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Chapter 5 soldierly honor and mexicanness in rafael f. muñoz’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 percent in 1910.1 The increase was largely due to the expansion of public education 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 Revolution was very much alive in the collective memory and also because most readers were males (75 percent) drawn to the subjects of war and violence , 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 primitivism , 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 migrated 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 magazines 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 proli fic 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 published in the newspaper, he includes an opening note in which he declares 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 writing such stories.6 Unlike most writers of his generation, he had not witnessed 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...

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