“Los Cristos de todas las pasiones”: The Latin American Existentialism of José Revueltas’s El luto humano

This article examines the ways in which José Revueltas’s novel El luto humano (1943) confederates the seemingly immiscible elements of Christianity, Marxism, and lo mexicano into a paradigm for a distinctively Latin American existentialism. Departing from Revueltas’s little-studied essay on César Vallejo, “Arte y cristianismo: César Vallejo” (1939), it probes El luto humano’s reterritorializing of theology, a transvaluation that seeds an ethico-political platform based on intersubjectivity and solidarity. Revueltas’s platform of “re ligare” also targets the historically-conditional alienation of various racial groups in Mexico, and it directs Latin American existentialism away from Sartrean objectification of the other. Altogether, my essay maintains, El luto humano braids together an array of Latin American passions, creating a template that existentialist writers like Julio Cortázar, Rodolfo Kusch, and Luis Villoro bear out.