, or for
what we believed was our work; a jaguar whose back we stroked with
trembling hand, fearful that at any moment a paw might strike out at
us. (43– 44)

The scene evokes with extraordinary accuracy a defining image of the

times: the revolution as the fortuitous encounter of two very different
worlds: one, the world of the subaltern classes, rural and illiterate; the
other, that of middle-class Liberals, educated and idealistic. The scene
suggests that the war has created a dramatic readjustment in the hier-
archical relationship of the two worlds, one hardly imaginable three or
four years earlier. Villa, a former cattle rustler and social bandit, occupies
a position of authority and power in the revolutionary army; he is
sought after, respected, and feared while the university-trained Guzmán,
Pani, and Amador find themselves in the humble position of newcomers
and subordinates.
Guzmán’s endeavor throughout El águila will be to challenge what
he perceives to be the anomaly of this hierarchical relationship and to
“correct” it, if only at the level of discourse, by exposing this unusual
reality to the normative standards of the “civilizing code.” From “My
First Glimpse of Pancho Villa” on, the general is framed into the extreme
paradigm of the “low-Other,” an antiatelic figure whose body language is
that of a dangerous animal (the jaguar). In contrast, the narrator presents
himself as a disinterested and idealistic young man who, in the struggle to
restore the rule of law in Mexico, must contend with the primitivism of
the world of the Other, on whose actions the triumph of the revolution
depends. Villa, therefore, is constructed as the narrator’s antithesis, the
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 91

necessary Other on which Guzmán consolidates his own self-identity and

status.
“My First Glimpse of Pancho Villa” sets the stage for a quiet battle,
one in which force must be countered by intelligence and instinct care-
fully tempered by reason. Villa, Guzmán writes, must “submit to the
fundamental principles of the Revolution” or condemn the revolution
to defeat by following “nothing but his own blind impulses” (178). Their
personal encounters henceforth will be construed by the narrator as a
challenge to temper, control, even transform the unruly Other (and thus
“save the revolution”) by confronting, judging, and exposing Villa to the
cultural rationale emanating from what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing
process.”
According to Elias, the civilizing process entails, among other aspects,
a slow but fundamental shift in individual conduct: from expressive forms
of violence (emotional discharge) to constant self-control in the affairs
of everyday life. The move from outward manifestation of feelings and
passion to self-constraint, the softening of manners, urbanity, politeness,
is a behavioral change that takes place in the West over a considerable
historical span, from the medieval to the modern age.33 The process in-
volves the “transformation of the whole drive and affect economy in the
direction of a more continuous, stable and even regulation of drives and
affects in all areas of conduct, in all sectors of his [the European man’s]
life.” 34 To civilize is to discipline the body, a learning tied to the social
demand for harmonious (nonthreatening) human relations in increas-
ingly complex societies. The civilizing process, in short, is predicated on
the individual’s internal control of aggressive impulses, a restraining ac-
tivity that is justified in the modern age in the form of morality. Physical
manners and regulations are thus connected to “the historical formation
of the self ” in Western societies.35 It is a civilizing model that begins to
take hold in Mexican society in the nineteenth century, particularly dur-
ing the Porfiriato, when the implementation of the modernizing project
begins in earnest.
Guzmán’s personal encounters with Villa in El águila cover and en-
act a range of possible outcomes within the “affect economy” associated
with the civilizing process.36 In “Pancho Villa in the Cross,” for example,
Guzmán and lawyer Enrique Llorente visit Villa, who is terribly upset
because his “boys” are fighting one another. One of his finest generals
(Maclovio Herrera) has defected with his troops and is now waging war
against him. Villa’s anger is such, the narrator recalls, that it “made our
 92 writing villa’s revolution

blood run cold to look at him,” and he remembers feeling “the giddi-
ness of fear and horror” (292). Uncontrollable anger slowly gives way
to calmness after Villa receives a telegram informing him that his forces
have defeated the enemy. He replies by ordering the immediate execu-
tion of the 166 turncoats who have surrendered. At this point, Guzmán
and Llorente, fearful of Villa but also determined to prevent unnecessary
killings, intervene and play the part of urgently needed tutors for the un-
couth leader. Through rational argument, they convince Villa to revoke
the execution order. The general even feels moral angst when he realizes
his countermand may arrive too late. In the end, the prisoners are not
killed, and Villa gracefully acknowledges the sound advice he received
from his civilian friends. Guzmán and Llorente’s role turns a potentially
tragic event into an exemplary tale of moral redemption.
In this story, anxiety is aroused in Villa only when he internalizes the
meaning of the established international rules for the treatment of pris-
oners of war who have surrendered.37 Before being exposed to Guzmán’s
enlightened rationale, Villa is free of any guilty conscience; morally, he
remains in a state of indifference not unlike that of a child or an adoles-
cent, according to the civilizing code.38 The change in Villa’s personality
structure, from visible emotional upheaval to intimate anguish, points
toward the desirable code switching the advocates of the civilizing pro-
cess, like Guzmán, would like to see take place—permanently—in the
general. The broader message is that military subordination to civilian
counsel and the rule of law (or of strength to reason) ensures justice and
social reconciliation.
No such internalized change occurs in “The Death of the Gaucho
Mújica.” On the contrary, Villa orders the immediate execution of Mújica,
an enemy agent and Argentinean national who has befriended the leader
with the intention of killing him. Because the culprit is a foreigner, the
general’s advisers object, arguing that the law requires an international
trial before Mújica can be condemned to death. A special trial is hastily
arranged, and the American consul is brought in to hear the confession
and sign the statements. Only then is Mújica declared guilty and executed.
Here Villa follows the law pro forma. He orders “more seals and signa-
tures” put on the paperwork (278), believing they add weight to the legal-
ity of the case, but the content and spirit of the law— due process, fair
trial— elude him. His overriding concern is solely to ensure the proper
punishment— death— of a man who, under the guise of friendship, was
plotting to kill him. In this story, cultural code switching, from the venge-
ful and personal to the impersonal and legalistic, is a mere formality.39
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 93

A more dramatic and perilous encounter for Guzmán is recalled in

“Pancho Villa’s Pistol,” in which the narrator faces the direct threat of
being killed by the “illiterate guerrilla leader” (210). The episode begins
auspiciously with an amiable exchange between both men. As they con-
fer about who should be the interim president of Mexico, Villa speaks
to him confidentially, in “the mysterious form of secret conclave” (211).
Disagreements prevail, however, upsetting Villa. The situation is unex-
pectedly aggravated when, at the friendly request of the narrator, Villa
willingly gives him his enormous pistol, only to realize that he is now
unarmed and vulnerable.
Villa’s figurative castration dramatically changes his mood. Feeling
shamed and deceived by Guzmán, his visceral distrust for city lawyers and
his vengeful spirit abruptly surface. Borrowing a pistol from one of his
associates, he takes aim directly at Guzmán’s head. Villa’s quick temper,
friendly and intimate one moment, brutally menacing the next, that is,
his wildly fluctuating behavior, stands in contrast with Guzmán’s, who, in
spite of his tremendous fear, remains poised in the face of danger and is
able to weather the storm. In the end, his controlled demeanor impresses
and “disarms”—figuratively speaking—Villa. Against threatening rage
and the law of the gun, Guzmán successfully wields the subtle power of
emotion management.40
The narratives about the Guzmán and Villa meetings underscore the
symbolic confrontation between civilian Arielismo and military might,
reason, and brute force, between the civilized and the barbarian. The
normative presence of the civilizing paradigm strategically places the
powerless Guzmán in a position of moral authority in his relationship to
General Villa, who is imposing, but lacks the cultural and legal attributes
(self-control, urban manners, formal education, strict submission to the
rule of law, etc.) of modern citizenship.41 Villa’s untamed, aggressive out-
bursts, the narrator implies, make him unfit to administer justice or to
hold any responsible decision-making position in the revolution’s leader-
ship. Thus systematic references to his violent personal impulses are not
innocently neutral, but integral to Guzmán’s ideological agenda.42
The conflation of the civilizing code and atelesis in Guzmán’s approach
to Villa and the masses fulfills two complementary, though apparently
contradictory, distancing purposes. The presence of the civilizing code
brings to mind anthropology’s “denial of coevalness,” 43 in this case, be-
tween the intellectual and the soldier (the latter belongs to an earlier pe-
riod of human moral evolution); hence the intellectual’s disidentification
with and “natural” authority over his object. Atelesis, on the other hand,
 94 writing villa’s revolution

is aimed at creating a safe distance for making the aesthetic experience

possible. Aesthetic detachment enables the transformation of what is per-
ceived as a disagreeable (and, at times, repugnant) reality into a source of
pleasure (that is, a qualified identification with the Other).44

two epic narratives:

villa against the mexican state
Two conflicting impulses shape Guzmán’s discourse of populist nation-
alism: one leads toward modernity and the future; the other construes
essentialist views of Mexico. The former is represented, among others,
by the author himself, who extols and embodies the virtues of citizenship
needed for the construction of modern Mexico. But nation building also
requires the elaboration of images of collective identity. These images of
lo mexicano, as we have seen, are located in the revolutionary fighters, in
the Other Guzmán is wary about, at times despises, but also admires (he
attaches spiritual value to them) and would like to identify with, if only
figuratively.45 The tense coexistence of these two impulses is most visible
in the treatment of Villa.
Gen. Francisco Villa is a site of conflicting desires for Martín Luis
Guzmán, a source of fear and rejection, but also of perennial fascina-
tion. Villa’s Otherness (particularly his hypermasculinity, or excessive
bravado) generates fear in Guzmán, who, next to him, feels personally in-
secure. The general’s threatening personality represents nonurban back-
wardness, a serious inadequacy, and, in fact, an obstacle in the nation’s
path toward modern citizenship and the rule of law. Ideally, as articulated
in “Pancho Villa on the Cross,” this version of revolutionary manhood
should subject itself voluntarily, in matters concerning justice, national
politics, and leadership, to the guidance of enlightened citizens, that is,
to people like Guzmán and his educated friends (Llorente, Pani, Domín-
guez, et al.).
On the other hand, ambiguity arises when Villa’s extreme Otherness is
effective in more ways than one, marking a division in the author’s mind.
Throughout El águila, the overbearing and unrestricted Villa generates
fear in Guzmán, but he is also a magnetic presence. One can surmise that
this is the fascination the sedentary intellectual often feels for the man of
action, a sort of compensatory dependence and subliminal desire for the
vitality of the “low-Other” he has in effect sought to repress in social life.
The awe caused by Villa’s personality and life of action is most discern-
ible in stories that touch on the antagonism between him and the Mexican
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 95

state. These are stories that attest, paradoxically, to modern civilization’s

longing and admiration for the life of adventure and danger it is intent
on leaving behind.
In his reflections on the civilizing process, Norbert Elias sees a corre-
lation between the phasing out of expressive violence in everyday life and
state formation in the development of Western societies. In these socie-
ties, he argues, the state’s gradual control of the monopoly over the means
of violence secures—theoretically, at least—the peace and eliminates the
necessity of, or tolerance for, expressive violence. Only when such control
is assured can the modern state assert its hegemony over the population.46
In El águila, Villa performs the type of expressive violence that must dis-
appear if the Mexican state and modern civilization are to consolidate.
Such is Guzmán’s reiterative view. Anecdotal accounts of his reunions
with the general invoke the civilizing paradigm to expose, denounce, at
times even relish, but, ultimately, indict the latter’s aggressiveness.
Two anecdotes included in El águila, however, explicitly re-create and
enhance the mythology of Villa’s resistance to the power of the Mexican
state. These are stories others tell in conversations with Guzmán during
the course of the revolution. Retrospective (an aura of myth surrounds
them) and epic (individual struggle against adversity through daring ac-
tions) in content, the narratives of Villa’s deeds stress his audacity and
resourcefulness.
In “Pancho Villa’s Escape,” Carlitos Jáuregui, one of Villa’s closest
associates, relates to Guzmán how he met the general in Mexico City’s
Santiago Tlatelolco prison and eventually aided him to escape. The story
is mostly made up of dialogues between the narrator and Villa, whereby
the reader learns of the general’s ability to earn the affection and com-
plicity of a stranger, the details of Villa’s ingenious escape plan, his self-
assurance at the time of implementing it, and the shrewd actions he takes
to mislead potential pursuers. Jáuregui’s account displays Villa’s practical
intelligence, decisiveness, and subtle understanding of human nature. In
short, Villa’s legendary traits (charisma, cunning, and courage) are duti-
fully re-created in this story.
In “A Perilous Sleep,” Villa, in an apparent act of courteous civility,
decides to accompany Guzmán and other political associates to the rail-
road station after a working meeting. As they wait for the midnight train,
Villa, “a vivid and entertaining talker” (299), remembers an incident that
occurred in the mountains of Durango during his social banditry days,
when the rurales, or rural police, were vigorously pursuing him and his
compadre Tomás Urbina. The rurales tried to hunt down the bandits like
 96 writing villa’s revolution

wild animals (tellingly, Guzmán’s description of Villa as a jaguar also

plays into this dehumanizing view), but Villa’s account of his plight pro-
vides a revealingly different perspective. On the run day and night and
unable to stop for rest, both men were terribly worn down. Urbina’s body
finally succumbed to sleep, and he refused to wake up. With the rurales
closing in, a desperate Villa threw his partner on his horse, tied him like
a bundle to the animal, and resumed their flight. He headed toward the
steepest area of the mountain, shielding his compadre’s head with his own
body from rocks and tree trunks. Hours later, with Urbina still sleeping,
they reached a safe, sheltered place where, finally, he, too, could lie down
to rest. Refusal to leave behind his sleeping compadre, a burden that puts
his own safety at risk, foregrounds Villa’s fraternal abnegation, generous
solidarity, the kind of human qualities his enemy—the Mexican state—
is unwilling to recognize in him.47 The primitive, natural man appears
transformed, observes one critic, into a spiritual man.48
It should be noted that in both stories the protagonist is a social out-
cast who escapes from two repressive institutions of the Mexican state: the
penal system, and the army. The objective of these institutions is to take
control of his body or to eliminate him altogether. Hence in his individ-
ual struggle for dignity and survival, he comes across as a victim of state
power more than as a threat to society. The state imposes violence on him,
rather than his being the instigator of violence. The actions the protago-
nist takes to liberate himself from the grip of his oppressors are therefore
morally justifiable, and even distance Villa from the strictly menacing
and amoral image of Guzmán’s eyewitness descriptions of him.
“Pancho Villa’s Escape” and “A Perilous Sleep” open a space in El
águila for the articulation of a point of view that is empathetic to Villa’s
plight. He is not the brutal and revengeful man who is “too irrespon-
sible and instinctive even to know how to be ambitious” (178), but the
brave, plain-speaking outlaw whose long history of defiance of the state
made him, during the revolution, a mythical hero, an assertive symbol
of popular Mexican manhood. It is a point of view that is not unrelated
to the popular tradition of the corridos. In the corridos, a willingness or
capacity to refuse individual submission, typically by a bandit, is due to a
wrong that has been unjustly committed against him. In addition, behind
the folk hero’s actions a more general cry for freedom and justice can
be heard.49 This narrative rationale underlies Guzmán’s re-creation of
both Jáuregui’s and Villa’s stories. Furthermore, the author deliberately
exploits the vernacular element (Villa’s colorful speech, boldness, cha-
risma, etc.) in an effort to produce enticing literary versions of the oral
 villismo in El águila y la serpiente 97

accounts. He thereby contributes to the construction of the Villa myth

in the culture of nationalism.
These legendary narratives, however, given the author’s ultimate ide-
ological stand, do not remain unchallenged. In the end, they must be
submitted to the order of the civilizing code. In “Pancho Villa’s Escape”
and “A Perilous Sleep,” the authorial “I” takes control of the stories at
the moment of closure to neutralize these flattering images. Epic action
gives way to the mundane; high must recede to low. The first story ends
with Guzmán’s reference to Villa’s control of Ciudad Juárez’s lucrative
gambling houses and the nature of the reward Carlitos Jáuregui receives
for having helped Villa escape: the monopoly over the lottery games. The
second ends with the unexpected appearance at the train station, or so it
seems to Guzmán, of the lover Villa has been lasciviously waiting for all
along. The image of the spiritual man quickly dissipates.
In the conclusion of both stories, the dominant narrative code moves
in to relocate the historical character in the overdetermined role he has
been assigned in the book. The main narrator has the last word, and Villa,
the symbol of low-Otherness, resurfaces. The oral anecdotes about the
epic Villa, the icon of Mexican manhood, are framed in a way that en-
sures their subordination to the normative order of written discourse. By
writing the epic Villa into the discursive order of his own world, Guzmán
symbolically appropriates this identity, making it “instrumentally con-
stitutive of the shared imaginary repertoire” of an emerging nationalist
culture, urban and middle class.50
In El águila, the images of the epic and spiritual Villa and, more perva-
sively, of the uncivilized brute are integrated into an implicitly hierarchi-
cal discursive framework that enables Guzmán to praise and bond with
the spirit of the popular Other while politically delegitimizing it.
 s o l d i e r ly h o n o r a n d
Chapter 5 m e x i c a n n e s s i n r a fa e l f .
m u ñ o z ’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!

marketing violence, searching for mexicanness

In 1930, the literacy rate in Mexico was 34.4 percent, up from 23.1 per-
cent in 1910.1 The increase was largely due to the expansion of public ed-
ucation and the literacy campaigns launched in 1921 by José Vasconcelos,
then head of the Ministry of Education. The benefits were concentrated
in urban centers like Mexico City, which had the highest literacy rate in
the country (77.1 percent), about twice the national average.2
The growth of the reading public increased the demand for reading
material, not so much from classical authors, as Vasconcelos would have
preferred, but from the more mundane genre of the literature of cheap
thrills found in newspapers and magazines. Because the Mexican Revolu-
tion was very much alive in the collective memory and also because most
readers were males (75 percent) drawn to the subjects of war and vio-
lence, the print media sought to capitalize on this interest by publishing
preferably gruesome anecdotes of the revolutionary war.3
Predictably, Gen. Francisco Villa, the bandit-turned-revolutionary
whose life and deeds thrilled and terrified the population, was a focal
point of curiosity and entertainment. Tall tales about his primitiv-
ism, charismatic leadership, military campaigns, and criminal behavior
proved irresistible for the newspaper industry. Ilene O’Malley, who has
researched Mexican periodicals of the 1920s and the 1930s, summarizes
this fascination with Villa: “Following the war years, many people mi-
grated to Mexico City, where peace and an improved educational system
expanded the market for periodical literature, particularly for that aimed
at the new urban masses. Among the new tabloids and sensationalist mag-
azines which specialized in blood, guts, sex, and romance, Pancho Villa
was one of the favorite topics.” 4
Not only tabloids but well-established “respectable” publications like
El Universal, the country’s leading newspaper at the time, included stories
about Villa in their Sunday magazines, for Villa was a source of continual
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 99

interest among readers of all social origins. The Centaur of the North
was the stock figure of the popular revolutionary, a folk hero depicted in
a style that frequently embraced an uncertain combination of admiration,
humor, and class contempt—an ambivalent approach, to be sure, but one
that captured both the seduction and the fear his name conjured up in the
imagination of the urban middle class.
Mexico’s most accomplished writer along these lines was Rafael F.
Muñoz. No writer during the 1920s and the 1930s would be more pro-
lific or adept in supplying enticingly dramatic stories about Villa and
his men. Muñoz’s straightforward, dispassionate narrative style and his
“packaging” of stories in accordance with the journalistic tendency to
concentrate on spectacular, unusual, or strange occurrences, which were
the basis of his literary production, were in tune with the reading public’s
craving for morbidly violent anecdotes.
Muñoz was well aware of this appeal. For example, in ¡Vámonos con
Pancho Villa! a book that began as a collection of stories originally pub-
lished in the newspaper, he includes an opening note in which he de-
clares his intention to offer the reader an exciting work that contains
all the elements of a popular novel: “daring, heroism, loftiness, sacrifice,
cruelty, and bloodshed, around the imposing figure of Francisco Villa”
([1989], 8). His sensationalist approach and deliberate mass marketing
are manifestations of what Carlos Monsiváis has called “a literature of
pre-consumerism” in Mexican postrevolutionary narrative.5
Rafael F. Muñoz’s life experience made him uniquely qualified for writ-
ing such stories.6 Unlike most writers of his generation, he had not wit-
nessed the violence of Villismo from afar. He grew up virtually trapped
in the middle of a war zone in his native Chihuahua. “From that period I
remember hardly anything,” he once said, “except acts of war: greatness
and crime.” 7 One thing he did remember was Villa storming in and out
of the city and the terror, particularly among the upper classes, caused by
his troops occupying the state capital from 1913 to 1915. Muñoz, himself
a member of a well-to-do family (his father was a state magistrate), saw
Villa as “a kind of Huitzilopochtli [the Aztec god of war]: horrifying but
enormous,” and treated him as such in his works.8
This view is not fundamentally at odds with that of Martín Luis
Guzmán. Unlike the latter, however, Muñoz’s literary treatment of Villa
and his followers often expresses empathy for and pride (albeit ambiv-
alent at times) in their violent actions, thanks to the author’s grasp of
the militarized regional culture that conditioned the Villista mentality, a
knowledge he used productively in his fiction.
 100 writing villa’s revolution

Muñoz completed his formal liberal education (probably not beyond

secondary school) at the Instituto Científico y Literario in Chihuahua. In
1920, he moved to Mexico City and shortly thereafter began writing for El
Heraldo and other newspapers. The daily El Universal commissioned him
to travel to Hidalgo del Parral to cover the story of Villa’s assassination
in 1923. That same year, he completed the second part of a brief biog-
raphy, Memorias de Pancho Villa (the first part was written by Dr. Ramón
Puente years earlier). The work established his reputation as a promising
writer and an expert on Villa.
In 1929, Muñoz became a founding member of the Partido Nacional
Revolucionario (PNR), the official party of the revolution, for which he
served as a press liaison. He also joined the Sindicato de Escritores Revo-
lucionarios (Union of Revolutionary Writers), a writer’s guild affiliated
with the PNR. A few years later (1936), he was appointed editor of El
Nacional, the PNR’s official organ. Muñoz, it follows, was an ideologue of
official revolutionary nationalism at a time when this concept was being
defined in the culture of the Mexican state.
In 1927, Muñoz was contributing a weekly story on the revolution to
El Universal. Three collections of short stories appeared between 1928
and 1934, his most productive years: El feroz cabecilla (The Ferocious
Chieftain, 1928); El hombre malo (The Evil Man, 1930); and Si me han de
matar mañana . . . (If They Must Kill Me Tomorrow . . . , 1934). These
collections were largely based on material previously published in news-
papers. These books and the publication of his first novel, ¡Vámonos con
Pancho Villa!, firmly established his place among the so-called novelists of
the revolution (Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Gregorio López
y Fuentes, Francisco Urquizo, et al.). Berta Gamboa de Camino wrote in
1935 that Muñoz was considered, in the world of Mexican culture, “the
best story-teller of the Revolution.” 9
Muñoz’s key work of this period, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! is symp-
tomatic of the role played by journalism in the evolution of Mexican lit-
erature. The novel is not the product of a preconceived narrative plan.10
The first chapters were originally written in the form of short stories and
appeared in the Sunday edition of El Universal. The weekly pressure to
produce dramatic anecdotes for a readership with a taste for the unex-
pected and avid to experience strong emotions forced Muñoz to “push
[ my] memory and imagination to find material.” 11 He came up with
the idea of writing about the military deeds of six fictional characters—
Tiburcio Maya, Máximo Perea, Rodrigo Perea, Melitón Botello, Mar-
tín Espinoza, and Miguel Ángel del Toro—all serranos from the state of
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 101

Chihuahua who together join the Villista army. “I had written 80 pages,”
Muñoz later recalled, “and only one character was left: Tiburcio Maya.
The other five I had killed in as many Sundays,” when his collaboration
with the paper was abruptly ended.12
At this point, Muñoz decided to turn his published stories into the
first half of a Villista novel. The rest of the work, not written under the
pressure of meeting a newspaper deadline, would forgo the brief dramatic
format of mostly self-contained anecdotes. The vicissitudes of the tense
relationship between Villa and Tiburcio Maya, the last survivor of the
original group, whose mental inquiries add an introspective, even psy-
chological, dimension to Muñoz’s work, are narrated in the cause-effect,
sequential style found in conventional novels. Hence the production of
the text itself exhibits overlapping styles and the transition from the sen-
sationalism of journalistic literature to the subjective exploration of char-
acter typical of the modern novel.
¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! was written at a time when the search for
lo mexicano, a branch of cultural nationalism concerned with the repre-
sentation and the meaning of the Mexican ethos, was being appraised
in popular and academic circles.13 Villa’s famous ruthlessness, his fol-
lowers’ deeds and excesses, provided abundant material for this kind of
cultural endeavor. The popular legend surrounding Villa’s outlaw years,
his reputation as a daring fighter (quick on the draw, a good horseman),
his womanizing, and, above all, his cruelty facilitated his portrayal as the
quintessential Mexican “macho.” In a country where the tradition of the
macho was closely associated in the collective mind with the insurrec-
tional, charismatic, and patriarchal appeal of the military caudillos of the
nineteenth century, Villa ratified popular traditions and historical images
already rooted in Mexico’s past.14 Since the widespread connection of
rebelliousness with manliness had been reinforced during the war, the
search for Mexicanness in postrevolutionary culture inevitably touched
on the issue of masculine violence, or machismo, for which Villa was a
formidable prototype. Regardless of authorial intentions, stories about
Villa were tacitly bound to the ongoing cultural construction of the so-
called Mexican character.15
Against the background of the marketability of violence and the search
for lo mexicano, which strongly intersect and complement each other in
the single process of modern nation-building, I will examine how re-
gional elements of popular subjectivity are re-created and mystified for
commercial as well as cultural reasons in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! My
analysis focuses on the military code of manly loyalty and its relation to
 102 writing villa’s revolution

the legend of Villa and the ideology of nationalism. The structural and
signifying function of gender as well as “the destruction of the bridge
motif,” which is central to the novel, frame my discussion of the text and
of its relevance to postrevolutionary culture.

destroying the bridge (i)

The opening chapter, “El puente” (The Bridge), was originally published
as a short story in the collection El feroz cabecilla. Skillfully deceptive, “El
puente” sets the ironic tone, tropes, themes, motifs of the novel and func-
tions as an allegory of events to come. The chapter intertwines two exem-
plary stories. The first sets a young rebel, the daring and vigorous Miguel
Diablo, against Captain Medina of the federal army, the man in charge
of protecting a vital train route (a lonely bridge strategically located in
northern Mexico) from an assault by revolutionaries. Repeatedly, Medina
comes across as an impostor with regard to the manly gestures expected
of an army captain. He has an “artificially hoarse voice,” a German-style
mustache (in vogue among Mexican officers, who admired Germany’s
military power) “that was out of place on his Indian face,” 16 and his power
stems not from confidence in his self-worth but from the backing he re-
ceives from the army.
The narrator’s unsympathetic treatment of Medina is in striking
contrast with the assertive depiction of his antagonist. Miguel Diablo’s
physical strength, marksmanship, and arrogant acts of defiance toward
the captain come across as genuine personal qualities and are high-
lighted throughout the story (he is called Diablo, or Devil, because of his
mischievous nature). The narrator’s point of view closely identifies with
Diablo’s riotous spirit, anticipating the outcome of the confrontation.
Miguel has surreptitiously killed fourteen sentries. Medina suspects
him of being the sniper and tries to arrest him so he can be court-
martialed. The young rebel escapes to join forces with other revolution-
ary sympathizers. He later returns and successfully blows the bridge to
pieces. The captain, having failed in his mission, faces the court-martial
he had envisioned for Miguel and is condemned to death. Here the first
story ends.
Two aspects of this story require attention. First, the ironic reversal
of fortune (Medina, not Miguel Diablo, is court-martialed), a standard
feature of the traditional short story genre, is used to surprise readers
and satisfy their desire for the unexpected. This type of ending is system-
atically implemented in the first half of the novel. Second, the captain’s
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 103

faked virility contrasts with and enhances the authenticity of Miguel’s

revolutionary manliness, which is the salient attribute in the military be-
havior of the leones (lions) of San Pablo in the novel. The distinction in
the story between “false,” or weak, men and strong, or “real,” men makes
gender a structuring category in the production of meaning about the
war and relations of dominance in the novel.
The second exemplary story simultaneously at work in “El puente” is
a deceptively minor one; it deals with the changing relationship between
Miguel Diablo and an elderly woman, the humble Tía Lola, who makes a
living cooking for the people working at the train station. Tía Lola rears
the orphan Miguel and loves him like a son. She passionately defends him
when he is about to be detained and is the victim of revenge by proxy
when he escapes: she receives the whipping Captain Medina intended
for Miguel. This anecdotal information about Tía Lola is woven into the
first story.
After Captain Medina’s demise (ending the first story), the second story
unfolds, but unbeknownst to the reader, the narrative logic has changed.
In the closing section of the chapter (which is also the end of the second
story), the revolutionary forces are triumphantly moving south. Several
months of intense fighting have gone by, and Miguel returns on a mili-
tary train to the station where Tía Lola lives. Success in battle, however,
has transformed him. Inside a well-lighted passenger car, the now hand-
somely dressed rebel, wearing a cowboy hat, an expensive suit, and a red
scarf, is drinking and talking to his friends in a self-important manner.
He is completely oblivious of Tía Lola, his former protector and faith-
ful ally, who by chance catches a glimpse of her “boy” from the railway
platform.
Astonished to see him and disheartened by his inattention, Tía Lola
readily comes to terms with the unanticipated changes brought about
by the revolution and in the last scene renders him symbolically dead.
When asked in her modest quarters about his whereabouts, she coldly
replies: “Well . . . only God knows if he has died . . . without the slight-
est alteration in her tired voice” (18). Miguel’s stunning indifference to-
ward the woman who fed him and risked her life to save him provides an
ironic twist, which is crucial for grasping the complete meaning of the
first chapter. Miguel’s ingratitude and the old woman’s reaction indicate
that a different and less-tangible kind of bridge, the “bridge of affection,”
which for years connected the woman to the young man, has also been
blown to pieces. It is another casualty of the war.
The estrangement and loss of Tía Lola’s putative son to the war is
 104 writing villa’s revolution

meaningful in that it foreshadows the Villista soldier’s plight in the novel.

All the emotional bridges that connect the fighter to domesticity and
civilian life by way of kinship or friendship are destroyed, for the culture
of warfare creates its own self-centered code of camaraderie, pride, and
honor (which often, as with Miguel, verges on swaggering), which is in-
different to the outside world.
The spatial and social mobility of those who join the train of the revo-
lution and are empowered by it creates a growing divide between them
and the noncombatant population. It is significant that this division again
makes gender a source of tropes for the “production and inscription of
more general effects of power and meaning.” 17 Clearly, revolutionary
success and the masculine culture of warfare, which confer a low status
on women, are what separate Miguel, the rebel, from Tía Lola (the “de-
struction of the bridge” motif ). At a more abstract level, civilian life and
the immobility associated with it is a “feminized” space insofar as it is the
space occupied by the female character.
The two story lines in “El puente” have the same characters and take
place in the same isolated train station, but follow distinct narrative
paths. In story 1, Miguel challenges and defeats Captain Medina; Tía
Lola is a passionate defender of Miguel. In story 2, the rebel triumphantly
passes through the train station; he is not eager to see Tía Lola, as might
be expected, and is oblivious to her. It follows that the role played by
Tía Lola in story 1, as an ally of Miguel, has no bearing on the outcome
of story 2. Therefore one must conclude that the system of causality is
different for each story. The same anecdotal data serve the narrative logic
of two contrasting stories.18 Story 1, an epic narrative, extols daring ac-
tions and the struggle against oppression. Story 2 is an understated nar-
rative about the culture of war and human nature. The narrator’s gen-
dered description of revolutionary struggle in story 1 foreshadows the
hero’s dismissal of Tía Lola in story 2. Both stories share two crucial
elements—the treatment of gender and the “destruction of the bridge”
motif—which bring together the divergent rationale behind these over-
lapping stories. The real and symbolic bridges destroyed in both narra-
tives subtly bring to the fore the paradox of warfare skillfully exploited by
Muñoz in the novel: its epic, liberating nature (story 1); and its alienating
human consequences (story 2).
War, then, generates a life of its own, vigorous and self-fulfilling, di-
vorced from society. “El puente” is an invitation to the reader to vicari-
ously join the prime manifestation of this wartime reality in revolution-
ary Mexico: the Villista movement.
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 105

The Spectacle of Manly Honor

“El puente” is not organically integrated into the plot line of ¡Vámonos
con Pancho Villa! There is no explicit reference to Villa or to the Villista
movement at all in this chapter, nor does it introduce the novel’s main
character or initiate the sequence of events. In fact, as noted above, it was
originally published as a short story in the collection El feroz cabecilla.19
The inclusion of “El puente” as the opening chapter of the novel serves
the function of a prologue: to acquaint the reader with the literary pro-
totype of the future Villista soldier; to set the ironic narrative tone; and
to establish the dominant tropes for expressing relations of power. The
material and symbolic destruction of the bridge, moreover, effectively
prepares the stage for the reader to enter the epic, self-absorbing world
of the revolutionary fighter in the following chapters.
The action proper begins in Chapter 2, when six ranchers from
the town of San Pablo, Miguel among them, voluntarily join Villa’s
army and are baptized the leones of San Pablo by General Villa himself.
Miguel Diablo is renamed Becerrillo (Little Calf ), a new and diminished
identity that separates him from his former role of isolated hero, as he is
now part of a fighting group. The narrative shift from the individual to
the six leones emphasizes the collective identity of the new protagonist.
Becerrillo, we soon learn, is a minor character in the novel (he dies in
this chapter).
The leones embody the expected code of honor in the military culture
of Villismo: a masculine dedication to preserving reputation and pride
through personal valor, fighting skills, and extreme loyalty. They belong
to a world where the rules of war and patriarchal society promote the
idea that men must be “real men” (i.e., fearless in the face of danger) and
try to behave accordingly. “What kind of men are you?” Villa boldly asks
the leones on meeting them for the first time (20). The gender category
of “real men” (Villa’s desired answer) is not a natural but a cultural one,
forced on males who, in turn, assimilate it into their identity and use it as
a measure of their own worth. To be real men is a key organizing prin-
ciple in the constitution of the soldiers’ subjectivity, of the fighters’ sense
of self-identity.
The cultural construct of “real men” took shape on Mexico’s northern
frontier during the war against the Apache dating back to the eighteenth
century. In this protracted struggle, “personal honor and fighting skills
became salient to the construction of male honor.” 20 The ideology of
male honor permeates the leones’ actions. To achieve military status and
 106 writing villa’s revolution

soldierly respect, they must be good fighters. They are aware that their
honor depends solely on how their “manly performance” in war is viewed
by them and by Villa, hence their eagerness to be at the front in battle, to
compete with others for soldierly recognition, prestige, and glory.
The passionate identification of the leones with the code of honor of
real men is what makes them tragic heroes. Becerrillo’s devotion to the
struggle drives him to blindly and inadvertently face enemy fire, and he
is fatally wounded (24 –25). In the adrenaline-charged heat of the battle
for Torreón, Rodrigo Perea wrests a bayonet from a federal soldier with
such intensity that he ends up impaling himself on it. Rodrigo “fell on
his shoulders, throwing a spout of blood and a gaze perpendicular to the
stars” (34). The one-armed Martín Espinosa, wounded in the legs, faces
certain death throwing grenades into the enemy camp from very close
range. Hidden by darkness, the crippled Espinosa ferociously yells and
throws grenades at the enemy until his position is spotted and he is torn
apart by gunfire; the cigar he used to light the grenades slowly “extin-
guished itself in his forever tightened jaws” (36).
The warlike qualities of Becerrillo, Perea, and Espinosa are supreme
values that encapsulate the ethos of the revolutionary soldier: courage
and generous self-sacrifice. Through poetic images of death on the battle-
field, Muñoz pays homage to the leones’ heroism.21 These images also
highlight the unsettling nature of their code of honor.
Roughly reproducing the narrative technique established in “El
puente,” with different degrees of intensity, each story sets in motion
an ironic play between the code of honor that powerfully binds the
leones of San Pablo together and the pattern of destruction and self-
destruction that this code ultimately leads them to. A shaken Tiburcio
will mercifully put an end to the agonizing suffering of the mortally
wounded Becerrillo by killing him (in “Becerrillo”). Melitón Botello
shoots himself in the head to prove his manhood, which has been placed
in doubt (in “El círculo de la muerte” [The Circle of Death]). Tiburcio,
against his will, burns alive the ailing Máximo Perea, who has been over-
taken by smallpox (in “Una hoguera” [A Bonfire]). The tragic irony of
these endings is integral to the author’s hyperbolic style of enhancing the
“manly spectacle” of Villismo (the “push the imagination” syndrome) to
garner readers’ attention.
The ending of the first half of the novel reaffirms the soldierly ethics
of the leones. Tiburcio, the last of them alive, grows disillusioned with the
Villista leaders when, in his view, they break the code of honor that unites
the fighters by ordering that Máximo Perea, who is dying agonizingly of
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 107

smallpox, be burned alive. Feeling abandoned by his superiors and unau-

thorized to fight because he has been exposed to Perea’s disease— even
Villa moves hastily away from him —the dignified Tiburcio, who cannot
bear the idea of being a noncombatant, finds a rationale to desert (“El
vagón 7121” [Boxcar 7121]).
The notion of honor in this segment of ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! re-
lies exclusively on the redeeming qualities of machismo. Muñoz’s ironic
but unapologetic exaltation of Villista manliness constitutes an ideologi-
cal break with the approach taken by Martín Luis Guzmán in El águila
y la serpiente. The latter sees in Villismo’s bravado a deplorable show
of brute force and senseless violence, while Muñoz perceives a popular
expression of revolutionary subjectivity. In this, he proves himself to
have been a step ahead, ideologically speaking, of the illustrious ateneísta.
Muñoz understood that, in spite of its limitations (which he criticizes),
revolutionary manliness represented a step forward in relation to the
social consciousness of the Porfiriato. In the caste hierarchy of the pre-
revolutionary period, Ilene O’Malley has observed, lower-class men were
exploited and physically abused. The denial of sociopolitical equality
with upper-class men deprived them of their manhood or personhood.
The revolution’s assault on the caste system became a vehicle of social
empowerment whereby lower-class men recovered their manhood by de-
stroying an oppressive order. Inasmuch as the violence of the fighting
masses was motivated by the quest for social justice, it carried the impri-
matur of a superior form of consciousness.22
Liberation from social oppression and rebel bravado came to be in-
timately connected in the public perception. The tendency to glorify
revolutionary manliness in postrevolutionary culture would make this at-
tribute an essential ingredient in the constitution of lo mexicano. A major
problem with Muñoz’s celebration of revolutionary manliness is that it
requires the concrete and symbolic suppression of the female figure in
the elaboration of this cultural identity, a point to be discussed later.

Self-Consuming Machismo
The stories about the leones’ deeds are tall tales of honor and death, as
befits narratives about war written for a mass audience. For realism and
commercial reasons, Muñoz approaches the revolutionary conflict as
the ultimate spectacle of masculinity, and nowhere in the novel is this
truer than in the chapter entitled “El círculo de la muerte.” The death of
Melitón Botello in this chapter takes the soldierly culture of machismo a
 108 writing villa’s revolution

step farther. Botello does not fall on the battlefield like his companions;
he dies by his own hand in a deadly game of chance. Conceived under the
influence of alcohol and reinforced by superstition, the game—a kind of
Russian roulette—has thirteen men seated at a round table. The lights
are turned off and a loaded pistol is thrown into the air. When it hits the
table and goes off, it wounds or kills one of the men, supposedly the most
“cowardly.” The death of one of the players, at the same time, eliminates
the bad luck associated with the number thirteen. The game, called the
“circle of death,” is designed to test the participants’ nerves, to show their
contempt of danger.
Botello, Máximo Perea, and Maya, the three remaining leones, are chal-
lenged to play the game and demonstrate that they are not afraid. They
do so out of pride, and the unfortunate victim is Botello, who is wounded
in the stomach. To demonstrate that he is not the most cowardly in the
group, he decides to end his life and shoots himself in the head; he prefers
death to dishonor.23
The circle of death is a deadly ritual designed to reenact the intense
emotions aroused by the fighting (the sense of danger and the need to
overcome the fear associated with it) and to test the players’ macho code.
The arbitrary and perilous nature of the game suggests that the trauma of
war lingers after battle, engendering curiously psychopathological con-
duct. The purpose of the episode is evidently to shock the reader by cre-
ating a dramatic situation in which Muñoz takes the self-destructive logic
inherent in the characters’ code of honor to the limit, with a spectacularly
gruesome outcome.24
Ever more significant in the context of postrevolutionary cultural for-
mation is the fact that the game is a tragic act of pure exhibitionism in
which the performance of macho “virility” has taken on a life of its own.
Unlike what happens in other chapters, where violence is embedded in
the struggle against the federal army, here it has been stripped of the
military context, which may give it a transcendent, altruistic meaning.
Uprooted from the war setting, the soldier’s willingness to die and prove
his manhood becomes a depoliticized, gratuitous act. Veteran Tiburcio,
the most conscientious of the leones, points this out when he says: “Killing
each other for no reason, because we are drunk, is not what brave men
do” (57). Yet Tiburcio, too, is drawn into the game because peer pressure
(camaraderie, sense of honor) pushes men to become prisoners of a manly
identity that, while necessary on the battlefield, can be foolish and self-
defeating elsewhere.
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 109

The socialization of death during the Mexican Revolution made the

idea of dying more acceptable, or inevitable, and the masses’ willingness
to die for a just cause became a reasonable expectation, writes Carlos
Monsiváis. In this context, machismo is an “act of social obedience” and
not an act of private bravado.25 In “El círculo de la muerte,” however,
the display of manliness has been abstracted from its original source and
transported to the domestic, private setting. This marks a decisive step in
the direction of transforming revolutionary machismo from an act of so-
cial solidarity in time of war into a prideful but empty histrionic gesture
deprived of any revolutionary content. Subjected to creative manipula-
tion, the spectacle of manly honor would have great popular appeal (the
film industry quickly learned to commercially exploit this visually viable
spectacle) precisely because it retained traces of social rebelliousness.
Muñoz’s description of the leones’ spectacular deaths in the first half of
the novel exploits the literary and sensationalist possibilities of perform-
ing the ideology of machismo. The “surprise” technique, the twist in-
volved in each chapter’s ending, enhances the ironic effect and confounds
and startles the reader. Furthermore, the poetic images of death exalt the
soldiers’ generous and selfless sacrifice and celebrate their stoic manli-
ness. Seen in the larger context of the cultural construction of Mexican-
ness, Muñoz’s hyperbolic images of machismo participate in the discur-
sive process of shaping and promoting the creation of a national myth.

destroying the bridge (ii)

Events in “El desertor” (The Deserter), the chapter that opens the second
part of ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! are separated from the first by a two-
year hiatus. The chapter is in many ways a hyperbolic repetition of the
beginning of the novel in that it radically magnifies the antagonism be-
tween epic warfare and loyalty to family and friends advanced in the clos-
ing part of “El puente.” Tiburcio Maya, now a peaceful peasant, works
the land and attends to his family’s needs, but in his inner self he yearns
for the military glory of yesteryear. The basic conflict in “El desertor”
springs from Tiburcio’s nostalgic desire to once again lead an adventur-
ous life of danger and excitement with Villa’s army rather than meet the
family obligations that tie him to the land and a monotonous, uneventful
life. When the Villistas appear on Tiburcio’s ranch and Villa himself,
who is like “a sun touching the horizon” (89), demands that the veteran
soldier rejoin his forces, the stage is set for the most atrocious scene in the
 110 writing villa’s revolution

novel (and in the entire body of Villista literature). Villa brutally solves
the veteran’s dilemma (loyalty to Villa versus commitment to family) by
killing Tiburcio’s wife and daughter immediately after they have fed him,
thereby compounding the dramatic effect. In the closing paragraph, a
stunned Tiburcio demands a carbine and, along with his son, silently
joins the rest of the Villista soldiers. After a brief hesitation, he moves
with his “chest forward, shoulders thrown back, head raised to the wind,
ready to give his life for Francisco Villa” (93). We must infer that he is
shaken but ultimately freed from a life of domesticity. Tiburcio closes
ranks with the Villistas and recovers his identity as a “real man,” though
the circumstances of his reincorporation remain traumatic.
With the slaying of Tiburcio’s wife and daughter, Muñoz reintro-
duces the “bridge destruction” motif. Now it is Villa’s call to arms that
demands the destruction of the bridge of affection connecting the soldier
to civilian life. Here, however, the rupture is horrifying and of an unprec-
edented magnitude, because the author’s main objective is to thrust on
the reader the full intensity of Villa’s incorporation into the plot. Prior to
this chapter, he is an ancillary character, a vital but mostly distant point
of reference for the actions carried out by the leones. Now he moves to
the forefront of the action. The author has a strategic interest in project-
ing a foundational image of him that is at once shocking and extreme.
Villa’s unspeakable cruelty surpasses all expectations, because he must be
immediately cast as the non plus ultra of the violent masculinity already
displayed by the leones of San Pablo in the first half of the novel, a sort of
arch-macho. Villa the literary character is born full-blown with this epi-
sode. With “El desertor” Muñoz effectively prepares the reader to enter
the tumultuous world of the legendary Villa.
While Villa’s heinous act is intended to shock the reader, Tiburcio’s
reaction is equally disturbing. The murders of his wife and daughter call
for revenge, not identification with Villa. Nevertheless, the old man joins
the Villistas, an apparently incongruent act (“madness,” says the Ameri-
can sergeant who later interviews Tiburcio), but it is one that is con-
sistent, though taken to the extreme, with the cultural rationale already
present in Miguel Diablo’s indifference to the plight of Tía Lola in “El
puente.” In both cases, the fighters are irrepressibly drawn to popular
rebellion and the excitement of war itself, a veritable test of manhood,
while the female characters are left behind (forgotten, killed). Miguel
Diablo’s break with Tía Lola, no matter how insensitive, and Tiburcio’s
break with his wife and daughter, however traumatic, are facts of life in a
world at war. Patriarchy reinforces the social belief that male-to-male re-
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 111

lationships must take precedence over males’ relationships with females.

This truism undergoes a radical test when Villa kills the female members
of the veteran soldier’s family. Tiburcio quietly accepts Villa’s criminal
act, corroborating the idea that, in a male-centered world, women are
ultimately expendable because they occupy a marginal position.
In “El puente” and “El desertor,” the emotional bond between the
soldiers and the female characters ends in alienation and death, whether
symbolic or real. Tía Lola and Tiburcio’s wife and daughter are tropes
for a life of routine domesticity that is sedentary and more civilized; they
must be left behind or sacrificed because they stand in the way of the
more primitive but vital life of nomadic warfare. The key “bridge de-
struction” motif conveys this break and provides the conceptual frame-
work that ensures continuity between the first and the second sections of
the novel.

Tiburcio: The Tribulations of Manly Loyalty

A different, more trying, historical reality has transformed the Villista
army in the second half of the novel. In the first half, the leones are caught
up by the military fever that swept Chihuahua’s countryside during the
rise of Villismo in 1913 and 1914. The second half takes place during the
twilight of the movement (the invasion of Columbus, New Mexico, in
1916; the American Punitive Expedition and its aftermath), when only a
few of Villa’s diehard followers remain faithful to him. Short of soldiers
and lacking the social support he once enjoyed (many townspeople who
had supported him are now organized in defensas sociales, a local militia
formed to defend towns from Villista raids), General Villa must resort to
forced conscription, intimidation, personal charisma, and paternalism to
keep his movement alive. The increasingly ruthless leader treats everyone
with suspicion, as there is a hefty reward for his capture, dead or alive.
Gone are the days when volunteers lined up to join his forces.
For a devoted follower like Tiburcio, the long-awaited reincorporation
into Villismo is further complicated, to say the least, by Villa’s deadly ac-
tions against his family. Voluntary and involuntary attachments (free will
and coercion) bind the old man to Villa. These conflictive feelings add
a new tense, subjective, dimension to the relationship of male bonding
between the last of the leones and his leader. Loyalty to Villa, a man who
“divides the waves of passions: either you hate him or you give yourself to
him” (19), becomes an intense personal dilemma, a drama of conscious-
ness for Tiburcio after the killing of his wife and daughter.
 112 writing villa’s revolution

The dilemma brings to the fore the inner workings of the old soldier’s
code of honor, for if this code values male bonding, it also carries a strong
dose of exaltation of men’s patriarchal “rights” over women. The ques-
tion of whether Tiburcio will continue to be faithful to Villa or rebel
and exact revenge against him is resolved in favor of the former in “El
desertor.” Ilene O’Malley has noted that Tiburcio’s “profoundest attach-
ment was to Villa; his wife and children were only impediments. Villa
also saw them as impediments and so he killed them. But he killed only
Tiburcio’s girl child; he spared the boy because he too could become a
villista.” 26 However uneasily, the principle of male solidarity, which is
predicated on the exclusion of women, prevails. Nevertheless, given the
brutal circumstances of the veteran soldier’s reincorporation, the previ-
ously unproblematic notion of loyalty can no longer be taken for granted
by Villa. Hence the rest of the novel is structured around a series of tests
Tiburcio must undergo to prove anew his unconditional support of his
leader. In this world, that can be measured only by trials of manhood.
Tiburcio starts his second military journey in the lowly position
of foot soldier, hardly a warrior in the grand Villista tradition, but he
slowly rises through the ranks by repeated demonstrations of allegiance.
Ironically, his increasing closeness to Villa is directly proportional to his
growing disillusionment with the caudillo’s actions. Tiburcio disagrees
with the decision to attack Columbus, New Mexico, and complains that
his leader “ignores the consequences of his acts. He doesn’t reason, he
doesn’t deduce” (126), a point of view that the narrator reinforces in a
more vociferous tone with allusions to Villa’s “madly bellicose spirit”
(128) and “incomparable insanity” (168). Yet Tiburcio never fails to sup-
port his leader (as he never let down Botello in “El círculo de la muerte”),
because his male honor is at stake. During the invasion, the old soldier
and his son save the general’s life. The son dies in the effort, embracing a
machine gun that serves as a symbol of the fighting spirit of the Villista
soldier. Villa is so moved he dares not lay the corpse of Tiburcio’s son
down on the ground because that would have “diminished the beauty
of his death” (140). Tiburcio’s personal courage and the sacrifice of his
son to the cause of Villismo in Columbus make the old león one of the
general’s most trusted men, even a sort of critical moral presence, and
leads to his induction into the Dorados.
The tests of loyalty reach their climax when Tiburcio is hunted like a
savage animal and taken prisoner during the Punitive Expedition. Freed
from the spell of Villa’s direct influence and under terrible duress, he is
given a choice between life and liberty if he reveals his leader’s hiding
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 113

place, or certain death at the hands of his enemies if he does not. He has
a moment of hesitation, but quickly recovers his moral fiber and chooses
not to betray his Villista identity. He is tortured and hanged from a tree,
from which the rope “began to give, the branch descended, and Tiburcio
Maya’s feet still bled when the sobbing water of the Papigochic River
kissed them” (206). This tragic, poetic image of ultimate loyalty and per-
sonal sacrifice brings the plot to a close. Masculine solidarity and honor,
the ethics of Villismo, prevail to the very end. Muñoz is paying tribute
not to Villa but to the Villista soldiers of the revolution.

villismo’s war machine

A thematic pattern is discernible in the first half of ¡Vámonos con Pancho
Villa! It is evident in each chapter in the leones’ adherence to the manly
code of honor. Another and perhaps less visible pattern emerges in the
second half of the novel, one only hinted at before. As effective as the first
in terms of meeting readers’ expectations with its lurid sensationalism,
the pattern focuses on General Villa and the culture of militarism on
Mexico’s northern frontier.
An overriding concern guides Villa’s actions in the novel: to elimi-
nate all obstacles and dangers that interfere with the strengthening and
military advance of the Villista forces. A series of gruesome chapters re-
veal this pattern, whereby the logic behind the inflexible law that rules
Villa’s camp is dramatically reiterated. The pattern is announced in “Una
hoguera,” a chapter at the end of the first half of the novel, when Gen.
Tomás Urbina orders the incineration of Máximo Perea to protect the
soldiers from smallpox. In “El desertor,” the chapter that opens the sec-
ond half, Villa kills Tiburcio’s wife and daughter so that they do not stand
in the way of his rejoining the troops. In “Consejos” (Advice), a soldier
tells the story of how the distrustful general personally shot a young re-
cruit who lagged behind during the exhausting trek through the sierra;
the message is that he is unfit for war or that Villa is suspicious of him.
In “Diálogos” (Dialogues), Villa orders the execution of all Carrancista
prisoners who refuse to join the Villista movement; the reader gathers
that they are an impediment to the guerrillas’ mobility. All obstacles, be
they contagious disease, family obligation, physical and moral weakness,
or anti-Villista sentiment, are speedily eliminated because, from the mili-
tary point of view, the survival of Villa’s army is a moral imperative that
overrides any other concern.27 Consistent with the centuries-old law of
frontier warfare, Villa’s brutally pragmatic rationale immediately sup-
 114 writing villa’s revolution

presses those who are not considered able bodies for the war: the sick,
women, soldiers lacking the necessary physical resistance, and the un-
committed.
In this second pattern, Villa embodies the laws of frontier warfare—
permanent mobility and unforgiving destruction of human obstacles—in
all their dehumanizing nature. Perhaps more important, the pattern pres-
ents a raw and radical vision of life, whereby war is not the exception to
the rule but a way of life: sublime, barbarous, yet ethically coherent. The
Villista tradition of war and its attendant violence is a permanent—nor-
mal—state of being according to this pattern, an integral aspect of hu-
man reality that the cloak of civilization, the modern state, and humanis-
tic culture try to negate or conceal.
Although he is ambivalent about it, Muñoz’s articulation of this radi-
cal view signals a decisive cultural shift from his predecessors Mariano
Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán, particularly Guzmán, whose Villista
works were still enmeshed in the mores of Porfirian values (civility, decor,
refinement) and the class and ethnic biases of positivistic thought.

villa’s legend
Friedrich Katz has stated that three legends surround and obfuscate our
knowledge of the historical Villa. The official discourse of the revolution
promoted the legend of the unscrupulous bandit; the legend forged by
the corridos depicts him as a popular hero or a leader of limitless cruelty;
and the Hollywood legend made him a Mexican Robin Hood, a Napo-
leon, or a Genghis Khan.28 Muñoz’s Villa comes closest to the version of
the corridos, though Muñoz does not exclude elements of other legends
(references to banditry, for example).
Several interconnected aspects of the Villa legend are cultivated in
Muñoz’s novel. Foremost (as we have seen) is the popular leader’s reputa-
tion for cruelty, which falls within the popular and “deeply ingrained”
tradition of the Mexican macho.29 The narrator stresses the primitivistic
aspects of Villa’s macho behavior by describing him in bestial terms, re-
ferring to his “beastly mouth,” “dreadful smile” (91) and his devouring
“like a jaguar” (92). Then there is the image of Villa, the avenger of the
dispossessed, “the only one who could have liberated them” (106). The
corridos emphasize the image of the charismatic leader who, like all pop-
ular champions of the oppressed, is surrounded by a quasi-religious aura
in the collective mind. This is the Messiah, or saviorlike figure, Tiburcio
is waiting for in “El desertor.” “Someday you will see him,” he tells his
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 115

son, “and like your father, you will go after him, and will never feel fear”
(85). He is also the military leader the people of northern Mexico imag-
ine riding West, “red and ardent like the ball of fire that illuminates the
afternoon” (130). Whether the point of view is sympathetic or critical, it
promotes the myth of Villa, the greater-than-life leader.
The greatest promoter of Villa’s myth in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! is
the general himself. Aware that his survival and that of his movement de-
pends not only on military strength but also on the psychological impact
he personally has on his enemies, on his followers, and on the population
at large, Villa relies on oral culture and popular belief to manipulate and
spread the myth of his own immortality. Wounded in the knee, the leader
disbands his men and goes into hiding, but not before issuing a specific
instruction: “In the villages where you go say that the changos [Carrancis-
tas] killed me. That way there will be more fear when they see me back”
(170). The religious notion of “resurrection” is another way of projecting
a supernatural mystical aura.
Villa’s association with the forces of nature is also a critical element
of his legend and enhances his semidivine attributes. Threatened by the
massive manhunt that has led to the Punitive Expedition, an intimate
knowledge of the territory allows Villa to assume a clairvoyant pose when
he tells Tiburcio: “Just as I know the countryside, the countryside knows
me. The trees speak to me when I pass by to warn me if there is danger,
the roads show me the tracks of animals or humans. . . . I know when it is
going to rain and when there will be wind. I know the stars and at night I
know where I am going” (147–148). By propagating the image of a man
of destiny who cannot be caught or defeated, who will survive because
he is guided and protected by the earthly and heavenly elements, Villa
forges the self-serving myth of the “chosen one.”
The collective perception advanced by Villa himself, and by others,
of his symbiotic relation with nature, of his being part of nature (animal-
like), an entity that, like nature, can die and resurrect, has the cumulative
effect of “naturalizing” his personal behavior and military actions. It is
as if they were part of a quasi-natural order. And just as nature gives and
takes away life in sometimes unexpected and violent ways, so, too, does
Villa. His symbolic role in the novel is to uphold the unmerciful laws of
frontier warfare, which appear to be as self-perpetuating as the laws of
nature.
A sacred and mundane figure, Muñoz’s Villa exists only in the truth
of his legend. Muñoz re-creates the awe of Villa’s legend, carrying to the
extreme (for commercial purposes) the internal logic of the historical
 116 writing villa’s revolution

elements on which it is based. At the same time, the author takes a criti-
cal and ironic distance from the legend by contriving scenes in which a
shrewd and manipulative Villa deliberately fosters the construction of his
own mythology.

gender and nationalism

Benedict Anderson has defined the nation as an “imagined community,”
and one of the features of that imagining is the feeling of a “deep, horizon-
tal comradeship.” 30 Feminist scholar Linda McDowell has noticed that
this feeling, though “theoretically gender-neutral, brings with it conno-
tations of masculine solidarity.” 31 Because the rise of modern nations is
linked to war, sacrifice, and death, war is tacitly (that is, unquestionably)
understood to be a male enterprise, evidence to the contrary notwith-
standing. The exclusion or invisibility of women in the cultural “imag-
ining” of the nation is an extended practice that attests to the power of
patriarchal normativity, which manifests itself with different degrees of
intensity in modern societies.
The case of Mexico is particularly telling. During the Porfiriato, the
exploitation and abuse of lower-class men by upper-class men deprived
the former of their manhood. This kind of class-based deprivation, as
Ilene O’Malley has noted, also had a patriarchal sexual expression. Poor
men could not adequately provide for their family or “exercise their pa-
triarchal privileges of exclusive sexual control over ‘their’ women” in the
same way as wealthy men could.32 During the revolution, the poor fought
and defeated their class enemies, recovered their manhood, and this “in-
cluded the prerogatives of the patriarch,” the right to reassert their con-
trol over women.
Although women participated in the Mexican Revolution as fighters,
couriers, nurses, cooks, writers, and spies, their massive contribution to
the struggle is seldom acknowledged.33 Because the revolution did not
attempt to destroy the social institution of patriarchy, but, rather, rein-
forced it by reaffirming the “patriarchal privileges of lower-class men,” 34
women’s contribution to the struggle remained largely ignored. This was
compounded by the fact that real or symbolic sexual dominance became
a positive expression of lower-class strength and liberation from oppres-
sion during the war. Revolutionary culture, writes Jean Franco, “consti-
tuted a discourse that associated virility with social transformation in a
way that marginalized women at the very moment when they were, sup-
posedly, liberated.” 35 If, as mentioned earlier, the discourse on rebellious
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 117

manliness expressed a superior form of class consciousness in relation to

the prerevolutionary period, in terms of gender, it, in effect, sanctioned
the oppressiveness of patriarchal society.36
Muñoz makes gender the prime site for signifying relations of domi-
nation and subjugation in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! Gender is integral
to the plot, most visibly in the fate of the minor yet centrally symbolic
female characters of Tía Lola and Tiburcio’s wife and daughter. It is at
work in the leones’ displays of masculinity and the manner in which they
and the narrator “feminize” the federal army (in the character of Captain
Medina, for example).37 Moreover, gender is critical to the definition of
national identity in the novel.
Just as violence reaffirms the manhood of the leones, violence against
the foreign enemy (the United States) serves to define the masculine
identity of the Mexican nation. As Villa’s troops move menacingly to
the north, we learn that, beyond the American border, “like a woman
who bends forward out her window, the city of Columbus offered herself;
she seemed to come to them, loose and seductive” (127). The narrator’s
feminization of an American territory into something seductive, ready
and willing to be assailed by a “virile” Mexico, prepares the reader for
Muñoz’s treatment of the Villista invasion of Columbus. The town is
described in explicitly sexual terms: “When they crossed that imaginary
line [the border] they experienced a sense of sexual satisfaction . . . blood
completed the illusion of a violent hymeneal entry” (142). The “rape” of
American territory symbolizes the reassertion of a Mexican masculinity
that has been emasculated by the continuous abuse and mistreatment suf-
fered by poor Mexicans who enter the United States and are treated as
“beasts of burden at the service of capitalism” (131).
One last aspect of Villa’s legend is reactivated in the representation of
this historical incident and its aftermath. He is the “avenger of Mexico’s
humiliated honor—the man who attacked Columbus, New Mexico, and
eluded Pershing’s pursuit.” 38 This feat made him a symbol of Mexican
nationalism. The novel identifies the patriarchal ideology of machismo
and its attendant sexual dominance with a vengeful popular nationalism
containing anticapitalist overtones.
Villa’s faithful follower, Tiburcio, who is captured by the Ameri-
cans, is also a figure in this nationalist symbolism. At the anecdotal level,
Tiburcio’s solidarity with Villa marks the success of male bonding over
the “disruptive” presence of women. At the nationalist level, his partici-
pation in the “rape” of American soil and his manly endurance and si-
lence in the face of adversity represent the ultimate moral triumph of the
 118 writing villa’s revolution

Mexican character in the face of a foreign oppressor. What ties together

Tiburcio and Villa and, metonymically, the “masculinized” Mexican na-
tion in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! is the ideology of machismo, associated
with popular rebelliousness, male honor, and anti-Americanism. It is a
sexist identity, however, that is built on the premise of, and requires for
its very existence, the literal and symbolic oppression of women.
The Mexican Revolution opened a space for the participation of
women in national affairs. Azuela acknowledges this reality in Los de abajo
through the character of La Pintada, though he does not know exactly
what to do with her and quickly eliminates her in the most melodramatic
scene of his novel. The fate of the female characters in Muñoz’s novel
suggest, to the contrary, that women have no place in the culture of
Villismo and thus are deprived of any historical agency in the process of
nation building, which is viewed as an exclusively male enterprise.
Muñoz is the Villista writer who most forcefully articulates and, in
fact, fosters the convergence of masculinity and nationalism. This con-
vergence goes beyond literature and is part of a larger struggle in the
contested field of cultural politics during the Maximato. A power strug-
gle began to take shape in the late 1920s and broke open in 1934, when
Muñoz and other revolutionary intellectuals made a successful request to
the Committee of Public Health to purge counterrevolutionaries from
the governmental bureaucracy.39 The counterrevolutionaries in question
were individuals of “dubious morality” whose “effeminate acts” had the
harmful effect of corrupting the “virile virtues found in youth.” 40 Among
them were homosexual writers oriented toward European themes and
styles and relatively unconcerned about the culture of nationalism. This
homophobic attack exposed the growing link between patriarchal no-
tions of moral integrity, Mexican identity, and “virility” in revolution-
ary nationalism, a connection Muñoz—a cultural ideologue—vigorously
pursued in his work. ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! is a prime example of the
new “virile” literature that was being shaped and also contested by other
groups in the nation’s mainstream culture.

Through Villa, Rafael F. Muñoz exploits the premodern sublimity of

frontier warfare, barbarous and unforgiving, and converts it into a con-
sumer product of considerable literary quality. The novelist resorts to
hyperbole to offer the urban reader a thrilling glimpse of the Other, the
“uncivilized” world, of what is free and unrestrained, along with the mor-
bid and the cruel. This is a terrific subject in term of entertainment.
On the other hand, Muñoz incorporates this world into the mythology
 honor in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 119

of nationalism. As treated in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! Villista violence

is part of the nation’s experience of self-discovery. Men like Villa, the
author says in the novel, for all their faults, were what made the country
“different,” non-European; they were what made Mexico unique and, as
such, were a source of pride. “Self-discovery” was, of course, a cultural
construct that was heavily indebted to the tradition of patriarchy and ma-
chismo, hence its gendered bias and shortcomings.
Muñoz’s view of Villa and Villismo contrasts dramatically with that of
Guzmán. The latter obscures and suppresses the subjectivity of subaltern
characters by framing them from the perspective of the civilizing code,
while the former resorts to the manly code of honor to construct and
exploit the perpetually warlike mentality of the oppressed in northern
Mexico for the sake of sensationalism. In doing so, Muñoz, though not
unproblematically, opened a space in the nationalist culture of the period
for a more radical and uncompromising view of the popular revolution-
ary struggle.
 t h e b at t l e f o r pa n c h o v i l l a
Chapter 6
during cardenismo, 1935 – 1940

The Cardenista period (1935–1940) brought new life into the debate over
the uncertain status of revolutionary hero Pancho Villa and his move-
ment in the nation’s memory. The regime’s reorientation in political mat-
ters created a space in public discourse for the reevaluation of Villa’s role
in the revolution and his historical legacy. It did not overturn the ambiva-
lent or outright anti-Villista rhetoric well entrenched in urban culture,
but new views and voices were heard that, generally speaking, cast him
in a more favorable light. Four interrelated issues that were intended to
solidify the social base of the regime shaped Cárdenas’s populist agenda
and influenced the debate over Villa: the unification and strengthening of
the labor movement; the priority placed on agrarian reform; the expan-
sion of education; and the quest for national integration.
The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas signaled a departure from the
antilabor and antiagrarian policies of the jefe máximo, Calles. By 1934,
rural and urban workers’ organizations had become, for the most part,
estranged from the state because of the previous administration’s failure
to meet popular demands for social and economic justice. With Cárdenas
in office, a decisive move was made to implement reform-oriented poli-
cies and reestablish state control over the highly fragmented labor move-
ment. The new president, unlike his predecessor, recognized the validity
of the class struggle inherent in the relations of production and sought to
achieve a “balance” among the forces of production within the system of
capitalist development. Peasants and workers were encouraged to orga-
nize in new unions and received state support to more effectively defend
their rights and fight against the latifundistas, or large estate owners, and
industrialists. Cárdenas personally intervened in settling many strikes,
siding more often that not with the traditional underdogs, the workers.
The regime’s policy of protecting labor rights eventually led to es-
calating confrontations with foreign capitalist interests, which had little
intention of abiding by Mexican labor laws. In 1938, a critical point was
reached during a protracted strike by oil-field workers against their for-
 villa during cardenismo 121

eign bosses (Standard Oil, British Royal). After months of failed nego-
tiations with oil companies contemptuous of Mexican Supreme Court
rulings in favor of the workers’ demands, Cárdenas settled the conflict
by issuing a decree nationalizing the oil industry. The unprecedented ac-
tion aroused feelings of nationalist pride throughout the country, and
the regime was blanketed by a cloak of popular support.1 Nationalization
enabled the president to strengthen and dominate organized labor by in-
corporating peasant and workers’ organizations, albeit in a subordinate
position, into the political system’s power structure.2
The new regime closely resembled Callismo, however, in that both fa-
vored state intervention in the direction of the national economy. Where
Cárdenas differed from his one-time mentor was in his deeper commit-
ment to social reform. He acknowledged the gross inequities in landown-
ership that had motivated the rural masses’ rebellion and made agrarian
reform the cornerstone of his nationalist policy. During his tenure, ap-
proximately eighteen million hectares of land were allotted to the peas-
ants, “more than twice the amount distributed by all previous post-1917
regimes combined.” 3 Equally noteworthy, Cárdenas’s land distribution
was modeled partly on the ejido system, a traditional Indian form of land
tenure that vested ownership in the community, not the individual. It
was hoped that this kind of cooperative agriculture would promote so-
cial solidarity while improving the lot of the peasantry.4 Along with land
distribution came the agrarian bank and the rural school, reflecting the
president’s genuine, if paternalistic, concern for the material and educa-
tional betterment of the peasants and the Indians. Cárdenas, it follows,
was more concerned—at least up to 1938—with building popular con-
sensus and fostering national integration as a precondition for consoli-
dating state hegemony, and therefore governability, than in immediate
economic development.
The regime’s interest in the peasants’ welfare led to a positive revalori-
zation of rural culture. This reassessment was aided by the rise of profes-
sional anthropological research.5 Studies of the life and culture of peas-
ant and Indian communities generated new knowledge and awareness of
Mexico’s agrarian and ethnic groups. The founding of the National Insti-
tute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia, INAH) in 1939 formalized the state’s permanent commitment
to matters concerning ethnicity and national integration.6 The regime’s
propeasant cultural policy and the growing awareness of rural life influ-
enced literary production. Novels inspired by peasant themes, by the In-
dian way of life (the so-called indigenista literature, which was written by
 122 writing villa’s revolution

non-Indians), and by the social drama of modernization became fashion-

able and officially rewarded. Gregorio López y Fuentes’s novel El indio
(The Indian), for example, received the National Literary Prize in 1935.7
Even Mariano Azuela went along with the vogue of writing novels with
indigenista themes in San Gabriel de Valdivias, comunidad indígena (Saint
Gabriel of Valdivias, Indian Community, 1938).
The visual arts witnessed a second wave of mural painting under
Cárdenas, similar to the one sponsored by secretary of education José
Vasconcelos in 1922. Although more geared toward “social realism,” in
this wave, as in the first, indigenista and nationalist themes were the domi-
nant subjects.8 Cultural production, in short, geared toward popular na-
tionalist subjects, stressed the plight of agrarian culture and life in Indian
communities.
The first grand production of the Mexican cinema, made with pri-
vate monies and official support, was the 1935 film version of Rafael F.
Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! directed by Fernando de Fuentes. The
Cárdenas regime provided “railroads, a regiment of troops, arms, artil-
lery, uniforms, horses and military advisors.” The film adaptation was
written by Fernando de Fuentes and Xavier Villaurrutia and was based
solely on the first half of the novel. The music was composed by Silvestre
Revueltas; Rafael F. Muñoz himself played the part of Martín Espinosa.
The film brought together some of the brightest architects of the cultural
nationalist movement; it was not, however, a commercial success.9
The masses’, particularly the Indian population’s, access to basic educa-
tion was another major objective of the regime. Between 1935 and 1939,
approximately forty-one hundred rural schools were built, an increase
of more than 50 percent.10 The Cardenista so-called socialist school in-
structed students in reading, writing, and hygiene; moreover, the schools
were intended to help promote national, economic, and social integration
by instilling anti-individualistic ethics, group solidarity, and economic
independence among the students. Cardenista socialist education flirted
with the notion of anticapitalist social change, but more often than not, it
was simply the equivalent of rational and secular knowledge in the state’s
war against Catholicism. In the international political climate of the
1930s, the term had a futuristic ring to it that was invoked in reference
to social and economic development (modernization) and the creation of
the welfare state or a mixed economy.11 Ultimately, “socialism” stood for
collectivism, a kind of societal alliance that blurred (but was not aimed at
erasing) class distinctions in the interest of a common national identity
and shared goals.
 villa during cardenismo 123

The quest for national integration underlies the central themes of the
Cardenista political agenda. Agrarian reform, state-supported unionism,
measures to achieve economic and social justice, incorporation of the in-
digenous population into modern life, and massive expansion of educa-
tion were all ultimately aimed at fostering the population’s allegiance to
the Mexican state—the sole and legitimate political body representing
the interests of the nation. Cárdenas’s revolutionary nationalism, most
scholars agree, was successful in institutionalizing and cementing the re-
lationship between the state and the masses while consolidating the hege-
mony of the former.
Cardenismo set the stage for a new cycle of Villista literature that was
polemical at times. The key political episode for understanding this cycle
was the president’s break with the jefe máximo. Early in his administra-
tion, Cárdenas’s agrarian reform and sympathy toward striking workers
quickly led to a confrontation with Calles, who was critical of the pres-
ident’s populist policies and even encouraged social and political unrest
among his followers.12 In response, Cárdenas exiled the former president
in April 1936. The expulsion marked the end of the Maximato and of
fifteen years of uninterrupted rule by the northern revolutionary dynasty
of Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles.13 This break carried the
burden of creating new sources of ideological support from the revolu-
tionary past that could legitimate the regime’s populist orientation. The
ideological juncture inevitably led to a revisionist trend that was bound
to situate Gen. Francisco Villa under a new and more favorable light.
The fierce Centaur of the North had fought against both Obregón and
Calles and symbolized the vindication of popular causes. He therefore
represented an alternative revolutionary tradition anchored in grassroots
struggles that had not yet been officially recognized. In elaborating its
own brand of revolutionary nationalism, the regime opened a space for
the political rehabilitation of Pancho Villa, the most charismatic and con-
troversial of all the military caudillos.14
Historical revisionism expanded the sources of the nation’s revolution-
ary memory. Old, previously unheard, voices could now bear witness to the
past. The president’s eschewal of Calles’s ingrained anti-Villa sentiments
clearly indicated that the time was right, particularly for those politicians
and generals who had been close to Villa, to remove the stigma of hav-
ing served under the leadership of a “bandit.” For the first time since the
end of the revolutionary war, army generals who for years had remained
silent about their Villista affiliation now counted with moral and political
support to publicly and proudly acknowledge their Villista past.
 124 writing villa’s revolution

The vivid memoirs of a Villista veteran, Gen. Juan Bautista Vargas

Arreola, A sangre y fuego con Pancho Villa (Blood and Fire [My Life] with
Pancho Villa], were serialized in 1938–1939 in a Mexico City magazine.
Vargas, a member of the famous Dorados, sheds light on the fate of Villa’s
elite cadre. His memoirs provide invaluable inside information about the
military qualities, character, and violent death (in most cases) of these
faithful soldiers. They also serve to vindicate and exalt Vargas’s own par-
ticipation in the Villista movement. Silvestre Terrazas, Villa’s secretary
during his tenure as military governor in Chihuahua, began serializing
El verdadero Pancho Villa (The True Pancho Villa) in 1936. Terrazas, a
newspaper publisher and Catholic intellectual, was moved to write by the
need to justify his association with the popular leader. He depicts Villa
as an uneducated yet wise man of the people, loving and sentimental,
although at times blinded by terrible outbursts of hatred and revenge. In
short, former Villistas now felt that there was a space open for them in
the discursive construction of the revolutionary past.
Dr. Ramón Puente, Villa’s assiduous biographer and political agent,
published for the first time in Mexico City a full account of the revolu-
tionary leader’s life, Villa, en pie (Villa, Standing, 1937). The title itself,
intended to convey the idea that the book should be viewed as a statue
or monument to the fallen hero, is suggestive of the new, more toler-
ant, ideological climate. The positive reappraisal of Villa also gave rise to
passionate, and violent, rebuttals, such as the highly critical Villa ante la
historia (History Judges Villa), penned by Celia Herrera in 1939.
The following year, Nellie Campobello published Apuntes sobre la vida
militar del general Francisco Villa (Notes on the Military Life of General
Francisco Villa), an imaginative and sympathetic historical account of the
Centaur of the North’s deeds. Apuntes was the culmination of a decade
of research and writing on the subject of Villa. The second edition of
Campobello’s Cartucho, which poignantly re-creates the intimate connec-
tion between popular culture, rebel subjectivity, and regional identity in
northern Mexico, also appeared in 1940. This edition, more so than the
first, was an attempt to insert a carefully constructed regional pro-Villista
memory into the larger context of national memory. With Cárdenas in
power, her efforts to rehabilitate Villa now coincided with the official ide-
ology of a centralizing state (to which, ironically, Villa was opposed).15
Yet Martín Luis Guzmán, with his Memorias de Pancho Villa, made the
greatest and most lasting contribution to the historical rehabilitation of
Villa. The monumental work comprises five volumes, four of which were
published between 1938 and 1940.16
 villa during cardenismo 125

the politics of remembering in

Memorias de Pancho Villa and Villa ante la historia
Martín Luis Guzmán’s political travails in the 1920s and the 1930s are
intimately connected to the rise and fall of Plutarco Elías Calles. The
novelist, former congressman (diputado), and publisher had been an old
political enemy of the jefe máximo. He opposed Calles’s candidacy in
the 1924 presidential election, a costly mistake that led to the closing of
El Mundo, the newspaper he founded, directed, and owned, and to his
exile to Madrid.17 There he wrote La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of
the Caudillo, 1929), a political novel in which a chillingly cold and aloof
character named Gen. Hilario Jiménez is transparently modeled after the
jefe máximo.18 For Guzmán, a return to Mexico was out of the question as
long as the seemingly unmovable Calles remained the key power broker
in national politics. By early 1936, however, President Cárdenas was in
the process of effectively breaking up his predecessor’s power base, and
Guzmán, whose prestige as a journalist and writer was well established in
Mexico, was again welcomed in his native land.
The novelist’s repatriation was prompted by an invitation from Cárde-
nas himself, who, in all probability, was in need of intellectual allies in
his crusade against Callismo.19 One may surmise that the prospect of
a Spanish civil war lurking on the horizon also influenced the writer’s
decision to return to Mexico. It is unclear how close Guzmán’s ties to
the president and his regime were, but it is known that he mingled with
the upper echelons of the ruling circle and even engaged in joint busi-
ness ventures with several of them. In 1939, in partnership with two
prominent Cardenista politicians,20 he cofounded Edición y Distribución
Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, S.A. (EDIAPSA), an umbrella group
that in the following years would establish publishing houses, book dis-
tributors, and bookstores.
As for his writing, official documents dating from 1937 to 1940 reveal
that Guzmán was engaged in a project to write a history of the revolu-
tion, apparently with the president’s consent.21 The history never ma-
terialized, for reasons that have yet to be determined. Instead, Guzmán
wrote Memorias de Pancho Villa, an ambitious, sympathetic, and volumi-
nous work in which he attempted to reconstruct Villa’s memoirs as if the
revolutionary himself had dictated them. It was to be the greatest work of
populist literature of the period.
Two fortuitous circumstances directly contributed to the writing of
Memorias, according to Guzmán. First, his friend Nellie Campobello,
 126 writing villa’s revolution

a staunch Villa defender, convinced one of Villa’s widows, Austreberta

Rentería, to lend or donate documents from the general’s archive to
Guzmán.22 These documents contained autobiographical information
dictated by Villa to his secretary, Manuel Bauche Alcalde, in 1914, and
other data on his military career. Another source was the informal con-
versations Guzmán had with Villa in 1913–1914, which, he assures us, he
immediately and faithfully wrote down.23
His return to Mexico and access to the general’s papers shortly after he
arrived seem to have energized Guzmán, who had not produced a book-
length work since 1933 and had not written about Mexican affairs since
1929. The novelist was now in a position to return to the revolution and
Villa, subjects close to his life experience and his literary and political
interests.
The Martín Luis Guzmán of Memorias appears to have experienced
a rather dramatic change of heart about Villa since the publication of El
águila y la serpiente in 1928. In that book, he describes the guerrilla leader
as a jaguar, a dangerously primitive man driven by blind impulses, who
needed to be controlled and guided by more enlightened minds if the
revolution were to succeed. Guzmán, one of Villa’s political agents but
one who distrusted and was fearful of the caudillo, eventually conspired
against him and succeeded in cleverly escaping from his “clutches.” 24
It was not uncommon among revolutionary intellectuals to try to
distance themselves from Villa in the 1920s. In defeat, Villa had become
the epitome of the rowdy fighter, and in educated circles he was per-
ceived as more of a bandit than a revolutionary, an image promoted by
Carrancista propaganda since 1915. Members of the urban intelligent-
sia who had been with Villa in the Division of the North’s heyday did
not want to be too closely associated with so discredited a figure. The
Guzmán who wrote El águila was not indifferent to this cultural milieu.
By the 1930s, the intellectual atmosphere had changed. The Cárdenas
regime directed its attention to alleviating the poverty, injustices, and
abuses suffered by the people in the countryside. This political shift en-
tailed official recognition that the revolution had yet to fulfill its mission
of social redemption in rural Mexico, which produced the bulk of the
soldiers who fought in the revolution. The regime’s agrarianism carried
an implicit condemnation of urban culture and favored the vindication
of the campesinos, the Indians, and the social outcasts. All of this helped
Villa’s historical recuperation. Often uncomfortable in urban settings,
in words and deeds, President Cárdenas himself repeatedly expressed his
 villa during cardenismo 127

preference for the simple ways of peasant life, which, he believed, was the
source of the Mexican nation’s most enduring virtues.25
Cárdenas’s agenda involved a shift from urban to rural settings, “from
middle class to poor families . . . from the highly restricted notion of
privatized, individual citizenship to an inclusive notion of public, group
citizenship.” 26 His nationalistic program, in short, was based on the po-
litical and cultural recognition of the rural poor, and Villa, the champion
of the poor par excellence, symbolized the kind of popular historical sub-
ject that the regime preferred. Friedrich Katz has summarized the change
that took place in the attitude toward Villa after Cárdenas came to power
and its influence on Guzmán: “I believe that under Cardenismo there was
a change: Calles and Obregón had fought against Villa, they were respon-
sible for his death and obviously did not want him vindicated. Cárdenas
wanted to achieve the unity of all the revolutionary groups and vindicate
Villa’s image, and I believe he probably had a lot to do with, at the very
least he encouraged, Martín Luis Guzmán, writing those Memorias.” 27
Whether the president actually urged Guzmán to write about Villa,
Memorias certainly was a cultural undertaking that captured the spirit of
Cardenismo. Politically, the book was intended to exalt Villa’s memory as
eloquently as possible in order to offset the guerrilla leader’s defamation
by Callista counterrevolutionary elements. This time around, Guzmán’s
Villa would not be a savage, jaguarlike rebel, but a highly humanized in-
dividual, socially redeemed by an armed struggle of national liberation.
The book was also didactic or exemplary in that it set out to demon-
strate how a poor, uneducated man, the victim of a dictatorial govern-
ment, could rise above his life of banditry to become the greatest symbol
of popular triumph over a well-entrenched, socially unjust system. The
first volume of Memorias sets the moral tone for the entire work and is
steeped in the romantic literary tradition about outlaws: the honest man
of humble origins who is wronged by society and rebels. Honor and sur-
vival, revenge and a quest for social justice are the driving forces behind
the hero’s actions. Although sometimes gullible or ill-influenced, Villa
the hero is never evil-minded; he is brave and cunning, a keen observer,
considerably reasonable and fair-minded, ever patriotic and concerned
about the plight of the poor.28
Guzmán sought an oral narrative style that would convincingly re-
produce Villa’s tone of voice and popular speech. Villa’s spoken words
had been transcribed in the documents Guzmán received in a manner
that attempted to “improve” the general’s verbal expressiveness. Bauche
 128 writing villa’s revolution

Alcalde, Guzmán notes, “dedicated himself to translating into the lan-

guage of a man coming from Mexico City what Villa had said or or-
dered to be written.” 29 To correct the effect of estrangement and lack of
authenticity produced by these urban prejudices concerning linguistic
propriety, Guzmán decided to write Memorias to mimic Villa’s colloquial
and uncultured yet richly textured rural language, “Castilian from the
mountains of Durango and Chihuahua, excellent Castilian, popular, not
vulgar, archaic.” 30 The challenge for the author, which made Memorias
his most daring literary project, was to restore the voice of the Other in a
convincing manner without transgressing the boundaries of literary art.31
Not surprisingly, all three objectives—the political, the didactic, the ar-
tistic—were wholeheartedly in line with Cardenismo’s populist cultural
ideology.
Memorias is divided into five books. The first four—El hombre y las
armas (The Man and His Weapons, 1938); Campos de Batalla (Battlefields);
Panoramas políticos (Political Panoramas, 1939); and La causa del pobre (The
Poor People’s Cause, 1940)—were published by the prestigious Editorial
Botas. Memorias begins with Villa’s adolescent initiation as a reluctant
outlaw and ends shortly after the 1914 Convention of Aguascalientes. A
fifth book, Adversidades del bien (Adversities of the Good), added in 1951
to Memorias, which was now consolidated into a single volume, records
Villa’s military defeat by the forces of Álvaro Obregón in 1915.32
Roughly one third of Memorias is based on Bauche Alcalde’s texts.
Guzmán gathered information for the rest of the project through ques-
tionnaires sent to former Villistas and conversations with intellectuals
like Luis Aguirre Benavides, one of Villa’s personal secretaries.33 With
the considerable documentation at his disposal and his penchant for
historical accuracy, the writer proceeded to weave together an impres-
sive amount of information on Villa’s military biography. Accounts of
persecutions, incarcerations and escapes, skirmishes, robberies and kill-
ings from Villa’s social banditry days are followed by the recounting of
his revolutionary exploits, innumerable battles, big and small, strategic
mobilizations, quarrels among the revolutionary factions, alliances, and
betrayals. To increase the verisimilitude of his work, the former ateneísta
skillfully inserted and rewrote historical documents and other material
into the narrative, drawing on military communiqués, telegrams, political
speeches, dialogues with key generals and advisers drawn from written
and oral sources and his personal recollection.
The factual content of the narrative makes the book a standard ref-
erence for historians. Guzmán added to these facts a series of personal
 villa during cardenismo 129

reflections purportedly made by the general on a variety of issues and in-

cidents. Among these are Villa’s thoughts on President Madero and why
he remained loyal to him, his views on the expulsion of Spanish citizens
from Chihuahua, the patriotic meaning of his soldiers’ deaths, Carranza’s
divide-and-conquer tactics, and Villa’s own lack of education.
These expressions of Villa the narrator’s inner thoughts and feelings
play a crucial role in the configuration of the “new” Villa, for they pro-
vide a plausible and morally responsible rationale for personal acts of vio-
lence and critical military decisions. Villa’s thought process is conveyed
through the logical unfolding of plain statements, causally connected by
explicative markers (“but,” “it so happens,” “because,” “that is”). A lim-
ited and somewhat melodramatic vocabulary befitting Villa’s notorious
sentimentality adds credibility to the soliloquies. A case in point is Villa’s
meditation on the corruptive force of money:
The rich men who hold power exercise injustice and cruelty over the
people. But these rich men are not men different from the men whom
they persecute and exploit. The rich, before being rich, are the same
as the poor in regard to the inclinations of their spirit. But what hap-
pens is that when men are blessed with wealth, almost all of them are
blinded by the desire to have more and . . . they no longer remember
the suffering of the poor, nor do they think about what it is like to suffer
under the tyranny of another. (315)

Another example is Villa’s moral justification for the widespread revolu-

tionary practice of forced loans: “The money they [the rich] had given
me did not really belong to them, but to the people, who are the true
owners of all the money there is in a country, because it is the people who
produce it with the labor of their hands” (284).
Villa’s class consciousness, articulated in rudimentary, commonsense
language, is more telling of the populist rhetoric adopted by Guzmán
than of Villa’s otherwise undeniable social awareness. The notion that
the poor are the true producers of wealth and therefore the rightful own-
ers of the riches amassed by the affluent is not too far removed from the
collectivist economic ethics of Cardenismo. The evocative reference to
the hands of working people brings to mind the poetic imagery of social-
ist realism. By having Villa’s subjectivity gravitate toward the regime’s
populist socialism, Guzmán was positioning himself as an intellectual ally
of the president he had embraced on his return to Mexico.
Guzmán’s introspective asides and his profuse recording of belligerent
actions had a deleterious effect on the overall literary construction of the
 130 writing villa’s revolution

protagonist. Villa the narrator was gradually reduced to the role of the
author’s mouthpiece; Guzmán was primarily interested in the description
of military events and political incidents, in the utterance of opportunis-
tic ideological postures, and in communicating his own well-meant, if
slightly condescending, ideas about the popular leader. The problem is
evident in Guzmán’s brilliant effort to reproduce a believable narrative
voice. Using rural grammatical constructions such as parallel structures
and pleonastic phrases as well as word repetition and popular idioms,34
Guzmán ably re-creates Villa the raconteur; however, after hundreds of
pages, these recurring stylistic devices become conventional and predict-
able, testing the reader’s endurance. In the end, Memorias de Pancho Villa
seems too controlled by the author’s awareness of the kind of narrative
voice he is trying to reproduce. As a result of Guzmán’s ventriloquist act,
Villa the man of flesh and blood remains a curiously remote, evanescent
figure throughout the book.
These problems notwithstanding, Guzmán’s considerable accomplish-
ment should not be underestimated. He was able to piece together the
most comprehensive account ever written of Villa’s life to 1915, disclos-
ing in the process a wealth of historical information about the general’s
military career that was little known in the late 1930s. By assuming a
point of view that purportedly gives Villa’s exculpatory account of his
own life, Guzmán portrays him not as a cold-blooded murderer but as
a fighting man who insists on the moral dimension of his actions and is
philosophical about war and social issues. Guzmán presents a Villa whose
violent conduct appears less threatening, more socially acceptable to the
values of Mexico’s urban middle-class, the key social group in the for-
mation of national public opinion. This revisionist portrayal of the cau-
dillo invites the reader to come to terms with and acknowledge Villa’s
emancipatory role in the revolutionary struggle. For political as much as
personal reasons, Guzmán’s literary effort to rehabilitate the Centaur of
the North coincided with the official stance of creating a space for him
among the official heroes of the revolution.
The publication of Memorias also had a positive, albeit limited, influ-
ence on the evolution of Mexican literature. Using a popular, conversa-
tional style to reproduce Villa’s speech, Guzmán departed from a long-
standing tradition of literary authority sustained by erudite culture and
the presence of an educated narrator,35 a tradition upheld by his fellow
ateneístas ( José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Julio Torri, Pedro Henríquez
Ureña). This was a noteworthy change for a writer of his intellectual
stature. His work implicitly fostered a new kind of authority based on
 villa during cardenismo 131

the writer’s ability to convincingly reproduce the voice of the people.

This kind of literary effort, already at work at least partially in Azuela,
Muñoz, and Campobello, required a life experience of social and physi-
cal proximity to the masses, or a certain amount of fieldwork. Many elite
writers rejected this contact, for they thought it unbecoming of their
social status and even distasteful. To Guzmán’s credit, and in spite the
narrative and ideological limitations of Memorias de Pancho Villa, the path
he followed unquestionably helped support the cultural legitimacy of this
kind of literary authority. Guzmán’s apologia, however, would not go
unchallenged.

Shortly after the appearance of the first volume of Memorias de Pancho

Villa, Celia Herrera published Villa ante la historia (a propósito de un monu-
mento que quieren levantarle) (History Judges Villa [Regarding a Monu-
ment They Want to Erect to Him], 1939), the most virulent diatribe ever
written against Villa. The author belonged to the Herrera clan from the
vicinity of Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, and had good personal reasons
to oppose any official or civic attempt to rehabilitate Villa. Her uncle was
Gen. Maclovio Herrera, a prominent revolutionary who defected from
the caudillo’s forces to join Carranza in the fall of 1914. He even wrote a
proclamation labeling his former military boss a “bandit.” 36 Villa’s feel-
ing of betrayal ran all the deeper and his hatred for the Herreras was all
the more unrelenting because the family came from the very heart of
Villista territory. Their defection was a personal affront.
Within the boundaries of regional life, the Villa-Herrera conflict was
to be a feud of tragic, even epic, proportions. The brave Maclovio Herrera
was killed in 1915, although not in battle fighting his former commander,
as he probably would have preferred, but by friendly fire during a recon-
naissance mission on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.37 His
brother Gen. Luis Herrera met a less-ironic but more-terrifying death.
Captured as he lay sick in his hotel bed after the battle of Torreón in
1916, he was thrown from the hotel window, shot, and then hanged by
Villista soldiers in front of the train station, where he was left for two days
with Carrancista currency stuffed in his hands. Three other members of
the Herrera family were killed in 1919 when the Villistas took a number
of prisoners from the defensas sociales that had unsuccessfully resisted an
attack on Parral. Villa unexpectedly pardoned them all except Maclovio’s
father, José de la Luz, and two brothers, Zeferino and Melchor, who were
among those captured; they were sentenced to death. Such was the cau-
dillo’s hatred for the Herrera family that he made it a point to be present
 132 writing villa’s revolution

when the sentence was carried out the following morning. The Herreras
died a “manly death,” in the words of one witness, shouting insults at
Villa as they were about to be hanged in the city’s cemetery.38
The Herrera clan had its revenge a few years later, when Jesús
Herrera, the sole surviving brother, participated in an elaborate and suc-
cessful conspiracy to ambush and assassinate Villa. Villa and his compan-
ions all died in a hail of bullets as they were leaving Parral one morning in
the general’s car. Villa, at the wheel, never had a chance to draw his gun.
He was hit by nine bullets and died instantly.39
Celia Herrera was a schoolteacher, not a professional writer. What
compelled her to take up her pen was a plan to erect a monument to the
revolutionary leader, which she vehemently opposed.40 She wrote Villa
ante la historia to make her case against the project and to counteract
the governmental campaign to redeem the history of her family’s execu-
tioner. As such, her work stands at odds with and, in many ways, is a
response to the publication of the first volume of Guzmán’s Memorias de
Pancho Villa and to the influence the latter was bound to have on public
opinion. In a veiled attack on Guzmán and other intellectuals who were
rewriting the historical importance of Villa and the Villista movement,
Herrera confesses her indignation: “It surprises me that the truth, con-
cealed by passions, would flee the mind of historians and cultured writers,
to the extreme of glorifying the bestial man.” 41
Written in a melodramatic style, Celia Herrera’s brief book is orga-
nized into two sections. Her animosity toward Villa is open and direct
in both. She accords him no honorability or redeeming traits, as an in-
dividual or as a revolutionary leader. Her message is plain and direct:
you do not build a monument to a ruthless provincial bandit, a criminal
who found in the revolution the perfect excuse to exercise his predatory
nature at will and on a grand scale.
The first section is an inventory of atrocities allegedly committed
mostly by Villa himself between 1890 and 1919. Cattle rustling and
random killings, kidnappings and rapes, hordes of Villistas terrorizing
the towns and cities of northern Mexico, and executions of Chinese are
among the iniquities she records, at times, in horrifying detail. She pre-
sents extorting money from wealthy people by abducting family mem-
bers as Villa’s preferred modus operandi. She claims that another com-
mon practice was tormenting and burning his victims alive, particularly
women. Her inclusion of the names of victims, the towns or cities and the
year in which the assaults and killings allegedly took place add credibility
to the stories. These historical facts, the reader is told, come directly
 villa during cardenismo 133

from the families of the victims, though it is clear that some references
are petty fabrications or are impossible to prove. Although no reliable in-
formation exists on Villa’s childhood and adolescence, Herrera states that
his criminal tendencies manifested themselves before the age of twelve in
a propensity to steal chickens. She writes how, after personally murdering
several men, Villa wallowed in the blood of his victims. This story, among
others, suggests that Herrera was harping on her claims of the general’s
monstrosity. In any case, whatever truth there may be in her book—and
there is probably a great deal of it in many of her anecdotes—it is clear
that it is enmeshed in and magnified by the aura of Villa’s dark legend,
which she actively cultivated.42
The second section, more personal and moving than the first, draws
extensively from the author’s traumatic childhood experiences. Her vivid
testimonial centers on the Herrera family’s nightmarish life of hiding
during the Villista raids on Hidalgo del Parral between 1916 and 1919.
Their very survival was subject to the battles for control of the city be-
tween Villistas, from whom they sought protection, and Carrancistas,
with whom they sided. During guerrilla attacks, the family always feared
being informed on, caught, and shot by the guerrilla leader, so they were
constantly on the run. The men fled to the mountains and fought while
the women and children surreptitiously moved among the houses of
friendly families and, when possible, escaped from the city. In one such
raid, Herrera’s father was killed in the fray.
Herrera’s account of life in hiding, of the anguish and suffering of
her family, has biblical undertones. The moral righteousness of the anti-
Villa families, their relentless persecution, call to mind the travails of the
first Christians. The climax is reached when she describes the desper-
ate battle by the defensas sociales to repel the enemy and the subsequent
capture and execution of her grandfather and uncles during Holy Week,
1919. With the crucifixion of Jesus Christ lurking symbolically in the
background, Herrera enshrouds the local anti-Villa fighters in the cloak
of martyrdom.
Besides vindicating the members of the Herrera family who died fight-
ing the Villistas, the author’s testimonial unintentionally hints at the un-
derlying class-based nature of the local resistance (the defensas sociales)
to Villa’s forces. Herrera’s testimony calls attention to the members of
the educated, professional class (doctors, schoolteachers) and merchants
who repudiated Villa because of their respectability, social standing, and
the fact that the popular leader allowed large-scale looting of stores.43
In Hidalgo del Parral, the Herreras were aided by people from all walks
 134 writing villa’s revolution

of life, most of them respectable, sometimes even well-to-do, and their

lower-class servants. It was a fairly privileged group, upholding the moral
torch of order, work, and decency, that had to protect its property and
interests from the encroachment of the unruly masses. The writer’s fa-
ther made a living as a merchant, we learn in passing, a significant piece
of information, for, in Villa ante la historia, it is precisely the merchant
community, as well as any person of wealth, that is alleged to be the pri-
mary target of Villa’s actions.44 Occasionally, we also learn, the guerrillas
were aided by members of the lower classes, who joined in the plunder of
stores and houses.
Other episodes bring to the fore Herrera’s own class values. At one
point, she recalls the story of a decent señorita hiding on a ranch who,
the author was told, had to kneel behind a metate and pretend for several
days that she was doing housework (“pasó los días ‘disfrazada’ de mujer
del rancho . . . hincándose detrás del metate” [75]), so that she would not
raise suspicions when visitors arrived. The anecdote vividly illustrates the
agonizing fear of many women in those turbulent years. In telling the
story, however, the narrator also communicates her shock at the fact that
the señorita had to degrade herself by pretending to be kitchen help—in-
appropriate for a woman of her social status—in order to conceal her
true identity. The book thus offers a gripping account of the violence and
instability that overtook Hidalgo del Parral from the perspective of a lo-
cal petit bourgeois living under intermittent siege.
If Villa’s “white” legend, apparent in Ramón Puentes’s books, reaches
a culminating stage in Guzmán’s Memorias, Celia Herrera’s book is the
most important source of his “black” legend from 1939 on.45 Herrera’s
book aroused the sympathetic interest of two members of the intellectual
elite. José Vasconcelos, a long-standing anti-Villista, praised Herrera’s
moral zeal and her commitment to practicing “the fertile heroism found
in truth” and took the opportunity to rail against those literati “who suf-
fer from the moral complicity complex of siding with the criminal.” 46
Vasconcelos had become an increasingly conservative and bitter thinker.
He loathed the revolution and its outcome, had returned to the teachings
of the Catholic Church, and was a devoted enemy of Cardenismo.47 Con-
sequently, his review, abetted most likely by the underlying religiosity
of the book, expresses genuine empathy with Herrera’s moral outrage.
It was also his way of criticizing “the Freemason” Guzmán’s overtures
toward the Mexican government.
A younger cultural and political commentator, Salvador Novo, com-
mended Herrera’s work for very different reasons. Novo, the son of a
 villa during cardenismo 135

Spanish merchant, lived in the northern city of Torreón as a child and,

along with his family, endured the hostility of the Villistas. He fully
agreed with Herrera’s account of Villa’s “reign of terror” and scorned
Villa’s panegyrists, the “Martín Luis Guzmáns and Ramón Puenteses.” 48
An irreverent and caustic writer who had been expelled from the gov-
ernment bureaucracy by “the flood of leftists hauled in by Cárdenas,” 49
Novo published his review anonymously, mindful, perhaps, of not openly
antagonizing Cardenistas (in contrast with Vasconcelos, who always did)
from the intellectual and political world with which he was frequently in
contact.50
Herrera’s Villa ante la historia represents a significant effort to coun-
teract the output of pro-Villista literature. The book suffered from edito-
rial limitations, however. It was not printed by a commercial publishing
house in Mexico City, but perhaps in northern Mexico, a culturally and
politically marginal center where the writer was then residing. The edi-
tion was most likely paid for by the Herrera family as part of its crusade to
prevent Villa’s posthumous glorification. The number of copies printed
and the distribution had to be limited.51 In contrast, Guzmán’s volumes
on Villa were published by Editorial Botas, the premier publishing house
for the literature of the revolution at the time.

The four volumes of Memorias produced between 1938 and 1940 rep-
resent the greatest contribution to the attempt during the Cárdenas
presidency to include Pancho Villa in the pantheon of official heroes of
the revolution. Endorsing this ideological endeavor were the leftist in-
tellectuals organized around Ruta, the culture magazine of the Liga de
Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers
and Artists), which supported the Cárdenas regime.52 Reviews praised
the respectful treatment of Villa and defended Guzmán’s re-creation of
popular language. Voices in the opposition, such as Herrera and her com-
mentators, were also heard, but they were more isolated or marginal, re-
flecting the minority position they occupied in those years in relation to
the government’s policy of promoting national reconciliation.
Herrera’s acrimonious testimony is significant not only as a personal
or family vendetta; it was an expression of the grievances and animosity
against Villa that were very much alive at the time. President Cárdenas
had called on Mexicans to put behind them the mistakes committed by all
the revolutionary leaders of the past and, instead, to remember their
positive contributions to the nation. However, too many people had died
and left hundreds of resentful widows and orphans, countless brutalities
 136 writing villa’s revolution

had been committed, and scars were still open. The revolutionary war
had divided the nation, and Villa’s participation was still too close in time
and controversial. Many of his military and political enemies where still
active and working for the Mexican government. Thus Villa’s official re-
habilitation remained an unfinished task during the Cárdenas presidency.
Guzmán’s and Herrera’s books participate actively in the politics of
remembering at a time when Villa’s historical role was being reassessed
for ideological and political reasons in the nation’s official culture.53 It is
possible that neither book would have been written had not the state’s
policy toward Villa changed after 1934. Memorias de Pancho Villa is in
accordance with and, in many ways, a product of Cárdenas’s conciliatory
policy and cultural populism, whereas Villa ante la historia is a bitter reac-
tion to that same policy, a work symptomatic of the difficulty of creating
a national memory that wished to overlook the painful memories of grief-
stricken survivors.
 v i l l i s m o ’s l e g a c y Chapter 7

By the end of the Cárdenas presidency, in late 1940, Gen. Francisco Villa
had yet to be included in the pantheon of official heroes of the Mexican
Revolution, despite the president’s reconciliation and inclusion policy.
Villa’s political and military enemies who were active in the revolutionary
government, particularly in northern Mexico, apparently obstructed his
historical rehabilitation. Cárdenas did succeed, however, through agrar-
ian reform, economic nationalism, and revolutionary discourse, in build-
ing the social consensus necessary to unify the country. His consolidation
of the Mexican state’s hegemony brought to a close the reconstruction
era. Thereafter, Mexico’s presidents favored accelerated industrialization
and adopted conservative policies on issues of social justice, thereby dis-
tancing themselves from Villa’s revolutionary legacy.
During the 1950s and the 1960s, the Centaur of the North remained
an unspoken subject in official revolutionary memory and politics. It was
only after memories had faded and most veterans of the revolution had
passed away that Villa’s status in the nation’s official memory was revis-
ited. In 1965, Pres. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, in need of popular legitimation,
decided to identify himself and his regime with the revolutionary “spirit”
of General Villa and officially recognized his status as a national hero.1
In 1976, the Mexican government unearthed Villa’s remains, buried in
Hidalgo del Parral, and solemnly transferred them to the Monument of
the Revolution in Mexico City.2 A half century after his death, the unruly
Villa had finally been co-opted by the Mexican state.
Literature also moved away from the subject of Villa and Villismo
after Cárdenas left the presidency. Not only did the state’s cultural policy
abandon the emphasis on social literature, but the emergence of an urban
society and mass culture beginning in the 1940s introduced new themes
that gradually displaced the revolutionary past as the preferred topic of the
nation’s novelists. After Cárdenas, few literary works on Villa appeared.
The Villismo literature written during reconstruction, however, en-
dured. Villista writers were among the first to construct, using a vari-
 138 writing villa’s revolution

ety of innovative narrative techniques, powerful images of a people in

arms, of the revolutionary masses who, until then, had been left out of
the national project. In this sense, these writers contributed to outlining
the physiognomy and the attributes of a popular national identity, which
had not previously existed. In the cultural imagining of Mexicanness, the
emphasis on Villa’s machismo communicated lower-class strength and
resistance to oppression, hence its appeal; but it also reinforced the values
of traditional patriarchy in postrevolutionary Mexico and the continued
marginalization of women in the affairs of the nation.
References to manly behavior during the revolution were also used to
illustrate soldiers’ limitations and thereby suggest the place they should
occupy in the reconstruction process. In the works of Guzmán and
Azuela, for example, Villa and the rural masses are portrayed—the
authors’ sympathies notwithstanding—as frightfully violent, backward,
and antimodern, lacking the intellectual and moral attributes necessary
to lead the nation into the future. By cultivating this kind of image, which
was sustained on the tenets of urban citizenship (social discipline, literacy,
individualistic bourgeois morality, and the subordination of the coun-
tryside to the city), these writers—regardless of their personal views on
presidential politics—became unofficial advocates of the modernizing,
middle-class project of nationhood promoted by the postrevolutionary
regimes.3 This national project was fueled by two contradictory impulses,
which Azuela and Guzmán skillfully amalgamated: the nation’s cultural
need to rescue and represent nonurban, popular subjects, people from
the “hinterland,” the proud source of Mexican “values” and identity; and
the social urgency to leave behind the rural world and culture this same
project was intent on transforming.
Campobello and Muñoz did not follow this ideological scheme. They
did not write to overcome or leave behind, but to preserve and remember
and to mythologize the revolution in the hinterland. Their works mark
the appearance in Mexican literature of an authorial consciousness that
was less permeated by the moral standards of the hegemonic class proj-
ect and its contradictions. By emphasizing different aspects of Mexico’s
northern frontier culture, Campobello and Muñoz introduced an ethics
of violence, associated with subaltern struggles, that was removed from
the realm of abstract meaning and liberal conceptualization found in the
works of Azuela and Guzmán. The latter always distanced themselves in
their work from popular violence, because they saw it as a defining trait
of the Other. In contrast, Campobello and Muñoz portrayed violence
as a fact of life in times of war. It was something to be identified with,
 villismo’s legacy 139

celebrated, deplored, or condemned, to be amazed at or indifferent to, or

even to be laughed at, depending on how and on whom it was exerted,
who wielded it, and why. The meaning assigned to violent actions in ¡Vá-
monos con Pancho Villa! and Cartucho is inseparable from the struggle for
social liberation and inextricably woven into the contradictory dynam-
ics of constantly evolving military and personal antagonisms; it is always
contextualized. Violence is therefore a concept that never operates above
the lives and travails of the characters, because it is seen as integral to
human reality, never something external, distant, a social behavior that
belongs only to Others.
The writings of Campobello and Muñoz were instrumental in incor-
porating the border region’s memory of Villismo into the consciousness
of the nation and in articulating a radical view of the war that had never
been voiced in Mexican literature. Campobello did so by recalling her
childhood memories and by re-creating oral forms of cultural politics
that intellectuals usually looked down on and dismissed. Her regional
knowledge and perspective of the war also made visible the irreducible
heterogeneity of the Villista world and the decentralizing ideology be-
hind the movement.
Muñoz, in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! written with a more commercial
purpose in mind, preferred to work with the regional mythology sur-
rounding the militaristic travails of Villa and his diehard soldiers. Us-
ing—hyperbolically—the soldier’s perspective and rationale for fight-
ing, Muñoz displayed a less judgmental (and thus more tolerant) attitude
toward popular violence than did Azuela and Guzmán. Campobello and
Muñoz, in short, reproduced, through different means, cultural codes in
which subaltern alterity was the norm, thereby opening a critical space
in mainstream postrevolutionary culture for the evaluation of popular
rebellions on their own terms.
Villismo’s legacy is critical in the development of Mexican literature
and culture. Villa’s charismatic leadership and the northern frontier cul-
ture of violence associated with him provided abundant material for writ-
ers, who introduced new techniques and narrative strategies that drew
from popular (and elite) cultural sources. Their success—in the era of
postrevolutionary nationalism —was contingent on their ability to repre-
sent, convincingly, subaltern subjectivities.
My subalternist-regionalist approach suggests that two distinct nar-
rative genealogies emerged from this endeavor. The works of Azuela
and Guzmán became the “master narratives” for a literary tradition in
which cultural Otherness is celebrated and endorsed as well as, para-
 140 writing villa’s revolution

doxically, discredited and suppressed. The indigenista social novels of

Gregorio López y Fuentes, Francisco Rojas González, and even Rosario
Castellanos respond to this tradition. The representation of Otherness in
this tradition carries implications beyond the realm of literature in that
it has helped naturalize cultural and class biases regarding subaltern poli-
tics. At a time when political centralism and integrative nationalism have
been weakened or are being redefined, the region-based forms of politi-
cal identity and community of the historically disenfranchised become an
important source in the collective democratic task of reconceptualizing
and reinterpreting Mexico as a multicultural nation.
The works of Campobello and, to a lesser degree, Muñoz make the
case for taking the subaltern seriously as a subject of knowledge, without
previously disqualifying or patronizing him or her, as has been the case
historically. These authors represent an alternative narrative tradition in
which writers acknowledge and artistically explore the richness and hu-
man complexity of popular characters’ subjective processes. Juan Rulfo,
Antonio Estrada Muñoz, and some works by Elena Garro and Jesús
Morales Bermúdez cannot be explained properly without an understand-
ing of this genealogy.
Finally, in the broader context of the production of discourses about
the past, my discussion of Villista literature points to the need for iden-
tifying and recuperating discourses of emancipation imbedded in the
dominant culture, as well as recovering the works of regional and local
intellectuals that, for cultural and political reasons, have been silenced or
forgotten in the making of modern Mexico.
 notes

introduction
1. Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 206.
2. Social bandits are “outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminal,
but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as he-
roes, as champions, avenger, fighter for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation,
and in any case men to be admired, helped and supported” (Eric J. Hobsbawm,
Bandits, 13). According to Hobsbawm, Francisco Villa falls into this category.
3. Friedrich Katz, the foremost specialist on Villismo, declared in an inter-
view: “Of all the revolutionary movements, Villismo is the most difficult to clas-
sify. . . . In March of 1913 Villa could only count on eight supporters. . . . At the
end of that year [1913], without forced conscription, 5,000 armed men followed
him [Villa], most of them on horses. What happened in those nine months? This
is just one example of the mystery of Francisco Villa” ( Juan José Doñán, “Entre-
vista con Friedrich Katz,” 11). For the making of the Villista movement in 1913,
see Katz, The Life and Times, 203–228.
4. Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican
Revolution, 42. See also Adolfo Gilly, La revolución interrumpida, 87–105.
5. Jorge Vera Estañol, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 393– 405.
6. Jesús Silva Herzog, Breve historia de la revolución mexicana, vol. 1, 47. All
translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
7. Arturo Warman in Enrique Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano, 105.
8. Katz, The Life and Times, 566.
9. Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 93.
10. “I do not believe that anyone has the support that Francisco Villa has,”
Villa bragged in a 1922 interview. “For this reason the politicians are afraid of
me. . . . I am a real soldier . . . I can mobilize 40,000 men in 40 minutes” (Katz,
The Life and Times, 756). Villa probably exaggerated his capacity to mobilize his
followers; however, he did represent a permanent threat to the Mexican govern-
ment, and this is one of the reasons he was assassinated.
11. Ibid., 761–768, 771–782.
12. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 98.
13. Ibid.
 142 notes to pages 4 – 7

14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 95.
17. This procedure is unique to postrevolutionary narratives.
18. Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano, 104.
19. Popular consciousness can be defined as “politicized forms of knowledge
and identity, that are consensually recognized by subaltern groups during par-
ticular historical conjunctures” (Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popu-
lar Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Everyday Forms of
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, 11).
20. The school of subaltern studies originated in India in the 1980s among
historians who began questioning and revising elite nationalist versions (guided
by the Western tradition of the Enlightenment) of the country’s colonial history.
The original objective was to recover the subaltern’s perspective, the Other’s con-
sciousness of historical events the dominant versions of which tended to suppress
or distort those events. The school has evolved and, consequently, the emphasis
and critical perspectives have shifted and may vary greatly among subalternist
scholars. For a summary, see Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial
Criticism.” See also Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected
Subaltern Studies; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Subaltern studies have
been productively applied to Mexican history; see Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant
and Nation; and Daniel Nugent, “Rural Revolt in Mexico, Mexican Nationalism
and the State, and Forms of U.S. Intervention.” For subaltern studies and the
humanities, see Latin American Subaltern Group, “Founding Statement.” For a
debate between U.S. historians and literary critics regarding the applicability of
subaltern studies to Latin America, see Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and
Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History”; and
John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation.
21. Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” 1480.
22. Nugent (“Rural Revolt in Mexico,” 17–20) agrees that Guha’s ideas are
relevant to the study of Mexican history.
23. Eric Van Young, Mexico’s Regions: Comparative History and Development, 1.
24. The volume edited by Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State For-
mation, stresses the importance of popular politics and culture in the process
of state formation in Mexico. See also Nugent, Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S.
Intervention.
25. Luis González et al. Historia regional y archivos; Thomas Benjamin and
Mark Wasserman, eds., Provinces of the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican His-
tory 1910 –1929.
26. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. His
articles, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” 33– 44, and
“The Prose of Counterinsurgency,” 45–84, appear in Guha and Spivak, Selected
Subaltern Studies.
 notes to pages 8 – 18 143

27. The word cartucho was not translated in the English edition.
28. Carlos Pacheco, La comarca oral, 114.

chapter 1
1. The Cristero War was an agrarian conflict enmeshed with the century-old
confrontation between the Catholic Church and Mexico’s Liberal state.
2. The ejido is a form of land tenure, pre-Hispanic in origin, where owner-
ship “is vested in the community, but the land may be farmed individually or
collectively; in the former it is distributed as individual or family plots among
members of the community” (Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-
Revolutionary Mexico, 68).
3. Plutarco Elías Calles, Plutarco Elías Calles: Pensamiento social y político. An-
tología (1913–1936), 104 –105.
4. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 100.
5. Calles, Plutarco Elías Calles, 78, 102–103.
6. Álvaro Matute, “La revolución recordada, inventada, rescatada,” 442.
7. Guillermo Palacios, “Calles y la idea oficial de la Revolución,” 261–278.
8. Ibid., 261–263.
9. Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada, 121.
10. Matute, “La revolución recordada,” 442– 443.
11. Enrique Montalvo, El nacionalismo contra la nación, 16.
12. John Rutherford, Mexican Society during the Revolution, 37–38.
13. Jean Franco, in Carlos Monsiváis, “Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el
siglo XX,” 1447.
14. See Víctor Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria,” (1925),
54 –99.
15. Guillermo Sheridan, Los contemporáneos ayer, 97.
16. See, for example, Antonio Castellanos, Francisco Villa, su vida y su muerte:
Sensacionales revelaciones y consideraciones sobre su vida y su asesinato; Teodoro Torres
Jr., Pancho Villa: Una vida de romance y tragedia. See also Dennis J. Parle, “The
Novels of the Mexican Revolution Published by the Casa Editorial Lozano.”
The Spanish-language press flourished in the U.S. Southwest during and af-
ter the revolution; however, the economic depression of 1929 and the subse-
quent repatriation of thousands of Mexicans diminished the readership.
17. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 76 –77.
18. There was only one military rebellion in 1929, by General Escobar, which
was promptly defeated ( Jean Meyer, “Revolution and Reconstruction in the
1920s,” 215).
19. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 97–98.
20. J. Meyer, “Revolution and Reconstruction,” 216.
21. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 97–100.
22. Arturo Anguiano, El estado y la política obrera del cardenismo, 40.
 144 notes to pages 18 – 23

23. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 100.

24. Ibid., 90 –100.
25. Ibid., 120.
26. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Cambio ideológico en la política educativa de la
SEP: Programas y libros de texto, 1921–1940,” 85–91.
27. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 99.
28. José Vasconcelos, El desastre, 28.
29. Martín Luis Guzmán, The Eagle and the Serpent, 178.
30. The interpretation of the revolutionary war that gradually came to dom-
inate Mexican historiography in subsequent decades, though not as hostile to
these popular leaders as were Vasconcelos and Guzmán, continued to be con-
sistent with the vision and aspirations of the middle class, the social sector that
ultimately reaped the greatest benefits from the conflict. Arnaldo Córdoba aptly
expresses this hegemonic perspective in his analysis of Mexican society during the
revolution: “Positioned at an equal distance from all the other social classes, the
middle sectors and their intellectuals were also in the best circumstances to ex-
plain coherently the causes of the ills that afflicted the country” (Arnaldo Córdoba,
La ideología de la revolución mexicana, 89; emphasis added)—“coherently” from the
standpoint of the interests of the middle class, that is. The idea that the middle
class is situated equidistant from the other social strata and, consequently, is in a
privileged position to understand the country’s reality is part of the myth that it
has created about itself. The myth suggests that the upper and lower classes, be-
cause of their positions at the “extremes” of society, are at an intrinsic structural
disadvantage in their ability to evaluate the nation’s problems. As a result, their
interpretation of the issues, according to this rationale, is, by definition, tenden-
tious, inadequate, and wanting in coherence; thus the self-serving myth of the
middle class providing the only truly judicious norm.
31. Katz, The Life and Times, 391.
32. Alan Knight, “Peasant and Caudillo in Revolutionary Mexico 1910 –
17,” 19.
33. Friedrich Katz, “El pensamiento social de Pancho Villa,” 293–296.
34. For the idea of the nation as an “imagined political community,” see
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 14 –16.
35. Alan Knight, “Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the
Mexican Nation.”

chapter 2
1. Mariano Azuela, “Cómo escribí Los de abajo,” 1268. For more on Azue-
la’s petit bourgeois ideology, see Jorge Ruffinelli, Literatura e ideología: El primer
Mariano Azuela (1896 –1918).
2. The novel appeared as a daily serial in the newspaper El Paso del Norte from
 notes to pages 23 – 26 145

October 27 to November 21, 1915. The newspaper published the novel in book
form that same year or early in 1916. See Stanley Robe, Azuela and the Mexican
Underdogs, 93, 121. Robe’s book contains a reproduction of the original serialized
version accompanied by a detailed historical reconstruction of Azuela’s actions
throughout the revolution and the real situations that influenced the elaboration
of the novel.
3. One notable exception is Tomóchic (1893), by Heriberto Frías, a novelized
account of an episode during the wars of extermination against the indigenous
populations of the northern frontier state of Chihuahua.
4. The change of focus in and of itself constituted an implicit acknowledg-
ment that the revolutionary middle classes had been displaced from the vanguard
of the revolutionary war. “The failure of the middle sectors to destroy the upper
classes opens the way for the action of the lower classes, campesinos and, occa-
sionally, the proletariat. It is they who, since 1913, have occupied the historical
stage” (Ángel Rama, “Mariano Azuela: Ambición y frustración de las clases me-
dias,” 181).
5. Two critics have used the phrase “novel of the masses” to define Los de
abajo. See Joseph Sommers, “Novela de la revolución: Criterios contemporá-
neos,” 739–740; and Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America, 94. For a
more extended discussion of the novel, see José Joaquín Blanco, “Lecturas de Los
de abajo.”
6. “Most of the events narrated,” writes Azuela, “were composed with the
material that I gathered in conversations with revolutionaries of different classes
and conditions, above all, the exchanges among themselves” (Azuela, Obras com-
pletas, 1087).
7. Jean Franco, Critical Passions, 453.
8. In his inaugural address of December 1, 1924, José Manuel Puig Casa-
uranc, Calles’s new minister of culture, was explicit about the vigorous social
criticism that ought to characterize the new literature, which he declared he was
committed to “publishing” and “circulating.” See John Rutherford, Mexican Soci-
ety during the Revolution, 57–58.
9. See Adalbert Dessau, La novela de la revolución mexicana, 261–268; John
Engelkirk, “The Discovery of Los de abajo”; and Luis Mario Schneider, Ruptura
y continuidad, 159–193. For a review of the critical reception of the novel in the
four decades after its appearance, see Jorge Ruffinelli, “La recepción crítica de Los
de abajo.”
10. Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria,” (1925), 14.
11. Díaz Arciniega’s book provides an extensive review of the cultural and
political debate and its results.
12. Robe, Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs, 1–71.
13. Mónica Mansour, “Cúspides inaccesibles,” 269.
14. See, for example, Guha’s Elementary Aspects and the articles compiled by
Guha and Spivak in Selected Subaltern Studies. For a summary review of the uses
 146 notes to pages 26 – 32

of subaltern studies by Latin Americanists in the U.S. academy, see Mallon, “The
Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies.”
15. For the concept of “subjectivity,” see Aralia López González, Sin imágenes
falsas, sin falsos espejos: Narradoras mexicanas del siglo XX. López González defines
subjectivity as “the structures of consciousness and the person’s desiring activity,
shaped by the norms, codes, and the discourse of society and culture, as well as by
the position that [the individual] occupies in them. . . . Subjectivity has as much
to do with conscious and unconscious desires as with sex, the body itself, percep-
tions, sensitivity, intelligence, imagination, health, etc.” (14).
16. Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs, 61. All quotations cited in the text and the
notes are from this edition.
17. I am using the Spanish names of the characters here because the English
version slightly modifies the spelling of names. For example, Montañés becomes
“Montáñez.” I use the English spelling only when quoting from the English
translation cited in note 16 above.
18. Monsiváis, “La aparición del subsuelo (sobre la cultura de la revolución
mexicana),” 36.
19. After looting the house of a wealthy cacique, Cervantes informs Macías:
“If this mess doesn’t blow over . . . if the revolution keeps on, there’s enough here
already for us to live on abroad quite comfortably” (105).
20. Rama, “Mariano Azuela: Ambición y frustración,” 147.
21. Positivistic criminology, in vogue in Mexico at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, shaped Azuela’s ideas about social violence. His ideas are not unlike
those of positivist sociologist Julio Guerrero, who in 1903 published La génesis
del crimen en México (Genesis of Crime in Mexico). Guerrero explains rural rebel-
lions and social unrest in terms of atavistic behavior, that is, discontinuous, savage
ancestral traits, genetic in origin, that reappear in modern society. In Los de abajo,
atavistic behaviors are linked to the indigenous race.
22. A group of revolutionaries exchange murderous anecdotes in a cantina:
“When I was up at Torreón I killed an old lady who refused to sell me some en-
chiladas . . . I killed a storekeeper at Parral . . . I killed a man because I always saw
him sitting at the table whenever I went to eat . . . Hmmm! I killed . . . ” (88). On
a crowded train, the conversation turns to theft: “God’s own truth is this: I have
stolen . . . Hell, I stole a lot of them sewing machines in Mexico . . . I stole some
horses in Zacatecas . . . the damned thing about it was that General Limón took a
fancy to the horses too, and he stole them from me!” (127).
23. Rama, “Mariano Azuela: Ambición y frustración.”
24. Robe, Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs, 31.
25. One critic has observed that the protagonist had already appeared in other
novels by Azuela. Macías “first came to life in the person of Gertrudis, the stable-
man in the novel Mala yerba. He reappears in Andrés Pérez, maderista, as Vicente,
another stableman”(Luis Leal, Mariano Azuela, 58). It follows that Macías is fun-
damentally a social stereotype with added features that Azuela took from his ex-
 notes to pages 32 – 44 147

periences in the revolution. My observations are not meant to express disapproval

of Azuela’s depiction of the character, but, rather, to underline the artistic and
ideological factors that entered into his elaboration.
26. Sommers, “Novela de la revolución,” 739.
27. Franco, Critical Passions, 453– 454.
28. On the conceptual and social base of these naturalistic images, Ranajit
Guha, a member of the Subaltern Studies Group, writes: “In conditions governed
by the norms of unquestioning obedience to authority, a revolt of the subaltern
shocks by its relative entropy. Hence the suddenness so often attributed to peas-
ant uprisings and the verbal imageries of eruption, explosion and conflagration
used to describe it. What is intended by such usage in many languages and many
cultures is to communicate the sense of an unforeseen break, a sharp discontinu-
ity” (Elementary Aspects, 36).
29. Franco, “Trends and Priorities for Research on Latin American Litera-
ture,” 112–113.
30. Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution, 115, 116, 118.
31. Ibid., 187.
32. Alfonso Reyes, “Pasado inmediato,” 185.
33. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 145.
34. Ibid.
35. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Move-
ments in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 1–12; see also chaps. 1–6.
36. Antonio Gramsci, “Espontaneidad y dirección consciente.”
37. Guha, Elementary Aspects, 5.
38. Alan Knight, “Los intelectuales en la revolución mexicana,” 41, 43.
39. Guha, Elementary Aspects, 15.
40. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies,” 1497.
41. Latin American Subaltern Group, “Founding Statement,” 111.
42. Regarding the institutionalization of Los de abajo, see Ruffinelli, “La recep-
ción crítica de Los de abajo.”
43. On this point, I follow Danny Anderson’s position on “cultural perspec-
tive” and the interaction of literary technique, ideology, reading, and subjectivity
(“Subjetividad y lectura: Ideología de la técnica en El luto humano y el cambio
narrativo a medio siglo,” 114).
44. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 5.
45. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,”
93–97.
46. Ibid., 94.
47. Blanco, “Lecturas de Los de abajo,” 211, 216.
48. Ruffinelli, Literatura e ideología, 80.
49. Class resentment motivates many of the excesses committed by the revo-
lutionaries, but in the case of güero Margarito violence is indiscriminate.
50. Jorge Aguilar Mora, Una muerte sencilla, justa, eterna, 146.
 148 notes to pages 44 – 50

51. Scraps of real events feed these legends, however. A grateful Villa, at the
height of his power, gave the hacienda Las Delicias in Chihuahua to Cipriano
Vargas, one of his faithful soldiers. Vargas had shown extreme loyalty to Villa
during the latter’s imprisonment in Mexico City. Vargas hid funds belonging to
Villa from the federales when his boss was taken prisoner. He later traveled to the
country’s capital and surreptitiously turned over the funds to Villa ( Juan Bautista
Vargas Arreola, A sangre y fuego con Pancho Villa, 85).
52. Blanco, “Lecturas de Los de abajo,” 223.
53. Ibid., 213.
54. Ibid.
55. Some critical comments, however, were not favorable. Victoriano Salado
Álvarez, from the elitist literary position of the old, prerevolutionary intellectual
class, complained of the author’s “useless repetitions, tremendous flaws in style”
(“inútiles repeticiones, faltas garrafales de estilo”) (in Schneider, Ruptura y con-
tinuidad, 184). In an interview, Nellie Campobello, from the standpoint of her
own regional experience of the war, decried the lack of historical truth in Azuela:
“He told pure lies in his novels. Like a bad actor, he overacted what he said about
the Revolution, about the revolutionaries” (Emmanuel Carballo, Diecinueve pro-
tagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX, 335).
56. Rutherford notes that the novelists of the revolution “had a universally
recognized master—Azuela—whose lead to follow in questions of style, form,
content, even attitude. And so the novel of this period tends to fall into well-
proved moulds of plot and character; just like the western or the detective or
the sentimental novel, the Novel of the Revolution, on acquiring popular ap-
peal, tended to become stereotyped and standardized; and certain commonplace
characters were evolved and appeared repeatedly” (Mexican Society during the
Revolution, 68).

chapter 3
1. Francisco R. Almada, Diccionario de historia, geografía y biografía chihua-
huense, (1997) 252.
2. Doris Meyer, “Translator’s note,” in Nellie Campobello, Cartucho; My
Mother’s Hands, 2.
3. Dennis Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique in Nellie Campobello’s
Cartucho,” 202.
4. It was not Campobello but the editor of the first edition, Germán List Ar-
zubide, who organized the book thematically (Blanca Rodríguez, nellie campobello:
eros y violencia, 157).
5. In an interview with literary critic Emmanuel Carballo, the writer stated
that she was born in 1909 (Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 328). Documenta-
tion unearthed by historians shows the correct date to be 1900. It follows that
her memories of the revolution actually included not only her childhood, as she
 notes to pages 50 – 52 149

always claimed, but her adolescence and the first years of her young adulthood.
See José Ramón González León, “La dama de las lilas”: Apuntes biográficos de Nellie
Campobello, 33.
6. Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 335.
7. Patricia Aulestia, “Entrevista con Nellie Campobello,” Archivo Nellie
Campobello, January 4, 1972; see also Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 74.
8. Francisca, ¡Yo! (Mexico City: LIDAN, 1929). I was unable to consult the
original edition. A facsimile can be found in Jesús Vargas Valdés and Flor García
Rufino, Francisca ¡Yo! El libro desconocido de Nellie Campobello (107–142). The fac-
simile shows that Campobello’s first book consists of fifty-four poems, far more
than the fifteen she includes in Mis libros, her collected works published in 1960.
9. Her family called her Nellie, after her mother’s pet dog (Carballo, Dieci-
nueve protagonistas, 328).
10. Matthews mentions that the sisters were “disillusioned” with Spain’s pro-
fessional theater; Rodríguez talks about “deception” (Irene Matthews, Nellie Cam-
pobello: La centaura del norte, 62; Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 78).
11. With Fernández de Castro’s encouragement, Nellie published a few ar-
ticles and poems in the Revista de La Habana (Campobello, Mis libros, 20. See also
Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 78.
12. The poems appear in Dudley Fitts, Anthology of Contemporary Latin Ameri-
can Poetry, 213–218.
13. Campobello, Mis libros, 15–16; Matthews, Nellie Campobello, 62–68.
14. Langston Hughes arrived in Havana in February of 1930, Federico Gar-
cía Lorca, in March. See Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1:
1902–1941, 178; and Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life, 282. From this and
other information provided by Campobello in her autobiographical “Prólogo”
(Mis libros, 17), we can gather that the sisters were in Havana in late 1929 and the
first months of 1930.
15. Campobello, Mis libros, 16 –17.
16. There is no doubt that knowledge of Campobello’s illegitimate child
would have tarnished her reputation as she tried to make a living and work her
way through Mexico City’s male-dominated cultural and intellectual circles,
hence the importance, in terms of social respect and survival, of being called
“Señorita Campobello.” Campobello’s case poses an interesting contrast and al-
ternative, worth exploring, with that of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, the divorced
mother and writer who became, in 1929, the lover of then–presidential candidate
José Vasconcelos, a married man. Rivas Mercado did not survive her well-known
affair with Vasconcelos; she killed herself in 1931. For a solid account of Rivas
Mercado’s intellectual and personal plight, see Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gen-
der and Representation in Mexico, 112–122.
17. Campobello, Mis libros, 14.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Ibid., 14.
 150 notes to pages 52 – 53

20. Nellie Campobello, “Inicial,” Cartucho (1931), iii–iv.

21. For the estridentista movement, see Luis Mario Schneider, El estridentismo:
O, una literatura de la estrategia.
22. Campobello, Mis libros, 17.
23. See Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 158. In his presentation, List Arzubide
mentions the “exhausted intellectualist groups” that write about the revolution
to “adorn their names with bullets.” He was most likely referring to the Contem-
poráneos group and other writers associated at the time with the Mexican state’s
cultural bureaucracy.
24. Germán List Arzubide, “Integrales,” in Campobello, Cartucho (1931), n.p.
25. Campobello, Mis libros, 26; Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 336.
26. Campobello, Mis libros, 26 –27.
27. Berta Gamboa de Camino, “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution,”
268.
28. Nellie Campobello, “Perfiles de Villa.” Campobello mentions Calles’s re-
action to this article in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo in 1958. Perhaps
because almost three decades had elapsed, she confused the date of publication;
see Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 337. The article assails what she perceived
to be the false stories surrounding Villa and goes on to praise the Centaur of
the North’s complex personality, the irresistible magnet of his military lead-
ership, and his love for the people. The most striking aspect of the article is
Campobello’s unapologetic defense of Villa’s patriarchal violence: “The man . . .
had been born to be at the service of the people,” she writes, “whether by govern-
ing them, whether by forcing them to be good, whether by killing them” (“Per-
files de Villa,” 15).
29. In one of these articles, Campobello reproduces two of Villa’s love letters
in order to reveal a facet of his personality that, she believed, would refute the
frequent accusation that he was a senseless rapist (“El Pancho Villa que no conoce
el mundo: Dos cartas de amor del guerrillero”).
30. Nellie Campobello, “Los hijos del general Villa necesitan que se acuerde
de una vez la pensión solicitada”; and Vito Alessio Robles, “Las memorias dicta-
das por el general Francisco Villa.” The memoirs constitute the original inspira-
tion for Martín Luis Guzmán’s Memorias de Pancho Villa.
31. Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Pancho Villa (Notes on the Military Life of
Pancho Villa) was published in 1940.
32. Dennis Parle notes that Campobello “was somewhat of an authority” on
corridos and points to folklore specialist Vicente T. Mendoza’s citation of her
opinion on the corrido in his 1939 study El romance español y el corrido mexicano
(Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique,” 211). A few corridos recorded by Cam-
pobello in Durango and Chihuahua are included in Mendoza’s book. Luz Corral,
another of Villa’s widows, scornfully recalled that when Campobello traveled to
Chihuahua, she passed herself off as Villa’s daughter; see Rubén Osorio, Pancho
Villa, ese desconocido: Entrevistas en Chihuahua a favor y en contra, 132.
 notes to pages 54 – 58 151

33. In the preliminary note to Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco Villa,
9–10, Villa’s widow Austreberta Rentería and Villista veteran Ismael Máynez are
mentioned as informants. Stories told by Máynez (“Ismael Máynez and Martín
López”) and by Rentería (“Samuel’s Cigarette”) are included in the new version
of Cartucho. Regional corridos appear in “The Officers of Segunda del Rayo,”
“Abelardo Prieto,” and “The Tragedy of Martín.”
34. Valeska Strickland Nájera, “La obra de Nellie Campobello,” 55. Nájera
also discusses the evolution of the narrative point of view (53–71).
35. For a study of the changes between the first and the second editions,
see Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 155–229. Campobello’s radical reaffirmation of
Villismo in the 1940 edition stands in stark contrast to Azuela, who weakened any
show of enthusiasm for Villa in the second edition of Los de abajo and, instead,
accentuated the general’s political nihilism (Aguilar Mora, Una muerte sencilla,
justa, eterna, 49).
36. I use the 1940 edition with one exception: the story “Villa,” which was
dropped from the second edition. I use the translation by Doris Meyer and Irene
Matthews (Cartucho; My Mother’s Hands). Meyer translated the third edition
(1960) of Cartucho, in which Campobello introduced only a minor addition: four
paragraphs at the end of “Nacha Ceniceros,” which do not enter into my discus-
sion of the text. For the sake of consistency and precision, in my discussion I
have, whenever necessary, altered Meyer’s anglicized spelling of some words and
modified those parts of the translation that slightly alter the meaning, and with it
the connotative field, of the Spanish text.
37. “They told Mama everything that had happened. She never forgot it”
(Campobello, Cartucho; My Mother’s Hands, 38); “‘El Peet’ said that everything
was very strange that night” (41); “ ‘They’re bringing Felipe Ángeles with some
other prisoners. They aren’t killing,’ the people were saying” (42); “‘The way his
companions tell it, Julio said to them’ ” (68); “Pepita Chacón, laughing amiably,
recounted the time General Villa himself turned up at her house” (73); “Isaías
Álvarez says: ‘One time . . . ’” (75), etc.
38. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 86 –98.
39. Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique,” 208–210.
40. Pacheco, La comarca oral, 40.
41. The grotesque is an effective survival mechanism. Mikhail Bakhtin elabo-
rates on the relationship between fear, laughter, and freedom in Rabelais and His
World, chaps. 1, 3, and 5.
42. Pacheco, La comarca oral, 114 –117.
43. T. Benjamin and Wasserman, Provinces of the Revolution.
44. Knight, “Peasant and Caudillo in Revolutionary Mexico,” 43, 44.
45. A second, and larger, geographical area would include Santa Rosalía, Ca-
margo, the city of Chihuahua, and as far as the city of Juárez and beyond the
border with the United States to El Paso, Texas. Campobello once stated: “I am
from the North—and the north of Mexico and the south of the United States are
 152 notes to pages 58 – 65

for me one and the same.” And she specified what she meant by northern Mexico:
“the mountain region of Durango, Chihuahua, and the plains of the south of the
United States: Texas, for me, continues to be part of Mexico, Arizona, and New
Mexico” (Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 331, 332–333).
46. Pedro Pérez Herrero, “Regional Conformation in Mexico, 1700 –1850:
Models and Hypotheses,” 128–131.
47. Friedrich Katz, “Pancho Villa, Peasant Movements and Agrarian Reform
in Northern Mexico,” 60.
48. Barry Carr, “Las peculiaridades del norte mexicano, 1880 –1927: Ensayo
de interpretación,” 323.
49. “The nuclear family and patriarchal values assumed particularly compel-
ling dimensions in northern New Spain. Frontier Indian conflicts rekindled me-
dieval attitudes emphasizing the valor of fighting men” (Cheryl English Martin,
Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century,
150; see also Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gen-
der in Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 98–99).
50. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 15.
51. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the
Mexican Revolution, 143–144.
52. Osorio, Pancho Villa, ese desconocido, 12; Katz, The Life and Times, 646.
53. Daniel Cazés, Los revolucionarios, 146; John Reed, Insurgent Mexico, 144 –
145.
54. See “The Dream of Pancho Villa” in Reed, Insurgent Mexico, 144 –145.
55. For a detailed description of this battle, see José María Jaurrieta, Con Villa
(1916 –1920), memorias de campaña, 87–95.
56. Gamboa de Camino, “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution,” 268.
57. Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique,” 202–203.
58. Manuel Pedro González, Trayectoria de la novela en México, 289.
59. Sophie Bidault de la Calle’s Nellie Campobello: Una escritura salida del cuerpo
also makes this point (47– 48). This book studies the relationship between writing
and body movements (dancing) in Campobello’s work.
60. The preface to the 1931 edition of Cartucho, which was left out of subse-
quent editions, ends with the following words: “My executed soldiers, asleep in
the green notebook. My dead men. My childhood toys” (iv).
61. Clementina Díaz y de Ovando, “Literatura popular contemporánea,” 39.
62. Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique,” 203.
63. Irene Matthews, “Daughtering in War: Two ‘Case Studies’ from Mexico
and Guatemala,” 152.
64. Female characters face the real danger of abduction and rape in Cartucho;
however, they do not always occupy the most precarious position in Campobello’s
work. In the few stories in which Indian characters appear, they are mistreated by
the women (by the narrator child, in an innocent display of childhood cruelty in
 notes to pages 66 – 77 153

“Zafiro y Zequiel,” and by the aunt in “For a Kiss”) and are executed without a
second thought.
65. “Memory is the epic faculty par excellence” (W. Benjamin, “The Story-
teller,” 97).
66. And, as the production of the text itself bears out, Campobello will as-
sume the task of keeping alive this subversive function by shaping it into a literary
form.
67. José Beltrán, Francisco Villa, and Tomás Urbina used to run raids to-
gether during their years as social bandits (Guillermo Ramírez, Melitón Lozoya:
Único director intelectual en la muerte de Villa, 57–65).
68. W. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 97.
69. Matthews, “Daughtering in War,” 149.
70. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 31.
71. Nájera, “La obra de Nellie Campobello,” 58.
72. On the poetization of death, see Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique,”
206 –207.
73. Ibid., 207.
74. On the popular sources for this type of narrative and the ritualistic origins
of the smile as associated with the notions death and resurrection, see Mikhail
Bakhtin, Problemas de la poética de Dostoievski, 151–193.
75. This narrative procedure is typical of storytelling. “Storytellers tend to
begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they them-
selves have learned what is to follow, unless they simply pass it off as their own
experience” (W. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 92).
76. Katz, The Life and Times, 522–523; Federico Cervantes, Francisco Villa y la
historia, 511–512; Vargas Arreola, A sangre y fuego con Pancho Villa, 278–285.
77. For an eyewitness account of “Urbina’s country” and of the general him-
self, see Part I (“Desert War”) of Reed’s Insurgent Mexico.
78. Américo Paredes, Culture and Folklore on the Texas-Mexican Border, 148.
79. This brief list is far from exhaustive and does not fully represent the many
variables offered by the text. Legends, corridos, and other popular narrative forms
also have their place in these stories.
80. Kemy Oyarzún, “Identidad femenina, genealogía mítica, historia: Las
manos de mamá,” 71.
81. Adolfo Gilly, “Memoria y olvido, razón y esperanza,” 7.

chapter 4
1. Martín Luis Guzmán is pictured at least once in this book with seven
presidents: Álvaro Obregón, Manuel Ávila Camacho, Miguel Alemán Valdez,
Adolfo Ruiz Cortinez, Adolfo López Mateos, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and Luis
Echeverría Álvarez. In a photograph from his days in exile, Guzmán is seen ac-
 154 notes to pages 77 – 83

companying his political friend Manuel Azaña, the prime minister of Spain’s Sec-
ond Republic.
2. Martín Luis Guzmán, The Eagle and the Serpent; this is the edition I will
cite in the text and the notes.
3. The novel La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Caudillo), a scath-
ing indictment of political scheming and repression under the Obregón-Calles
regimes (1921–1928), was also written during this period.
4. Fernando Curiel, “Introducción,” in Martín Luis Guzmán, Caudillos y otros
extremos, xxi–xxv.
5. Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Introducción,” in Guzmán, La sombra del caudillo,
xx–xxi.
6. Ibid., xix. See also Curiel, La querella de Martín Luis Guzmán, 64. The
English version, unfortunately, abridged, appeared in 1930. About the English
translations, see Juan Bruce-Novoa, “El águila y la serpiente en las versiones
estadounidenses.”
7. Calles, Plutarco Elías Calles, 86.
8. President Calles introduced anticlerical provisions that seriously impeded
the functioning of the Catholic Church. The confrontation escalated into a full-
fledged war, known as the Cristero War, in central Mexico between 1926 and
1928.
9. The “awakening” of the intelligentsia to Mexico’s landscape, to the reality
of its social problems, and to the very notion of homeland is characteristic of this
early period of cultural nationalism. See, for example, Alfonso Reyes’s ambigu-
ous story “El testimonio de Juan Peña,” the poetic meditation of Ramón López
Velarde in “Novedad de la patria,” and the essay 1915 by Manuel Gómez Morín,
all written in the 1920s.
10. Juan Flores, Insularismo e ideología burguesa, 74.
11. Manuel Aguilar, the Spanish editor, rejected the original title and re-
quested alternatives. Guzmán proposed five new titles, including El águila y la
serpiente (Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 73).
12. In an interview Guzmán declared, “[It]is not a historical work as some
have claimed; it is, I repeat, a novel” (ibid.).
13. Shaw, “El águila y la serpiente,” 5.
14. Christopher Domínguez, “Martín Luis Guzmán: El teatro de la política,”
23–24. Performance certainly displaces “hard” politics in the section on the Con-
vention of Aguascalientes, which, as Domínguez points out, appropriately takes
place in the city’s old theater (Teatro Morelos).
15. Martín Luis Guzmán, Obras completas, vol. 1, 98.
16. Guzmán’s poetic awareness of the rayo verde, or green ray, probably came
from reading Jules Verne’s novel of the same name.
17. Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 69, 70.
18. José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, 49–56.
19. Ibid., 94.
 notes to pages 83 – 85 155

20. Ibid., 87–88.

21. Arielismo was an intellectual reaction to the historical crisis caused by
the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and, more generally,
the abrupt incorporation of the region into the capitalist world and modernity.
Troubled by the ever-expanding influence of the United States on the continent
and that country’s attendant utilitarian values, Rodó warns that Latin America
should resist the blind imitation of this new model (which he calls “nordomanía” ).
Capitalist transformation, however, is not to be rejected. Rodó acknowledges
the importance of and even celebrates technological progress, science, and the
materialist world, yet he views these signs of modernity as little more than the
labor necessary to prepare the soil for humankind’s greater task of cultivating
the spiritual dimension of life. Without material wealth, he observes, the “realm
of the spirit” is impossible (ibid., 87–90). Rodó’s Ariel was the dominant influence
in the intellectual life of Latin America in the early twentieth century. His highly
rhetorical meditations attracted the attention and approval of the region’s intel-
ligentsia because he satisfactorily integrated and harmonized the turn-of-the-
century philosophical conflict “between the idealistic and positivistic concepts of
life” (Alfonso García Morales, El Ateneo de México, 1906 –1914, 120). Moreover,
Rodó’s essay contributed to the prestige and advancement of modern subjectiv-
ity, whereby refinement and sensibility “would seem unequivocally on the side of
the progressive middle class, as the aesthetic foundation of a new form of polity”
(Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 26). In Mexico, this “new form of
polity” carried an implicit rejection of the mores of the rural population.
22. Ateneísta Antonio Caso was an advocate of the “philosophy of disinterest”;
see La filosofía como economía, como desinterés y como caridad.
23. José Vasconcelos, Memorias I, 269–270.
24. Martín Luis Guzmán, “La vida atélica,” Caudillos y otros extremos, 233–234.
The article originally appeared in Nosotros in September 1913.
25. The científicos were a group of Liberal politicians who identified with the
doctrine of positivism and claimed to have a “scientific” view of society. They
were instrumental in implementing the industrial development program during
the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, to whom they were closely associated (Alan
Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, 21–24).
26. Rodó, Ariel, 56 –70.
27. Ibid., 67. The powerful influence of the Rodorian notion of “spiritual
selection” is most visible in José Vasconcelos’s utopian essay La raza cósmica
(1925).
28. I condense here ideas expressed by three critics. David William Foster
aptly discusses how the techniques Guzmán used to process information enabled
him to scrutinize events carefully (“Escrutando el texto de la revolución: El águila
y la serpiente de Martín Luis Guzmán”). Luis Leal (“La caricia suprema: Con-
textos de luz y sombra en El águila y la serpiente”) shows how Guzmán associates
darkness with tyranny, violence, brute force, and evil, and light with transparency,
 156 notes to pages 86 – 92

idealism, freedom, peace, patriotism. Donald L. Shaw (“El águila y la serpiente:

Arielismo and Narrative Method”) emphasizes the juxtaposition of episodes and
the novel’s moral dimension.
29. Alfonso Reyes, Visión de Anáhuac, 14 –15.
30. Hence the distrust of and aversion to cities and urban culture of regional
leaders Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata. When they met in the town of
Xochimilco in December 1914, their dialogue captured this rural bias. Zapata
complained, in typical country style, of Mexico City’s sidewalks: “The men who
have done most of the work are those who enjoy those sidewalks less. Only side-
walks. And I say for myself: the moment I get on one of those sidewalks, I start to
fall down.” Villa replies: “This ranch is too big for us. It is better to be out there”
(Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 56).
31. Villa opposed such centralization projects. As I discuss in Chapter 1, he
favored autonomous local and regional politics and a decentralized state. See
Katz, “El pensamiento social de Francisco Villa,” 293–294.
32. Ariel is written in the form of a lecture given by Próspero, a wise and
beloved teacher, to his students on the last day of class.
33. According to Elias (The Civilizing Process, 461ff ), the behavioral code that
repudiates expressive violence originates in the effort of the secular upper classes
(the medieval court nobility) to differentiate themselves from the lower classes, a
practice that eventually came to permeate the rest of society.
34. Ibid., 452.
35. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgres-
sion, 90.
36. Guzmán’s judgmental application of the “civilizing code” in The Eagle and
the Serpent is not limited to Villa and the uneducated masses, though they are his
primary targets. He also uses it against Venustiano Carranza, Guzmán’s enemy.
He describes Carranza as a man who prefers to be photographed instead of asking
“for a bath—soap and water to rid himself of the dirt and lice” after his long and
difficult trek to Sonora (285).
37. John Reed records a different version of Villa’s reaction to Western soci-
ety’s rules of war. When American general Hugh L. Scott sent a copy of the Rules
of War (adopted by the Hague Conference) to Villa in 1914, the latter questioned
the international legality of the pamphlet and found the content unbearably hyp-
ocritical. “What is this Hague Conference?” Villa asks. “Was there a representa-
tive of Mexico there? Was there a representative of the Constitutionalists there?
It seems to me a funny thing to make rules about war. It’s not a game. What is
the difference between civilized war and any other kind of war? If you and I are
having a fight in a cantina we are not going to pull a little book out of our pockets
and read over the rules. It says here that you must not use lead bullets; but I don’t
see why not. They do the work” (Reed, Insurgent Mexico, 142–143).
38. Seen from the pragmatic rules of engagement enforced during the revo-
lution by Villa, Obregón, Carranza, Zapata, and many other generals, however,
 notes to pages 92 – 94 157

the original execution order is not only permissible, but expected, a sign not of
moral insensitivity but of upholding a code of military conduct that is inflexible
with regard to turncoats. Villa’s own sense of justice distinguished between pris-
oners who previously had been revolutionaries (e.g., the colorados, or followers of
Gen. Pascual Orozco) and those who were with the federal army. The former he
would always have executed, because they were traitors to the cause. Prisoners
from the federal army were separated by rank: officers were executed, but com-
mon soldiers were set free. See ibid., 143; Aguilar Mora, Una muerte sencilla, justa,
eterna, 379–380.
39. In another story, “A Very Expedient Trial,” no such formality exists, only
the coldness, speed, and indifference with which Villa orders the execution of
several counterfeiters from well-to-do families.
40. This lesson is repeated in the tragic story “The Death of David Berlanga,”
in which the spiritual and moral superiority of control of one’s body, a symbolic
triumph over arbitrary violence, is taken to the extreme.
41. To expose the appropriate code of conduct in a society ruled by the values
of modern citizenship and denounce infringements of this code is part of a long
tradition in Mexican literature. This particular aspect aligns Guzmán’s work with
the didactic narratives of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (El periquillo sarniento
[The Itching Parrot, 1816] and La Quijotita y su prima [The Girl Quixote and Her
Cousin, 1818–1819]) and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (El Zarco [1901]).
42. The contrast between the first description of Villa and that of Guzmán’s
friends in the border city of Nogales, Arizona, makes this clear: “They greeted
us with affectionate warmth . . . smiled at us, hugged us, asked a thousand ques-
tions. . . . They represented our first real contact with the Revolution, and they were
evidence to us that the struggle, at least on the border, was a reality” (The Eagle
and the Serpent, 45; emphasis added). Guzmán’s revolution is white-collar, “civi-
lized,” and more real for him than the one being won by Villa and his soldiers on
the battlefield.
43. In the discourse of the social sciences, “denial of coevalness” is de-
fined as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthro-
pology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological
discourse” ( Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Ob-
ject, 31).
44. On distancing techniques and the aesthetic experience in historical narra-
tives, see Mark Salber Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and
the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography.”
45. Guzmán’s nationalist identification with Mexico’s Otherness is most ex-
plicit when he crosses the U.S.-Mexico border: “It made our hearts dance,” he
wrote, “as we felt the roots of our being sink into something we had known, pos-
sessed, and loved for centuries, in all its brutishness, in all the filth of body and
soul that pervades the streets. Not for nothing we were Mexicans” (The Eagle and
the Serpent, 38).
 158 notes to pages 95 – 101

46. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 165. State formation and the phasing out of
expressive violence are also discussed in Parts 3 and 4 of Elias’s work.
47. Jorge Aguilar Mora offers the following insight regarding the depiction of
Villa as a wild animal: “In fact, he [Villa] was an animal because he had internal-
ized the animal point of reference in order to understand his surroundings, to
attack and survive. However, to speak of him as an animal is not a value judgment,
as many have made it out to be; it is simply a characterization of his perspec-
tive. . . . In Villa’s case, his animalistic qualities were an essential function of his
mode of life, because survival was his mode of living” (Aguilar Mora, Una muerte
sencilla, justa, eterna, 380, original emphasis). For Aguilar Mora, then, animal-like
attributes in Villa are not antithetical to human nature, as many of his enemies
claimed. It follows that Aguilar Mora would not object to Guzmán’s description
of Villa as a “jaguar”; he would, however, disagree with the disparaging meaning
Guzmán attaches to such a characterization.
48. Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá, “Sobre las muchas ‘especies de hombre’ en El
águila y la serpiente,” 61
49. For a discussion of bandits and the corrido tradition in Mexico, see
Nicole Girón, Heraclio Bernal ¿Bandolero, cacique o precursor de la revolución? For
the U.S.-Mexico border region, see Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His
Hand:” A Border Ballad and Its Hero.
50. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 6.

chapter 5
1. James W. Wilkie, The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social
Change since 1910, 208.
2. Ibid.
3. “Datos estadísticos de las bibliotecas existentes en la República.”
4. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 100.
5. Monsiváis, “Notas sobre la cultura mexicana,” 1455.
6. The biographical information on Muñoz in the following paragraphs is
based on four sources: Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 265–280; Aguilar Mora,
Una muerte sencilla, justa, eterna, 123–127; “Rafael F. Muñoz”; and Rafael Solana,
“Rasgos bio-bibliográficos de Rafael F. Muñoz.”
7. Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 271.
8. Ibid., 273.
9. Gamboa de Camino, “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution,” 270.
10. Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 267.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid. The newspaper editor needed space to begin serializing the memoirs
of a revolutionary general.
13. Henry C. Schmidt, The Roots of “Lo Mexicano”: Self and Society in Mexican
Thought, 1900 –1934, 97–138.
 notes to pages 101– 112 159

14. For the identification of Villa with the tradition of machismo in Mexico,
see Katz, The Life and Times, 238–239.
15. The search for lo mexicano prominently included the concept of violence,
which “was linked to that of the struggling masses . . . and their projected social
redemption . . . [and] assumed a lyrical quality in Mexican identity” (Schmidt,
The Roots of “Lo Mexicano,” 69, 70).
16. Rafael F. Muñoz, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1989), 11. This edition will
be cited in the text and the notes.
17. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 76.
18. On the two systems of causality and the dual nature of the short story
form, see Ricardo Piglia, Formas breves, 103–111.
19. “El puente” was dropped from the second edition of El feroz cabecilla (Edi-
ciones Botas, 1936).
20. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 54.
21. In their eagerness to be at the front of the Villista forces, the leones resem-
ble Villa’s legendary Dorados, whose deeds probably inspired Muñoz. The Dora-
dos were General Villa’s personal entourage, soldiers of unquestionable bravery
drawn from his home region of Durango and Chihuahua. With few exceptions,
they were known to be intrepid on the battlefield and extremely loyal to Villa. A
certain degree of vanity and theatrics was also involved, for, in some instances,
they were motivated by the desire to stand out, to be recognized and appreciated
by their superiors and their comrades-in-arms. The objective was to be remem-
bered, to achieve fame in the ranks of the Division of the North. Most of them
died fighting. Their exploits, it follows, were fertile ground for myth making and
epic history. In ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! the leones fit the profile of the Dorados:
they are natives of Villista territory (San Pablo); fierce warriors who perform
worthy deeds; and even under the most adverse circumstances, they remain faith-
ful to the Villista cause. Near the end of Muñoz’s novel, old Tiburcio is inducted
into the Dorados. For an extensive account of this elite military group, see Vargas
Arreola, A sangre y fuego con Pancho Villa, 27–111.
22. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 136.
23. In the chapter entitled “Así eran ellos” (That’s the Way They Were), the
threat of dishonorable death becomes a real possibility when Melitón Botello,
Máximo Perea, and Tiburcio Maya, who are about to be hanged by federal sol-
diers, are almost killed by the approaching Villistas, who are trying to liberate
them. For the leones, it is a traumatic moment, for being killed by friendly fire
would make their sacrifice absurd, inconsequential. They would prefer a dignified
death at the hands of the enemy.
24. “El círculo de la muerte” appears to be inspired by a game of chance oc-
casionally played by members of Villa’s Dorados (Vargas Arreola, A sangre y fuego
con Pancho Villa, 87–88).
25. Carlos Monsiváis, Amor perdido, 31.
26. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 134. Later in the novel, Villa is
 160 notes to pages 113 – 121

wounded in a skirmish with the Carrancistas. Tiburcio’s emotional outburst, cry-

ing “like he did not [cry] when Villa killed his wife, when he killed his daughter,
when his son died calling out for him” (167), confirms that his love for Villa is
stronger than his love for his family.
27. Muñoz’s specific anecdotes are inspired by popular myths; the vision he
conveys of Villismo is grounded in historical reality. In one memorable incident,
for example, Villa orders his brother Hipólito executed because he was negligent
at his post, putting at risk the forces under his command. Villa is later persuaded
by his aides not to carry out the sentence ( Jaurrieta, Con Villa (1916 –1920),
138).
28. Friedrich Katz, “Introducción,” in Osorio, Villa, ese desconocido, x.
29. Katz, The Life and Times, 238–239.
30. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 16.
31. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geog-
raphies, 195.
32. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 136.
33. For the role of women in the revolution, see Shirlene Ann Soto, The Mexi-
can Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the Revolution, 1910 –1940.
34. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 136.
35. Franco, Plotting Women, 103.
36. A hyperbolic example of the connection between class liberation and sex-
ual dominance in Muñoz’s works, with Villa as the central character, is the short
story entitled “La marcha nupcial” (The Wedding March), included in Relatos de
la revolución: Cuentos completos.
37. Another example is Botello calling the young federal officer who is about
to hang him, “señorita” (¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! [1989], 48– 49).
38. Katz, The Life and Times, 793.
39. Among them, José Clemente Orozco, Ermilo Abreu Gómez, and Grego-
rio López y Fuentes.
40. The harassment was directed against the members of the Contemporá-
neos group, some of whom lost their government positions (Carlos Monsiváis,
“Los Contemporáneos: La decepción, la provocación, la creación de un proyecto
cultural,” 24).

chapter 6
1. Alan Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo, c. 1930 – c. 1946,” 282.
2. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, chap. 7.
3. James D. Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the
State, 132.
4. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 68.
5. For a review of the rise and development of anthropological research in
 notes to pages 121– 125 161

Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, see Catalina Hewitt de Alcán-
tara, Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico.
6. Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, Modernización y política cultural: Una visión de la
modernización de México, 42– 43.
7. Other novels on rural themes written during this period include Gregorio
López y Fuentes’s Arrieros (Muleteers, 1937); Rosa de Castaño’s Rancho estradeño
(Estradeño Ranch, 1936); and Mauricio Magdaleno’s indigenista novel El res-
plandor (The Shining, 1937).
8. Oliver Debroise, “Notas para un análisis del sistema de la cultura plástica
en México,” 163.
9. Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, 90 –91.
10. Rossana Cassigoli Salamón, “Educación e indigenismo en México: La
gestión cardenista,” 588.
11. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 140; Knight, “The Rise and Fall
of Cardenismo,” 264 –268.
12. Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: Apuntes 1913–1940, 337–340.
13. For an account of the rise of this military dynasty, see Héctor Aguilar
Camín, La frontera nómada: Sonora y la revolución mexicana.
14. Emiliano Zapata, the other popular revolutionary leader, had been co-
opted in the early 1920s by the Obregonistas. See O’Malley, The Myth of the Revo-
lution, 41–70.
15. In 1940, Campobello was no longer the marginal figure in the literary and
artistic world of Mexico City that she had been in 1931, when the first edition
of Cartucho appeared. She now had three books to her credit and was the direc-
tor of the National Dance School. Among her friends and cultural allies were
well-known and influential artists and writers such as muralist José Clemente
Orozco (who painted sets and created custom designs for her ballets) and novelist
and publisher Martín Luis Guzmán (who was responsible for the publication of
the second edition of Cartucho). See Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 80 –85. In 1940,
when the second edition of Cartucho was published, Campobello had relocated in
the intellectual and artistic field and was now far closer to Mexico’s political and
cultural establishment, which endorsed, or at least was no longer hostile to, her
pro-Villa activities.
16. Chapters of Memorias appeared in the newspaper El Universal in 1936.
17. Curiel, La querella de Martín Luis Guzmán, 154 –155.
18. According to Guzmán, Calles was so upset when La sombra del caudillo
came out that he wanted to prohibit the novel’s distribution in Mexico. Calles’s
cultural adviser persuaded him not to do so, but Espasa Calpe, Guzmán’s Span-
ish publisher, under pressure from the Mexican government, had to agree not to
print any book by Guzmán dealing with Mexico after 1910 (Carballo, Diecinueve
protagonistas, 74 –75).
19. Martín Luis Guzmán revealed this fact in a 1971 interview (Guzmán,
Iconografía, 13).
 162 notes to pages 125 – 132

20. One of these politicians, Adolfo López Mateos, would be elected presi-
dent of Mexico in 1958 (Curiel, La querella de Martín Luis Guzmán, 173).
21. Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Lázaro Cárdenas Pa-
pers, 530/30, Guzmán 7–22–37.
22. Guzmán acknowledged his debt to Campobello and Rentería by giving
each woman 30 percent of the book’s royalties (Katz, The Life and Times, 831).
Luz Corral, another of Villa’s widows, declared in an interview that the docu-
ments originally belonged to her, and that Guzmán and Campobello took advan-
tage of her absence to remove the papers from her house in Chihuahua by making
false promises to Marianita Villa, Corral’s sister-in-law (Osorio, Pancho Villa, ese
desconocido, 132).
23. Guzmán, Obras completas, vol. 2, 9–10; Carballo, Diecinueve protagonis-
tas, 76.
24. Fellow ateneísta José Vasconcelos, however, recalls in his memoirs a
Guzmán far more committed to Villismo than he was willing to admit in El águila
(Vasconcelos, Memorias I, 608–609, 628–629, 649–650).
25. Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” 257.
26. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and
Schools in Mexico, 1930 –1940, 40.
27. Friedrich Katz in Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 332.
28. Guzmán describes the writing processes of Memorias in the prologue to
the 1951 edition. See Obras completas, vol. 2, 9–13. This edition will be cited in
the text and the notes.
29. Ibid., 11.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 11–12.
32. This last book was included in the second edition of Memorias de Pancho
Villa.
33. “In the Memorias,” Guzmán declared, “there is not one word that is
not supported by the firsthand testimony of an eyewitness, or by a document”
(Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas, 76; see also, Katz, The Life and Times, 830 –
831).
34. Guzmán uses redundant expressions such as “Me habló sus palabras . . . ,”
“Le hablé las palabras de mi necesidad”; colloquial constructions like “Y lo cierto
es que . . . ,” “pero lo cierto, señor, que . . . ,” “tomé mis providencias . . . ,”
“según yo opino . . . ,” “según yo creo . . .”; archaic expressions such as “grande
confianza”; and popular rural words like “masque” and “cuantimás.”
35. Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 327.
36. For the life and death of Gen. Maclovio Herrera, and his views on Villa,
see Isaac Grinaldo, Apuntes para la historia.
37. Ibid., 22–24. Celia Herrera’s version suggests that Villa’s henchmen killed
Maclovio Herrera in a cowardly manner.
38. Jaurrieta, Con Villa (1916 –1920), 178.
 notes to pages 132 – 136 163

39. Katz, The Life and Times, 761–768.

40. I have been unable to identify who in the Mexican government proposed
the idea of building a monument to Villa.
41. Celia Herrera, Villa ante la historia (1939), 5. This edition will be cited
in the text and the notes. The first edition (1939) has only 111 pages; two other
editions, both twice the length of the original, were published in 1964 and 1981,
respectively, by Costa-Amic Editores.
42. Soldiers who were close to Villa, such as José María Jaurrieta and Juan
Bautista Vargas Arreola, sometimes concur with Herrera and sometimes provide
a different version in their memoirs of events also described in Herrera’s book.
43. According to Katz, in most “cases the wealthier inhabitants took over con-
trol over the defensa social” (The Life and Times, 644); for Villa’s positions toward
looting in the years 1917–1920, see 585.
44. Historical documents corroborate the classist content of the Villista move-
ment. On one occasion, Villa forced a group of Parral merchants and well-to-do
citizens into a stockade. No family visits were permitted, and they were allowed
to eat only dried meat and corn. They would now have to live “as the poor were
living,” Villa told them (ibid., 596).
45. Ibid., 6.
46. Vasconcelos, “Timón” (May 11, 1940), reproduced in Herrera, Villa ante
la historia (1981), 13.
47. In 1937, while living in the United States, Vasconcelos unexpectedly allied
himself with General Calles and joined a conspiracy to overthrow the Mexican
government. The conspiracy never materialized. A year later, Vasconcelos ac-
cepted the president’s invitation to return to Mexico, where he continued his
attacks on Cárdenas ( José Joaquín Blanco, Se llamaba Vasconcelos: Una evocación
crítica, 170 –171).
48. Novo’s review of Herrera’s book was published in the newspaper Últimas
Noticias ( Jan. 18, 1940). It was later reproduced in the 3rd edition of Herrera’s
Villa ante la historia, 18–19.
49. Salvador Novo, La vida en México en el período presidencial de Lázaro
Cárdenas, 25.
50. In a letter to Celia Herrera, Novo confesses that it would not be appropri-
ate to talk about Villa in the weekly column he was writing for Hoy, one of the
prime magazines of the period. The letter is included in Herrera, Villa ante la
historia (1981), 17.
51. The first edition (1939) of Villa ante la historia does not indicate a publish-
ing house. This suggests that publication costs were probably paid by the author
or by the Herrera family.
52. See Rodríguez, nellie campobello, 327.
53. It is quite possible that Herrera’s vehement anti-Villa book may have
prompted changes in the second edition of Cartucho. While in the first edition
Campobello’s references to executions ordered by Maclovio Herrera and the hor-
 164 notes to pages 137 – 138

rible death met by his brother Luis stress the cruelty of war, in the 1940 edition,
the Herreras are accused of masterminding the death of popular revolutionary
Abelardo Prieto (Cartucho, 81–83) and of ordering the execution of his friends
(ibid., 51), leading the narrator to state, approvingly, that with the eventual death
of the Herreras “Abelardo Prieto has been avenged” (ibid., 83).

chapter 7
1. To divert attention from its growing authoritarianism and repression of
grassroots movements, the Díaz Ordaz regime sought to cloak itself in the
populist mantle by reclaiming the popular origins of the revolution and the
postrevolutionary state (O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution, 112, 173–174).
O’Malley notes, however, that many people still opposed Villa. For example, Ce-
lia Herrera’s Villa ante la historia was republished in 1964 in an effort to prevent
the general’s historical rehabilitation.
2. Katz, “Pancho Villa, Peasant Movements and Agrarian Reform in North-
ern Mexico,” 59.
3. This is also true for Celia Herrera, although her case is unique because of
her single-minded aim of attacking and discrediting Villa.
 bibliogr aphy

archival sources ( mexico city)

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN). Ramo Presidentes. Lázaro Cárdenas
Papers, 530/30, Guzmán 7-22-37.
Archivo Nellie Campobello. Fondo Reservado. Biblioteca de las Artes del Centro
Nacional de las Artes (CNA). Patricia Aulestia, “Entrevista con Nellie Cam-
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 index

Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 151n35, 157n38, Ángeles, Felipe, 80. See also El águila y
158n47 la serpiente
El águila y la serpiente (Guzmán), 8, 10, A orillas del Hudson (Guzmán), 78
81, 107; Arielismo in, 80, 83–89, Apaches, 59, 105
93; book title, 80, 154n11; civiliz- Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco
ing code in, 10, 89–94, 95, 97; Villa (Campobello), 54, 69, 124
classical culture in, 84 –85, 87–88; Ariel (Rodó), 83, 84, 156n32
composition techniques, 82–83, Arielismo, 80, 83–84, 155n21. See also
155–156n28; English version of, El águila y la serpiente
154n6; Guzmán the narrator in, A sangre y fuego con Pancho Villa (Var-
90 –91; historical characters in: gas Arreola), 124
—Carranza, Venustiano, 81, 82, Atelesis, atelismo, or vida atélica, 10, 84,
156n36 86, 87, 88, 93
—De la Huerta, Adolfo, 82 Ateneístas, 84, 107, 130
—Fierro, Rodolfo, 88 Azuela, Mariano, 7, 9, 17, 32, 54, 100,
—Obregón, Álvaro, 79, 81, 82 114, 118, 131, 139; anti-peasant
—Urbina, Tomás, 95–96 bias, 33, 34, 36, 46; convergence
—Villa, Francisco, 10, 79, 80, 81, with Calles’ ideology, 28; liberal
88, 89–97, 126; rebel masses ideology, 8, 23, 25, 31, 47, 138,
and mexicanidad in, 79–80, 83, 144n1; literary criticism and, 24;
88, 89, 94, 157n45; spatial pol- positivistic criminology in, 146n21;
itics in, 85–87, 89; storytelling and postrevolutionary cultural
and integrative nationalism, hegemony, 35
10, 94, 96 –97; urban citizen-
ship in, 79, 85–86, 89, 93, 94, Barthes, Roland, 39
138; writing of, 77, 78–82 Bassols, Narciso, 19
Aguirre Benavides, Luis, 128 Bauche Alcalde, Manuel, 126,
Alonso, Ana María, 59 127–128
Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel: El Zarco, Beltrán, José, 153n67. See also Cartucho
157n41 Benjamin, Walter: on storytelling,
Amador, Neftalí, 89, 90 153n75
Anderson, Benedict, 116, 144n34 Berger, John, 65
Anderson, Danny, 147n43 Bergson, Henri, 84
 180 writing villa’s revolution

Blanco, José Joaquín, 39, 46 during, 121–122; socialist idals

Boutroux, Émile, 84 under, 122, 129; Villa’s status
Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 78 under, 10, 120, 124, 126 –127, 136,
137; Villista literature during, 8–9,
Calles, Plutarco Elías, 8, 9, 20, 51, 53, 10 –11
87; during Cardenismo, 120, 123, Carr, Barry, 59
125, 163n47; against the Catholic Carranza, Venustiano, 2, 80, 87, 129,
Church, 79, 154n8; and ideology of 131; and anti-Villa propaganda, 3,
the Revolution, 14 –15; on land re- 126, 131; death of, 3; and political
form, 13, 18; literary policy under, centralism, 21. See also El águila y la
24; and national reconstruction, serpiente; Cartucho; Villa
13; peasants under, 14; politics of Cartucho (Campobello), 8, 50; anti-
centralism, 21; presidential can- Carranza sentiments in, 54, 60, 69,
didate, 78, 79; socialist education, 70, 71–72; child fantasy in, 61–65;
19; and La sombra del caudillo, 125, concept of violence in, 138–139;
161n18; struggle for state hegemo- corrido elements in, 53, 54, 63, 69,
ny, 13; views on the middle class, 151n33; critical approach to, 49;
14; violence during the presidency female characters in, 65, 66 –69,
of, 13–14, 18 74, 152–153n64; the grotesque in,
Campobello, Gloria, 50 –51 55–57, 151n41; historical charac-
Campobello, Nellie, 8, 9, 48, 58, 125, ters in:
131, 140; changing intellectual sta- —Beltrán, José, 67
tus, 161n15; compiler of corridos, —Fierro, Rodolfo, 74
53; early life, 50 –51, 148–149n5; —Herrera clan, 163–164n53
gender obstacles and intellectual —López, Pablo, 69–71
survival, 149n16; on the geography —Máynez, Ismael, 54, 58, 60
of northern Mexico, 151–152n45; —Ortiz, Santos, 68, 75
and ideology of Cardenismo, —Rodríguez, José, 71–72, 75
124; on Los de abajo, 148n55; and —Urbina, Tomás, 49, 58, 72–75
Mexico’s frontier culture, 138–139; —Villa, Francisco, 53, 72–74; Indian
stay in Havana, 51–52; on Villa, characters in, 152–153n64;
51–52, 53, 150nn28,29 memory and cultural resistance,
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 8, 120, 122, 135; 48, 66–69, 75–76, 153n66; nar-
and agrarian reform, 120; anti- rative perspective in, 52; narra-
urban bias, 126 –127; break with tive strategies in, 54 –55; Parral
Calles, 123, 125; national integra- (Hidalgo del), 48– 49, 58, 62,
tion policies, 120 –123, 137; and 63, 70, 71; regionalism in, 49,
non-individualistic citizenship, 57–61; regional revolutionary
127; policy towards peasants, mythology in, 69–76; subaltern
120, 121, 126 –127. See also perspectives in, 9–10; thematic
Cardenismo organization of, 49, 148n4;
Cardenismo: historical revisionism the writing and reception of,
under, 123; populist nationalism 51–54, 151n35
 index 181

Castellanos, Rosario, 140 Frontier culture, 59

Científicos, 84, 155n25 Fuentes, Fernando de, 122
Civilizing code: 90, 93, 119, 156n36;
and Villa, 20, 95. See also El águila Gamboa de Camino, Berta, 53, 61, 100
y la serpiente García Lorca, Federico, 51
Colonias militares (military colonies), García Rufino, Flor, 149n8
58–60 Garro, Elena, 140
Contemporáneos (Los), 150n23, Gilly, Adolfo, 76
160n40 Gómez Morín, Manuel, 154n9
Córdoba, Arnaldo, 144n30 González, Manuel Pedro, 61
Corral, Luz, 150n32 Gramsci, Antonio, 36
Corrido, 53, 63, 69, 150n32 Guerrero, Julio, 146n21
Cristero War, 13, 143n1, 154n8 Guha, Ranajit, 6, 7, 147n28; on popu-
lar political consciousness, 36 –37
Defensas sociales, 111, 131, 133, Gutiérrez, Eulalio, 79, 87
163n43 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 10, 80, 86, 87,
De la Huerta, Adolfo, 78, 79. See also 88, 89, 100, 124, 134, 135, 139;
El águila y la serpiente association with Villa, 161n24;
Díaz, Porfirio, 21, 45, 59 Ateneo de la Juventud and, 84;
Díaz Arciniega, Víctor, 145n11 evolving views on Villa, 20, 126;
Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 137, 164n1 forced exile, 78–79; ideological
Division of the North, 1, 2, 72, 126 contrast with Rafael F. Muñoz,
Domínguez, Christopher, 81 99, 107, 114, 119; and ideology of
Cardenismo, 9, 11, 130; middle-
Eagleton, Terry, 155n21 class liberal ideology, 8, 138;
Ejido, 143n2 non-elitist literary influence, 130;
Elias, Norbert, 91, 95, 156n33 and popular nationalism, 157n45;
Elías Calles, Plutarco. See Calles, relation to Mexico’s presidents,
Plutarco Elías 77–78, 125–127, 129, 153–154n1,
Estrada Muñoz, Antonio, 149 162n20; research on Villa, 128;
Estridentista movement, 52 Rodó’s influence on, 84 –85; on
Villa’s colloquial language, 128;
Fernández de Castro, José Antonio, and Villista bravado, 107. See also
51, 52 El águila y la serpiente
Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín: El
periquillo sarniento and La Quijotita Hamilton, Nora, 143n2
y su prima, 157n41 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 130
El feroz cabecilla (Muñoz), 100, 102, 105 Herrera, Celia, 9, 10, 11, 124, 131,
Florescano, Enrique, 5 132, 134
Foster, David William, 155n28 Herrera clan (the): Jesús, 132; Luis,
Francisca ¡Yo! (Campobello), 50, 149n8 131; Maclovio, 91, 131; rivalry
Franco, Jean, 33, 116 with Villa, 131–132, 133, 135. See
Frías, Heriberto: Tomóchic, 145n3 also Cartucho
 182 writing villa’s revolution

Hobsbawm, Eric J., 35, 36, 69, 141n2 Villismo in, 25, 40 – 41, 46; the
El hombre malo (Muñoz), 100 writing of, 23–24, 145n6
Huerta, Victoriano, 1, 2, 32, 41
Hughes, Langston, 51 Machismo, 80, 88, 102–103, 109; and
class consciousness, 107, 116 –117;
Iconografía (Guzmán), 77 cultural nationalism and, 101, 118,
Indigenista literature, 121–122, 140 138; literary culture and, 16, 25,
138; male honor and, 105; and
Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 82 national identity, 16 –17, 101; and
Joseph, Gilbert M., 142nn19,24 patriarchy, 116, 138; Villa as em-
bodiment of, 19, 101, 114, 138. See
Katz, Friedrich, 21, 114, 127, 141n3 also ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!
Knight, Alan, 22; on peasant con- Madero, Francisco I., 32, 80, 128
sciousness in Mexico, 36, 37 Mallon, Florencia, 38
Mansour, Mónica, 25
El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 35 Martin, Cheryl English, 152n49
Leal, Luis, 146n25, 155n28 Matthews, Irene, 51, 149n10
Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolu- Maximato, 8, 18–19, 118, 123
cionarios (LEAR), 135 Máynez, Ismael, 54, 151n33. See also
List Arzubide, Germán, 52, 148n4, Cartucho
150n23 McDowell, Linda, 116
Literacy in Mexico, 98 Memorias de Pancho Villa (Guzmán),
Llorente, Enrique, 91, 92, 94 9, 10 –11, 100, 124, 125, 131, 134;
López González, Aralia, 146n15 appeal to middle-class readers, 130;
López Velarde, Ramón, 154n9 books included in, 128; colloquial
López y Fuentes, Gregorio, 100; El style, 127–128; critical reception
indio, 122, 140 of, 135; historical documenta-
Los de abajo (Azuela), 49, 54, 65, 118; tion for, 161n33; and ideology of
critical reception, 24 –25, 145n9, Cardenismo, 9, 127, 128, 129, 135;
148n55; “discovery” of, 9, 16, 24 – narrative voice, 130; Villa’s sani-
25; first edition, 23, 144 –145n2; tized image in, 11, 127, 129, 130
intellectuals in, 29–32; and literary (“white” legend, 134); the writing
nationalism, 16 –17, 25; as master of, 126 –128
narrative of revolutionary litera- Memorias de Pancho Villa (Muñoz and
ture, 47, 148n56; middle-class cul- Puente), 100
tural hegemony and, 46 – 47; oral Mexicanidad (Mexicanness), 10, 101,
tradition in, 43– 44, 54; peasant 107, 119, 138. See also El águila y la
characters in, 26 –28, 138; popular serpiente; machismo; nationalism;
political subjectivity in, 8, 9, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!
36 – 47; racialized atavistic behavior Mexican Revolution: and collective
in, 31, 146n21; social stereotypes memory, 5; country versus city
in, 24, 27, 31, 146 –147n25; Villa’s during, 2 (see also El águila y la
symbolic presence in, 25, 41– 45; serpiente; Cárdenas, Lázaro); ethnic
 index 183

and class content of, 1–2; female Novel of the Mexican Revolution, 24,
participation, 116 –117, 118; inter- 148n56; peasants stereotypes in, 47
pretations of, 37; political attach- Novo, Salvador, 134 –135, 163n50
ments during, 50; socialization of Nugent, Daniel, 142nn19,22,24
death, 109
Mexico City: as national cultural Obregón, Álvaro, 3, 14, 17, 78, 80,
center, 17 123, 128; politics of centralism, 21.
Meyer, Doris, 151n36 See also El águila y la serpiente
Meyer, Jean, 143n18 O’Malley, Ilene, 3, 98, 107, 112, 116,
Middle class: Calles’ support for, 14; 164n1
cultural perception of peasant Orozco, José Clemente, 83
subjectivity by, 46 – 47; intellectu-
als and the class struggle, 20; in the Palacios, Guillermo, 15
Mexican Revolution, 145n4; myth Pani, Alberto J., 78, 89, 90, 94
of, 144n30 Parallel Lives (Plutarch), 88
Monsiváis, Carlos, 99, 109 Paredes, Américo, 74
Morales Bermúdez, Jesús, 140 Parle, Dennis J., 61, 65, 143n16,
Moya Luna, Francisca. See Campo- 150n32
bello, Nellie Parral (Hidalgo del), 3, 50; during the
Muñoz, Rafael F., 9, 10, 98, 122, 131, revolution, 48, 100, 131, 133, 134,
140; frontier culture in the literary 137
ideology of, 138–139; ideological Paz, Octavio, 35, 36
contrast with Martín Luis Peace by Revolution (Tannenbaum), 34
Guzmán, 99, 107, 114, 119; as Peasants: conflicting views on, 33–35,
ideologue of nationalism, 100, 36, 37; during the Calles regime,
118–119; journalistic style, 99, 14; Cárdenas’ policy toward, 120,
100 –101; literary treatment of 121, 126 –127. See also Los de abajo
Villa, 99 PNR (Partido Nacional Revoluciona-
rio), 17–19, 100
Nationalism: gender and, 116 –117; Popular consciousness: definition, 5,
ideology of, 102; and mexicani- 140, 142n19
dad, 101; primordial, 22; state- Puente, Ramón, 100, 124
sponsored cultural, 15–16: Puig Casauranc, José Manuel, 16,
— in film, 122 145n8
— in literature, 16 –17, 24 –25, Punitive Expedition, 3, 111, 112, 115
154n9; and Villa’s regionalis-
tideology, 22 La querella de México (Guzmán), 77
National reconstruction, 13; Calles’
politics of, 9, 13; and middle-class Rama, Ángel, 17
hegemony, 14; middle-class intel- Reed, John, 153n77, 156n37
lectuals during, 20 –21; negative Region: definition, 6–7; and democratic
impact on peasants, 14; struggle for empowerment, 140; versus nation, 7,
historical memory during, 5 21–22; and Villista militarism, 57, 99
 184 writing villa’s revolution

Regional: historiography, 6; identities characters, 103–104, 110 –111,

and popular mobilizations, 6 –7 117; film version, 122; gender,
Rentería, Austreberta, 53, 54, 126, male domination and, 102, 104,
151n33 105, 110 –111, 112, 117 (and
Revueltas, Silvestre, 122 national identity, 117–118); jour-
Reyes Alfonso, 34 –35, 36, 84, 86, 130, nalistic sources of, 99, 100 –101;
154n9 machismo in, 102–103, 105–106,
Rivas Mercado, Antonieta, 149n16 110, 112:
Robe, Stanley, 25, 31, 145n2 —and mexicanidad, 10, 101, 107,
Rodó, José Enrique, 83, 87, 89, 109, 117–119;
155n21; influence on Guzmán, —as spectacle of masculinity, 106,
84 –85; influence on Vasconcelos’ 107–109; military code of
La raza cósmica, 155n27 honor in, 105, 106, 112–113;
Rodríguez, Blanca, 51, 149n10 and popular nationalism, 117–
Rojas González, Francisco, 140 118; Tomás Urbina in, 113;
Ruffinelli, Jorge, 144n1 Villa in, 105, 107, 111–112:
Ruta (cultural magazine), 135 —and laws of frontier warfare,
Rutherford, John, 148n56 113–114;
—legends of, 110, 114 –116, 117;
Salado Álvarez, Victoriano, 148n55 violence, literary marketing of,
San Gabriel de Valdivias, comunidad 8, 10, 98–99, 101, 115–116,
indígena (Azuela), 122 118:
Shaw, Donald L., 156n28 —meaning of, 114, 139;
Si me han de matar mañana . . . (Mu- —regional, 10
ñoz), 100 Van Young, Eric, 6 –7
La sombra del caudillo (Guzmán), 125, Vargas Arreola, Juan Bautista, 124,
154n3 148n51
Subaltern Studies, 5–7, 26, 142n20, Vargas Valdés, Jesús, 149n8
145–146n14 Vasconcelos, José, 78, 84, 98, 122,
130, 149n16, 162n24; anti-Zapata
Tannenbaum, Frank, 34, 35, 36 views, 20; hostility toward Carden-
Tejeda, Adalberto, 52 ismo, 134, 135, 163n47; against
Terrazas, Silvestre, 124 Villa, 134
Tomóchic, 145n3 El verdadero Pancho Villa (Terrazas),
Torri, Julio, 130 124
Villa, en pie (Puente), 124
Urban citizenship, 138, 157n41 Villa, Francisco, 51, 54, 65, 72, 73, 79,
Urbina, Tomás, 49, 50, 67, 68; social 80, 81, 89, 98, 124, 125; “animal-
bandit, 72, 153n67. See also istic” qualities, 158n47; autobio-
El águila y la serpiente; Cartucho graphical documents, 126; aversion
Urquizo, Francisco L., 100 to cities, 156n30; biographies on,
17, 143n16; Carrancista propagan-
¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Muñoz): da against, 3, 126, 131; colonias mil-
the Dorados in, 159n21; female itares (military colonies) mentality
 index 185

of, 60; death of, 3, 132; historical Villismo: and class warfare, 2, 163n44;
marginalization, 3– 4, 18, 20, 137; and the Dorados, 159n21; and
largesse, 148n51; legends of, 114; evolution of Mexican literature,
and Mexican machismo, 19, 101, 139–140; and frontier military
114, 138; in Mexico City news- culture, 59–60, 99, 113–114; mass
papers, 51, 98–99; middle-class appeal and psychological impact of,
perceptions of, 19–20, 99; military 1, 2–3; as a regional movement, 57
magnetism of, 1–2, 141nn3,10; and Villista literature: during Cardenismo,
patriarchal violence, 150n28; po- 8, 123; chronology of, 8; decline
litical rehabilitation efforts under of, 137; and mexicanidad, 138; dur-
Cardenismo, 10, 120, 123, 126 – ing the Maximato, 8; as popular
127, 136, 137; popularity, 2, 3– 4; literature, 99; proliferation of, 4,
and popular nationalism, 3; and the 19; violence in, 4 –5, 20; the writ-
Punitive Expedition, 2–3; rationale ing of, 4 –5
for executions, 157n38, 160n27; Violence: during the Calles era, 13;
regionalist ideology, 9, 20 –22, 60; the civilizing process and expres-
on the rules of war, 156n37; as a sive, 91, 156n33; as dominant
social bandit, 72, 141n2, 153n67; theme in Villista literature, 4 –5,
status after Cardenismo, 137; 20; frontier culture of, 59–60, 138;
urban views on, 53, 126. See also El popular, 1–2; marketing, 4, 10,
águila y la serpiente; Cartucho; Los 101; and mexicanidad, 159n15; by
de abajo; Memorias de Pancho Villa; middle-class intellectuals, 21; in
¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!; Villa positivistic criminology, 146n21;
ante la historia state formation and, 95; Villista, 4,
Villa ante la historia (Herrera), 9, 10 – 99. See also Cartucho; ¡Vámonos con
11, 124, 131, 135; class-oriented Pancho Villa!; Villa ante la historia
violence in, 133–134; editions
of, 163nn41,51; elite intellectuals’ Warman, Arturo, 1–2
reaction to, 134; and Villa’s “black”
legend, 11, 132–134; the writing Zapata, Emiliano, 2, 20, aversion to
of, 132 cities, 156n30, 161n14
Villaurrutia, Xavier, 122