La fiesta de balas
There is no such thing as objective history. It is an act of
fiction, one in which the writer shapes and forms the material they have both
gathered and received to formulate stories. As much as we may give credence to
the persistent illusion otherwise, we have as much difficulty agreeing on what
is happening now as we do with what happened in the past. Narrative shapes
history, because narrative underlies the way in which we assign meaning.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 is one that has been
mythologized extensively. It is certainly the case that it changed the country,
but it may also be viewed as a narrative of emancipation. It was a long and chaotic
process, with many forces put into contention, and with a whole cadre of heroes
and villains. It also helped to shape the course of the subsequent 80 years of
Mexican history, for it heralded a new ideology that, as in the title of the
ruling country that held sway during that period, sought to “institutionalize”
this revolution. As such, it is a foundational period, one that marked an end
to the previous period.
Even we, children who were born and raised in the United
States, but who have parents and grandparents who came from Mexico, have a
vague sense, imparted to us by our parents as well as popular culture, of the
processes and characters involved. I remember encountering my father when I was
a child singing in the garage with other men, and even though they were born in
the 40s, they still sang corridos
that recounted the exploits of regional revolutionary figures, not just Pancho
Villa, but of the leaders that sprang up almost everywhere in vast mestizo and
Indian heartlands of Mexico. It may not have been entirely clear to us all, but
we heard Pancho Villa, the centaur of the North, and Emiliano Zapata, the dour
Indian peasant of the south, and of course, we heard of figures such as
Francisco Madero, the martyr of the Revolution, and the dictator and tyrant,
don Porfirio Díaz, who was overthrown. As young people who chafed against
parental control as well as the discrimination we suffered as children in the
school system here in the USA, many of us sympathized with the revolutionaries,
those who came from marginalized sectors, those who looked like our peasant
ancestors, who spoke a colloquial Spanish and who had famous phrases of
liberation attributed to them, from “¡Tierra y Libertad!” to such a lapidary
remark as that attributed to Zapata, “It is better to die on your feet than to
continue living on your knees”. This was when we weren’t giving expression to
our revolutionary impulses by listening to rock music, to Pink Floyd and Van
Halen and Led Zeppelin, which scandalized our parents to no end.
But the Mexican revolution, as much as it has seeped into
our consciousness, was a process that was multi-faceted, and that had several
stages. It had its martyrs, foremost among them the afore-mentioned Francisco
Madero, the rich hacienda owner from the north who was influenced by democratic
ideals and who proved unable to govern once he toppled the dictatorship. This
is no way detracts from the aura that accompanies him in the popular
imagination, for his idealism was evident from the very beginning, in his
championing of the need for land redistribution, and in his true underdog
struggle to topple a long-standing tyrant and champion the ideal of a more
representative government, one not beholden and serving the interests of elites
who were arrayed into camarillas
(factions). (It is always endlessly fascinating and ironic that Madero himself came
from this elite class.) And we have our villains, in a process that saw much
meddling from the outside, principally by the United States, who with the
meddling of President Wilson and his representatives helped to support Huerta
who had overthrown Madero and had him and his brother killed in a tragic
episode known as the “decena trágica”.
This process was polarizing, and was reflected in literature
as well as historiography. The official account that is promulgated by the
ideologues of the new Mexican government was that it was a bloody but necessary
process, even if it witness untold destruction and it resulted in the migration
of millions of Mexicans to the United States. We have, thus, a celebratory if
at times somber recounting of this episode, one which, in reality, is a
sequence of episodes that have been stitched together so that we preserve in a
way a triumphalist account that doesn’t end with the murder of Madero, but
instead, with the practical and necessary triumph of leaders such as Carranza
and Obregón who crafted the new state, and who provided the ideology that would
hold sway and would be associated with notions of Mexican nationalism. It is
portrayed, thus, as a fight for liberation and resistance, liberation from
internal forces and the caudillismo
represented by Díaz and Huerta, and resistance to external intervention on the
part of the only real external foe that Mexico has had since its independence,
the United States.
This polarizing quality is evident in the famous novel by
Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo, which
was published in 1915. The novel purports to present a different perspective, representing
as it does a fictionalized account that of the popular classes who joined in
the revolution. It is a novel that incorporates a skeptical narrator who
comments on and criticizes the events and actions of the characters involved,
and if anything, it recalls powerfully another model that was immensely
influential in Latin America. It is, thus, the Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism of Mexico, a version of the
famous book that was written by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina and
that chronicled the rise of the figure of the Latin American despot.
While the former work, published approximately 80 years
earlier, was a hybrid work that was as much autobiography as cultural critique
and an exercise in costumbrismo (the
description of national types), we preserve from that work the enduring motif
of a clash of civilizations, and of an imputed savagery of a public (the rural
classes, the workers) who, in the polemical argument of Sarmiento, were thought
to be unprepared to govern. This is an argument that is reproduced in an
explicit way in Azuela’s novel, in the bitter reflections of the revolutionary
Solís who, we may take, is a spokesperson for the author. This character, in an
encounter with another elite turned revolutionary, Luis Cervantes (el curro),
who describes the forces unleashed in the following way:
(quote)
Pero hecho, gestos y expresiones que
agrupados en su lógica y natural expresión, constituyen e integran una mueca
pavorosa y grotesca a la vez de una raza…¡De una raza irredenta!..(…) Me
preguntará que por qué sigo en entonces en la revolución. La revolución
es el huracán, y el hombre que se entrega a ella no es ya el hombre, es la miserable
hoja seca arrebatada por el vendaval… (p. 69)
(end quote)
It is a pessimistic and destructive judgment rendered, and
in the same way that Sarmiento does, it dismisses the potential of an entire
social class, by referring to arguments that were based as much on a
pessimistic reading of Latin American history as on the notions of scientific
racism that were so common during the 19th century.
We have, then, the spectacle of an “irredeemable” people,
and this symbolism is mirrored throughout the narrative in items that seek to
underscore this interpretation. We have, for example, symbols such as the
rolling stone, one that, once unleashed, can’t be stopped, and the volcano that
has erupted and can only be allowed to run its course, as well as the wind-up
clock that is so prized by peasant general Demetrio, and suggests powerfully
that these upheavals are cyclical. The view is very clear that what we have is
a novel that alludes to these powerful arguments from the past, ones that
project, it may be said, a perspective that was not truly shared by the popular
classes who genuinely chafed under the conditions that held sway during this
epoch leading up to the revolution.
The story is furthermore elaborated in the story of two
characters, the general Demetrio Macías to whom I first alluded, and the figure
of Luis Cervantes. We have characters who are involved in movements that may be
visualized in terms of ascents as well as descents, where the poor peasant
characters which to overturn the existing order and thus move up, and the elite
or bourgeois groups (represented by Luis) seek to appropriate these energies by
seeming to join the revolutionary struggle, but in reality, are waging their
own rear-guard action to control and benefit from the revolution. As one of the
most enigmatic characters in the novel, La Pintada, proclaims,
(quote)¡Qué brutos! (…) ¿De dónde vienen? Llega uno a cualquier parte y no tiene más que escoger la casa que le cuadre y ésa agarra sin pedirle licencia a naiden. Entonces ¿pa quén jue la revolución? ¿Pa los catrines? Si ahora nosotros vamos a ser los meros catrines… (p. 86)
(end quote)
It is this vision of an overturning of the existing order
that holds sway, and it constitutes a vicious indictment of the revolution.
We see this in the way the movement of the revolutionaries
is tightly circumscribed by their circumstances. They don’t have any real understanding
of the ideology of revolution, that which was formulated by celebrated figures
who have entered into the hagiography of the revolution, figures such as
Ricardo Flores Magón, an advisor to Francisco Madero. The novel emphasizes over
and over that these are simple men, with a limited vocabulary that is
furthermore laced with expletives and colorful metaphors, in which the
characters lack any real ambition other than to lay hand on their next quota of
“avances”, the spoils of war. The
character of Luis Cervantes tries to impart some notion of the revolution as a
fight against tyranny, but in the portrayal offered by this novel, the humble
peasant soldiers are unable to fully understand or conceptualize the process in
this way.
Thus, we have intersecting movements in which characters
from a higher social sphere (the bourgeois Luis) formulate and help to channel
the energies of the revolutionaries, and the revolutionary energies are in turn
sidetracked and thwarted so that, in the end, it is principally a movement in
which the lower classes eliminate themselves for the convenience of the elites.
While the revolution seem to be on the ascent in the first part of the novel,
which leads up to the famous assault and conquest of Zacatecas, we see a dissipation
of these energies in the second part, as no program of justice is implemented
by the conquering revolutionaries who prove, on the contrary, to be just as
savage as the federales.
We have mirrors, then, that are at play in this novel. The
first scene involves the arrival of the federales
to the house of Demetrio Macías, and the killing of the dog (the popular
classes are continually compared to starving dogs) and the attempted rape of
his wife. Demetrio manages to overpower them by surprise, and in an act of
restraint lets the federales flee
while being urged all the while to kill them. But in the end, Demetrio becomes
the same as those groups in power against whom he was struggling, and in a
famous scene not only does he exact retribution on the old cacique who had
persecuted him before (don Mónico), but in the end allows his men to kill and
rape the poor, as happens in other notable scenes such as that where his men
steal the food of the citizens of Guadalajara, or threaten to shoot the poor campesinos of the sierras who have
hidden from his forces.
There are both external as well as external struggles, and
it is clear that by the second half, Demetrio is losing both struggles. He has
ascended to the position of general, but in an orgiastic scene in the
restaurant, he finds himself joined by disreputable individuals who will
compromise his position, and in the case of the güero Margarito, we see the
ascent of the authentic psychopath.
This güero Margarito is a vicious character who, we may say,
is consumed by a need for vengeance. If the revolution is compared to a
destructive force, he is the embodiment of this violence, and he seems to be
kept barely in restraint. His associate, La Pintada, is just as self-centered,
and is just as bereft of any idealism. It is thus noteworthy that these
characters find the appropriate moment in which to join forces with Demetrio,
who accepts them out of necessity if not out of any genuine sympathy. Over and
over, we see the violence perpetrated by Margarito, a violence that offends the
sensibilities of the reader and that can only be likened to the hyper-violence
of the savage rural classes in Esteban Echeverría’s classic story, El matadero. (A story in which the
representative of high civilization, a man who is part of the Unitarians, is
tortured and killed by a rabble that supports the caudillo.)
These episodes, as well as the increasingly skeptical tone
and harsh language of the narrator, who criticizes these actions and denounces
Margarito explicitly as “malign”, serve to forward the argument that the
ideological foundation of the Mexican Revolution eluded the understanding of the
common soldiers who were involved in the movement. This foundation was present , and within the
novel was expressed in the arguments forwarded by Luis, but it fell on deaf
ears, and was supposedly not as powerful an incentive as that of the promise of
“avances”, the spoils of conquest, or
revenge, as in the case of Margarito who holds a grudge against the ruling and
bourgeois classes. As Demetrio responds when he is asked by Luis to restrain
his men who seem too eager to pillage the households they encounter, he
justifies them by saying that it is their only reward for the risks they are
undertaking, thus establishing the notion on the part of the skeptical narrator
that these revolutionaries were devoid of any allegiance to a higher ideology
of liberation.
It is the case that, in the end, we circle back to where we
first started. The first battle that was won by Demetrio was an ambush of
Federalist troops, and the final battle is also ambush, but one in which the
revolutionaries are slaughtered by the Federalists. The revolution is going
badly, and the wise buffoon, Valderrama, offers proclamations that indict the
savagery of the revolutionaries as well as the course of a war that has left
them incapable of feeling the suffering of the populace. Valderrama, the
brilliant but instable drunk, seems to hold a more realistic notion of the
revolution, in which it is not as much a jockeying of position by powerful men
as, instead, a vital force:
(quote)
―¿Villa?...¿Obregón?...¿Carranza?...¡X…
Y… Z…! ¿Qué se me da a mí?...¡Amo la revolución como amo el volcán
que irrumpe! ¡Al volcán porque es volcán, a la revolución porque es revolución!...
Pero las piedras que quedan arriba o abajo, después del cataclismo, ¿qué me importan
a mí?... (p. 139)
(end quote)
And this formulation seems to prefigure what will happen,
because it is an enduring symbol that has been repeated over and over in the
novel. What we have is a movement in which social groups scramble to ascend as
well as endeavor to avoid descent, in which eternal processes are once again on
display, and in which sacrifices are made continually and with little reason. Demetrio
has had his lover Camila, an innocent and initially unwilling peasant from the countryside,
murdered by La Pintada, and his assistant, Luis Cervantes, has abandoned the
group in order to exile himself in San Antonio, Texas, where he seeks to deploy
the capital he has stolen in order to set himself up. Villa has lost the battle
of Celaya, and now, the peasants and poor city dwellers deny him and his forces
any hospitality, and instead chafe when asked to provide supplies to the
revolutionaries. The end is still some distance away, but when Valderrama
abandons his, after he (Demetrio) abandons his wife and child once again to
continue to continue this marathon of suffering (the rolling stone that keeps
rolling until stopped), we know that it can only end in one way.
And, thus, with no sense of idealism, and with a reluctance
but as well a resigned determination to continue on his path, we see him lead
his forces into an ambush, which will serve to bookend this novel and invest
this narrative with the aura of an anti-revolutionary work, one that demystifies
the revolution and portrays it in a grimmer light, one divested of the aura of
idealism. There is no grand cause in play here, at least in the conception of
the peasant revolutionaries, for whom such a conception is far too abstract to
be understood, and we the readers have the sense that this process is one that
is defined by futility, for the clock will surely be wound up again and we will
start where we left off, with those who are “above” exploiting those who are “below”.
Demetrio dies trying to defend his position as the bullets (further mortal
rocks or lethal metal “pebbles” , i.e. gunshots) rain down upon him, and we
have the sense of a promise unfulfilled.
OGRomero © 2013
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