Carlos Fuentes
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by Philip Gambone

Fifty years ago, Mariano Azuela was known as Mexico's best-known novelist. Today I'd say that accolade belongs to Carlos Fuentes. But Azuela, who wrote more than 20 novels as well as fictionalized biographies and literary criticism, deserves major attention not only for penning one of the supreme novels of the Mexican Revolution, but for influencing many subsequent Mexican writers including Juan Rulfo (whom I wrote about a few weeks ago) and, in fact, Fuentes himself.

"Had he stopped writing novels when the Mexican Revolution began in 1920, he would today be considered by literary critics as just one more of the many novelists who during the last decades of the [nineteenth] century wrote Naturalistic novels in imitation of Zola," wrote Mexican American writer and literary critic Luis Leal in his 1971 book on Azuela. Instead, Leal said, Azuela ended up aligning himself with the revolutionary movement and became "one of the most important chroniclers of that earth-shaking upheaval which preceded the Russian revolution by seven years."

Azuela was born in 1873 to a middle-class family in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. On the family's small farm, he picked up the speech of the farmers and ranchers, an idiom he would use effectively in his later novels. His interest in literature began early. In elementary school, he started reading the novels of Alexander Dumas, "sinful" books that were prohibited by his father. At fourteen, he was sent to a seminary in Guadalajara, but left two years later.

Mariano Azuela
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In 1892, Azuela began to study medicine at the University of Guadalajara. While still in medical school, he published his first story. Upon receiving his medical degree in 1899, he returned home, married his childhood sweetheart, and set himself up as a general practitioner.

All the while, Azuela continued to nurture his literary interests. He joined a group of intellectuals, men of letters who came to be called "The Generation of 1903." They met every month to discuss books and read to each other their own work. He published his first novel, María Luisa, in 1907. In the next two years, two more novels followed.

In 1910, at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, which overthrew the dictator Porfirio Díaz, Azuela sided with Francisco Madero, the revolutionary and writer who had proclaimed himself provisional president. The next year, with the initial triumph of the revolution, Azuela was named jefe politico (political boss) in Lagos, a position that lasted only a few months, until a follower of Díaz retook the governorship in Jalisco.

"From that moment on," Azuela wrote, "I stopped being the serene observer which I had tried to be in my first four novels." In the novels that followed, he transformed himself into a fervent witness to the events of the day, "a partisan and passionate narrator." Azuela's 1911 novel, Andrés Pérez, maderista, is considered the first novel of the revolution. Four years later, he published his most acclaimed novel, Los de abajo (The Underdogs).

Porfirio Díaz
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Carlos Fuentes calls The Underdogs "a barefoot Iliad sung by men and women rising from under the weight of history, like insects from beneath a heavy stone." There are no heroes in Azuela's novel, only flesh-and-blood men and women caught up in a cause they only partially understand. The Underdogs derives its power from its brutal and gritty honesty.

At the outset of the novel, we meet Demetrio Macías, the leader of a small squadron of rebels whose allegiance is with the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. Demetrio's men capture Luis Cervantes, a medical student and journalist (like Azuela himself), who once served as a second lieutenant with the Federalist cavalry. But Luis, who has begun to identify with the suffering and misery of the dispossessed, has deserted the Federales. The veil has been lifted from his eyes and he now sees the cause of the revolutionaries "as the sublime cause of an oppressed people demanding justice, pure justice."

The revolution, Cervantes ardently proclaims, "is for him who has been a slave his entire life, for the wretched who do not even know that they are so because the rich man transforms the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor man into gold." (I'm quoting from Sergio Waisman's translation, published by Penguin Classics. There are other English translations as well.)

At first, Macías' men are suspicious of this "damned mongrel," whom they derogatively call a curro, a fancy city slicker. "You're water of a different river than we are," they tell him. But after Cervantes gives an impassioned speech—"I wanted to fight the blessed struggle of the poor and the weak"—they slowly come to accept him.

Pancho Villa
*

As an intellectual, Cervantes understands better than Macías the larger implications of the revolution. While Macías is content to be a small-time rebel who looks forward to going home after the revolution, Cervantes sees that such a stance will only return the poor to the daily struggle they have always faced, subject to the power of "a handful of indolent rogues" who will grow rich, "while everything else remains the same as before, or even worse."

"You have risen up against the cacique [landowner] system itself," Cervantes points out, "the system that is devastating the entire nation…. We fight on behalf of the sacred rights of the people." Cervantes' impassioned idealism echoes Azuela's own. At the same time, the author gently shows how this curro's enthusiasm for the cause is a bit out of step with the simpler, pragmatic desires of Macías and his men. Nevertheless, Macías comes to see that Cervantes is "one of those who understands things good." He allows Cervantes to join his fighting unit

Azuela peppers the novel with vivid descriptions of several skirmishes between the revolutionaries and the Federales. He does not spare us any of the butchery, confusion, and macho fervor of these brutal encounters. Cervantes is turned off by the plunder, drunkenness and sexual depredations that attend the raids. "This kind of action ruins our good name and, what is even worse, it ruins the reputation of our cause," he protests to Macías, who is hard-pressed to see the bigger picture. "Truth is," he tells Cervantes, I don't understand nothin' about this politics business."

Everywhere in the novel, Azuela's sympathies with the poor are apparent. But he is also mercilessly candid about the jealousies, rivalries and factional rifts that open up among the revolutionaries and between their girlfriends.

When two of the revolutionary factions—Pancho Villa's Northern Division and Carranza's Constitutionalists—clash in a civil war within the revolution, Cervantes becomes disillusioned and (again like Azuela himself) moves to El Paso, Texas. He dreams of opening a Mexican restaurant and becoming rich. As for Macías and his crew, their scrappy but feckless derring-do ultimately proves fruitless against an ambush by machine-gun-toting Federales.

Toward the end of the novel, Azuela inserts a short scene depicting a cockfight, a diversion for the weary revolutionaries. "One was wine red, glimmering with beautiful obsidian streaks; the other sandy yellow, with iridescent feathers like fiery copper scales. The fight was swift and almost as fierce as a human battle." The scene is a kind of metaphor for the revolutionaries themselves. Too often they became nothing better than fighting cocks, what the government called "nothing more than a bunch of bandits grouped together under a magnificent pretext just to satiate their thirst for gold and blood."

Distance is one of Azuela's themes: the distance between noble sentiments and scurrilous deeds, between sacred duties and pragmatic means, between abstract political ideology and the volcanic excitement of a good fight. "We are not fighting in order to defeat one miserable murderer, Cervantes reminds the others. "We are fighting against tyrant itself." But even he falls into thievery, womanizing and desertion.

The Underdogs was the first novel I read when I originally came to Mexico several years ago. It made a huge impression on me then and, on reading it again for this article, it only grew in my admiration. Translator Waisman calls The Underdogs "replete with ambiguities." Is it revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, he asks, "in the ways it reveals the barbarism and banditry of those who fought on both sides?" Yes, replete with ambiguities—as all great novels are. What is not ambiguous is the magnificence of this small masterpiece of modern Mexican literature.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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