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Chapter 2 villa and popular political subjectivity in mariano azuela’s Los de abajo mexican literature discovers a social class In October 1914, physician and novelist Mariano Azuela joined the troops of Villista general Julián Medina in Guadalajara with the rank of colonel . “I then satisfied one of my greatest longings,” he wrote many years later, “to live together with the genuine revolutionaries, the underdogs, since until then my observations had been limited to the tedious world of the petite bourgeoisie.”1 The novelist’s encounter with the “genuine revolutionaries,” that is, the peasants who had taken up arms against the federal government, had a decidedly literary goal: to observe their world; to immerse himself in its atmosphere and language; and, eventually, to write a work that would reveal the human dimensions of the armed con- flict. Azuela’s contact with the Villista army also provided an invigorating spiritual antidote to the conventional and socially rigid world of which he was a part, and it proved to be a productive experience. A year later, in October 1915, a newspaper in El Paso, Texas, began publishing his campaign notes in installments under the title Los de abajo: Cuadros y escenas de la revolución actual (The Underdogs: Views and Scenes from the Current Revolution).2 Azuela’s literary project was innovative. Los de abajo was not centered on the petite bourgeoisie, as had been most literary production during the Porfirian dictatorship.3 Instead, Azuela focused on the popular classes, whose overwhelming presence during the revolution, especially between 1913 and 1915, had become a human reality that Mexico’s dominant society could no longer ignore. This change in focus from one social group to another incorporated new social terrain, expanding the human register of the Mexican novel and giving it a breadth previously unknown.4 Azuela is credited with founding the “novel of the masses” in Mexico.5 He accomplished this in three main ways. First, for the first time in the history of the Mexican novel, he assigned the role of protagonist to the “bajo pueblo,” the rural lower classes. The construction of this collective 24 writing villa’s revolution character was unprecedented at the time in Mexico. It demanded innovative narrative techniques that used montage sequencing, quick cuts in action and setting, and a rapid, nervous tempo as the author moved back and forth from the affairs of the masses to those of individuals. Second, Azuela was able successfully to re-create the language of the masses, which he collected during his months of campaigning with the Villistas. The great number and variety of colloquial expressions that appear in the novel are strongly rooted in the forms of popular speech.6 Third, Azuela’s narrative offered a view of “a social division among the characters, between the guileless and the spontaneous (of rural extraction ) and the opportunists and corrupt (of urban extraction).”7 These three elements, along with the readily identifiable events that make up the historical background of the novel guaranteed its overwhelming truth effect. Despite these elements and formal innovations, Los de abajo went largely unnoticed for ten years. The reasons for this neglect by Mexico’s literary critics are not difficult to ascertain. Literary criticism, a precarious enough activity even under normal circumstances, was necessarily brought to a halt by the revolutionary war. This hiatus lasted through the early 1920s. In addition, the fact that Azuela was a writer from the provinces who was living outside the literary circles of Mexico City delayed the appreciation of his undeniable skill as a novelist. Finally, time had to pass for a new cultural climate to emerge in Mexico, one inspired by the social struggles of the revolution and stimulated by the state’s cultural policy, before Azuela’s Los de abajo could begin to receive the recognition it deserved. Beginning with Calles in 1924, the revolutionary governments began explicitly to favor the production of literary works with a social orientation and designed to contribute to an understanding of the recent conflicts and to instill in readers an awareness of the social problems facing Mexico.8 This cultural policy was largely directed not at the rural classes but at an urban, middle-class population that needed to be educated about and “sensitized” to the terrible reality of abuse, exploitation , and violence that reigned in the countryside. Azuela’s audacious look into the world of revolutionary peasants began to achieve renown in the context of...

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