The hurricane of history
Are revolutions only good on the long view?
The Book:
The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution
By Mariano Azuela
Translated by Sergio Waisman
First published in 1915
The Talk:
In his 1915 novel The Underdogs, Mexican novelist Mariano Azuela tells the story of Demetrio Macías, a fictional farmer turned revolutionary on his two year journey from local troublemaker to military general.
In real life, Azuela served as a doctor in the rebel army of Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the famed “Mexican Napoleon” of the Mexican Revolution. In fact, Azuela wrote the novel as the events within the novel were happening. He first published the book in Texas in 1915, and the book ends in the summer of 1915.
The Mexican Revolution spanned a time of technological change. Peasant farmers plowed their fields with oxen, armies moved on horseback. But there were also aeroplanes, trains, telegraphs, and typewriters. In one memorable scene, Macías leads his men on an assault and lassos the machine guns “as if they were wild bulls.”
The hurricane of war
When we first meet Mancías and his twenty-five men, they are hardly an army at all. They barely have clothes, let alone uniforms. They don’t have enough guns for everyone, so they take turns during battle. They receive no orders, they receive no pay, and have no idea what’s happening in the war elsewhere. They couldn’t tell you about the ideals of the revolution, and they often get the historical facts wrong about what led up to the present conflict. Hey, they just like shooting up the federales!
But as the war progresses, Mancías’ followers grow to a hundred, and Mancías rises up in the ranks. The revolutionary army begins to take on a life of its own. And instead of defending poor townspeople from federales, the army becomes a mob that steals everything it finds as an “advance” on war pay. What started at least vaguely as a defense of the weak against the strong transforms into a pillage of all, an unstoppable force. Everything that can’t be stolen is destroyed. Houses are trashed, townspeople are beaten or left to starve. One disillusioned solider explains:
You will ask me then why do I stay on with the revolution. And the answer is: the revolution is a hurricane, and when a man surrenders himself to her, he ceases to be a man and becomes, instead, a lowly leaf blown wildly about by the winds…
The eye of the storm
The character who comes out the worst (in my opinion) is Luis Cervantes, a medical student and curro (city slicker), a stand-in of sorts for the author, who joins Macías’ army and eventually becomes his secretary. At the beginning, he uses his rhetorical skills to praise the ideals of the revolution, but over time we realize he can make flowery speeches to justify anything. He, too, like the uneducated around him, becomes just as greedy and corrupted by his acts. While counting up their “advances,” Cervantes attempts to convince Macías to flee the country with their stolen riches so they, the revolutionaries, can live like kings. Macías replies:
Keep it all for yourself. Really, curro…You know, I really don’t care for money at all! Want me to tell you the truth? As long as I have enough to drink, and as long as I have me a little gal to keep me warm, I’m the happiest man in the world.
All Macías wants is to get back to the innocence of his pre-war days in the rural beauty of the Sierras. He discovered he has a knack for leadership and fighting, but somehow along the way everything got out of hand. Instead of being liberated, he has become trapped in a machine he can’t stop. He has become the eye of the hurricane, a hurricane that he doesn’t understand. At one point, as the revolution fractures, his commanding officer asks him which side will be loyal to.
A perplexed Demetrio buried his hands in his hair, scratched his head for a moment and said:
“Look, don’t ask me a question like that, I’m not a schoolboy here. This little eagle that I wear on my hat, you gave me that… So you know that all ya have to do is say: ‘Demetrio, you do such and such,’ and I’ll do it, end of story!”
They didn’t have time to be bad
It’s interesting to compare this book with Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, another short novel written and published near the same time. Both portray times of social upheaval and rapid modernization—one during a war, the other during rapid economic growth—and both ultimately take a sour view of humanity. How could the revolution have gone so wrong?
One poetically-minded soldier looks upon the town of Juchipila, one of the starting places of the revolution, with reverence, and offers a prayer:
“Juchipila, crib of the revolution of 1910, blessed land watered with the blood of martyrs, with the blood of dreamers…of the only good men!”
“Because they didn’t have time to be bad,” an ex-Federale riding by brutally completes the sentence.
Does every revolution eat itself in the end? Does every soul turn rotten, if given enough time? Does power always corrupt, no matter who usurps whom? Is there no defense against the hurricane of history, that turns idealists into selfish bastards? Is that all people are to begin with? Macías never thinks to think of these questions, and Azuela does not answer them. Azuela gives us characters to pity, but no characters on which we can hang some moral hope. (Even the devotee in the above passage quickly deserts at first sign of trouble.)
Ya won’t even remember me no more
But, of course, the revolution did not end in 1915, nor did Mexico. The novel mentions the song “La Adelita," the most famous ballad of the revolution. A village girl, Camilla, pleads to Cervantes:
“Listen, curro. I was wantin’ to tell ya a little something’. Listen, curro. Just one thing. I’d like you to teach me the words to ‘La Adelita.’ So that… Can ya guess what for? So I can sing it and sing it when ya all leave, when ya’re no longer ‘round, when ya’re already so far away, so far…that ya won’t even remember me no more.”
Camilla’s dreams of love are doomed. But the song—about a solider in love with a woman—continues to be recorded and performed in concert today.
Perhaps hope only emerges on a longer timeline—not that of years, but of centuries.
Leo Tolstoy writes in War & Peace, “The only activity that bears any fruit is subconscious activity, and no one who takes part in any historical drama can ever understand its significance.”
We look back at wars and revolutions of the past, times that must have felt evil, in which evil was done under the banner of righteousness, and we see what good came out of them, good for us. We pick over the remains, the detritus the past has left for us, collecting what gold we can find, forgetting the cost for others, as the wind picks up again.
Related:
Did the Spanish Conquest happen?
Loneliness is the price we pay for modern life
Los Lobos 'Carabina .30-.30' 2016-05-13 UC Theater, Berkeley, CA (YouTube)
