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Chapter 3 reconstructing subaltern perspectives in nellie campobello’s Cartucho Few towns during the revolution saw events as bloody as those that occurred in Hidalgo del Parral, a mining center in the state of Chihuahua that was one of the gravitational centers of Villismo. In the course of ten years, Parral suffered the violence of being taken no fewer than twelve times by contending revolutionary forces.1 Its inhabitants lived through sieges, fierce battles fought street by street, acts of revenge, torture , executions, and the grotesque spectacle of mutilated bodies lying in the streets. The uncertainty of life, the daily deaths, the cruelty and hatred of the contending factions, exacerbated at times by the enmities of local blood feuds, left an indelible mark on the population. Years later, Nellie Campobello, who grew up in Parral, would turn to a storehouse of personal and family anecdotes and to collective memory to write Cartucho. Campobello’s Cartucho is neither a conventional novel nor a book of short stories; it is a collection of short narratives, a “blend of autobiography , history, and poetry” that powerfully evokes the extraordinary violence and devastation of the armed struggle,2 and the psychological impact it had on the consciousness of the population. The work’s forcefulness and originality largely rest on Campobello’s unprecedented treatment of memory, on her unusual ability to reproduce how people try, in a manner consistent with their emotional needs and world view, to explain and make sense of the disturbing experience of war. By resorting to the narrative patterns of oral culture, the author effectively connects the act of remembering the past and the dead to the preservation of community in Villista territory. Cartucho is a book about memory and identity, about memory and survival —individual and collective survival. The original edition contains thirty-three stories, all inspired by Campobello’s childhood and family memories of the war. The basic structure is that of “an adult, now residing in Mexico City, who looks back, recalls, and . . . relives her childhood experiences.”3 The child’s voice and point of view predominate, as does a subaltern perspectives in Cartucho 49 narrative technique based on understatement. The stories the child heard or that were told to her by relatives and friends are an integral part of her own memories. Hence the narrator not only rescues her individual experiences, but also functions as a compiler of the intimate memories of other characters, whose tragic, incongruent, or, at times, humoristic recollections are registered in the text. The stories are organized thematically into three sections: “Men of the North” (seven stories); “The Executed” (twenty-one stories); and “Under Fire” (five stories).4 All sections depict the streets and places close to the family home in Hidalgo del Parral, which represents the slow accumulation of knowledge about the external world characteristic of childhood . A gallery of colorful and tragic Villista characters emerges from this limited visual field, all of them friends or acquaintances of the family (most of them Urbinistas, or followers of General Urbina). The events described are specific and local, assembled, at times, in an incomplete and fragmentary way; only the details that excite her childish imagination are mentioned. Thus the entire collection is never far removed from the family setting. Cartucho is unique in that the events narrated are not subordinated to a value system that is external to the regional cultural world of the characters , as is the case with Los de abajo. Instead, they communicate an implicit and explicit empathy and solidarity with a view of the world “from below.” How does Campobello convey this view and for what purpose? What are the limits and contradictions of writing about life in Villista territory in the context of the politics of reconstruction? To answer these questions, I propose a critical approach that focuses on three binary oppositions: the child’s imaginative perspective as opposed to adult rationality; the female and the domestic sphere over the public, male sphere; and the restricted notion of regionalism in contrast to centralist or integrationist nationalism . These perspectives intertwine and reinforce each other in the narrative . The presence of one therefore implies the others and simultaneously conveys the personal and the collective experience of the war. For the purpose of my analysis, however, I examine these perspectives separately, privileging the notion of regionalism, for it is here that rebel subjectivity and the cultural politics of Villismo are most visibly at work. I read the child’s perspective and the...

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