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Chapter 7 villismo’s legacy By the end of the Cárdenas presidency, in late 1940, Gen. Francisco Villa had yet to be included in the pantheon of official heroes of the Mexican Revolution, despite the president’s reconciliation and inclusion policy. Villa’s political and military enemies who were active in the revolutionary government, particularly in northern Mexico, apparently obstructed his historical rehabilitation. Cárdenas did succeed, however, through agrarian reform, economic nationalism, and revolutionary discourse, in building the social consensus necessary to unify the country. His consolidation of the Mexican state’s hegemony brought to a close the reconstruction era. Thereafter, Mexico’s presidents favored accelerated industrialization and adopted conservative policies on issues of social justice, thereby distancing themselves from Villa’s revolutionary legacy. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the Centaur of the North remained an unspoken subject in official revolutionary memory and politics. It was only after memories had faded and most veterans of the revolution had passed away that Villa’s status in the nation’s official memory was revisited . In 1965, Pres. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, in need of popular legitimation, decided to identify himself and his regime with the revolutionary “spirit” of General Villa and officially recognized his status as a national hero.1 In 1976, the Mexican government unearthed Villa’s remains, buried in Hidalgo del Parral, and solemnly transferred them to the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City.2 A half century after his death, the unruly Villa had finally been co-opted by the Mexican state. Literature also moved away from the subject of Villa and Villismo after Cárdenas left the presidency. Not only did the state’s cultural policy abandon the emphasis on social literature, but the emergence of an urban society and mass culture beginning in the 1940s introduced new themes that gradually displaced the revolutionary past as the preferred topic of the nation’s novelists. After Cárdenas, few literary works on Villa appeared. The Villismo literature written during reconstruction, however, endured . Villista writers were among the first to construct, using a vari- 138 writing villa’s revolution ety of innovative narrative techniques, powerful images of a people in arms, of the revolutionary masses who, until then, had been left out of the national project. In this sense, these writers contributed to outlining the physiognomy and the attributes of a popular national identity, which had not previously existed. In the cultural imagining of Mexicanness, the emphasis on Villa’s machismo communicated lower-class strength and resistance to oppression, hence its appeal; but it also reinforced the values of traditional patriarchy in postrevolutionary Mexico and the continued marginalization of women in the affairs of the nation. References to manly behavior during the revolution were also used to illustrate soldiers’ limitations and thereby suggest the place they should occupy in the reconstruction process. In the works of Guzmán and Azuela, for example, Villa and the rural masses are portrayed—the authors’ sympathies notwithstanding—as frightfully violent, backward, and antimodern, lacking the intellectual and moral attributes necessary to lead the nation into the future. By cultivating this kind of image, which was sustained on the tenets of urban citizenship (social discipline, literacy, individualistic bourgeois morality, and the subordination of the countryside to the city), these writers—regardless of their personal views on presidential politics—became unofficial advocates of the modernizing, middle-class project of nationhood promoted by the postrevolutionary regimes.3 This national project was fueled by two contradictory impulses, which Azuela and Guzmán skillfully amalgamated: the nation’s cultural need to rescue and represent nonurban, popular subjects, people from the “hinterland,” the proud source of Mexican “values” and identity; and the social urgency to leave behind the rural world and culture this same project was intent on transforming. Campobello and Muñoz did not follow this ideological scheme. They did not write to overcome or leave behind, but to preserve and remember and to mythologize the revolution in the hinterland. Their works mark the appearance in Mexican literature of an authorial consciousness that was less permeated by the moral standards of the hegemonic class project and its contradictions. By emphasizing different aspects of Mexico’s northern frontier culture, Campobello and Muñoz introduced an ethics of violence, associated with subaltern struggles, that was removed from the realm of abstract meaning and liberal conceptualization found in the works of Azuela and Guzmán. The latter always distanced themselves in their work...

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