Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs) has long been considered the quintessential “novel of the Mexican Revolution” – the narrative thematic that both initiates and defines Mexico’s national literary tradition. Prior to the novel’s appearance in 1915, Mexican literature was characterized as derivative of European traditions. Azuela is credited with inaugurating an autochthonous Mexican literary tradition by anchoring his narrative in the cataclysmic events of early twentieth-century Mexican history, and foregrounding the social divisions that led to the peasant rebellion he was chronicling. Strikingly, however, and despite its “hyper” national status, the remarkable conditions of Los de abajo’s publication have always left open the possibility of its being read transnationally. As has been well documented, Azuela joined a band of Pancho Villa’s men in 1914, in part because he wanted to write a novel about the war and the insurgent peasants behind it. When the Villistas started to suffer defeats, Azuela fled across the northern border into El Paso, Texas. There he finished the novel that he had been crafting during the hard months of flight throughout central and northern Mexico. Penniless and close to starvation, he published his novel in serial installments with the El Paso Spanish-language newspaper, El Paso del Norte.1
Mexican literary histories have paid scant attention to the fact that this most national of Mexican novels was published on the much-reviled fringes of the nation, in the US–Mexico borderlands. Instead, Los de abajo is read through what Juan Pablo Dabove calls a “nation-state identity paradigm,” an interpretive apparatus that underwrites the post-revolutionary Mexican government’s nation-building project by enabling the appropriation of the revolution’s meanings through imperatives of centralization, exclusion, and the achievement of modernity (260).2 This interpretive lens begins by celebrating the narrative’s peasant protagonists, led by Demetrio Macías, as the source of Mexican values and identity, crediting them with setting into motion the war that enabled national self-actualization. Ultimately, however, those subjects are seen to be frightfully violent, backward, and anti-modern, qualities putatively indicated in Los de abajo by the circular wanderings in which they engage, and which become increasingly aimless as the narrative progresses. That seemingly pointless roaming along with Demetrio’s violent and meaningless death at the novel’s conclusion are understood to symbolize the masses’ lack of plan for the nation and their disconnection to the national center. The novel’s meanings, then, are sucked into a “state-centered vortex” (Dabove 252–53), as the dislocated rural insurgents are understood to be narrative closures, dead ends that have no generative potential for the national future.
Yet situating the novel in the context of the fronterizo print culture from which it emerged pulls us away from that vortex. Instead, we shift toward a transnational optic that emphasizes margins, borders, and migrations, one motivated by but also exceeding Azuela’s personal experience of dislocation and border crossing. Of course, margins, borders, and migrations are a constitutive aspect of Chicana/o studies’ frameworks, especially in the context of the US–Mexico borderlands. They counter the nation-state’s totalizing narratives by understanding the dispossessed to constitute narrative openings – their experiences of dislocation and migration are the starting points from which to engage the revolution’s meanings. Through this lens, the seemingly aimless movement of Azuela’s landless insurgents indicates not a failure of politics, but an alternate register of the political, one that suggests a refusal to be captured or disciplined by the nation and its narratives. Such a reading from the periphery undercuts the state’s official and appropriative “misreadings,” restoring the popular subjects that inject the novel with its vitality back to their positions as protagonists on the terrain of politics and culture.3
I begin with this analysis of a canonical Mexican novel in a chapter on the Mexican diaspora in the United States for several reasons. First, as the above discussion shows, applying a Chicana/o studies framework to Los de abajo provokes a powerful rereading of the narrative that demonstrates the generative possibilities of incorporating such frameworks into Mexican cultural criticism, which has tended to follow a nation-based logic dictating that Mexican-American cultural expressions, histories, and epistemological interventions be severed from those of Mexico because of their location north of the border. Second, and following from this, such a framework necessarily initiates a geopolitical heuristic informed by the neocolonial relationship between Mexico and the United States, drawing attention to the myriad ways in which Mexicans north of the border engaged the revolution, not only through their direct participation – which was considerable – but also through their literary writings, many of which were published in the vibrant network of Spanish-language newspapers that they produced in this period.4 This transnational material history and the conceptual apparatus it enables undermines the geopolitical limits imposed by nationalist literary histories in understandings of the revolution, as it foregrounds the perspectives of those migrants, immigrants, and border subjects who were cut loose by the Mexican nationalist project. When read in this light, Los de abajo becomes the departure point for an alternate literary current, one that critiques the neocolonial relationship between Mexico and the United States, and consequently emphasizes issues such as US imperial aggression, dispossession, racial and ethnic conflict, and debates about cultural integrity.5 Put another way, this literary current ignores Demetrio’s death at the conclusion of Los de abajo, refusing to understand him as the martyred hero who marks the end of the popular class’s role as historical protagonist, but rather seeing him as a future migrant, as one whose story continues as a journey to the north.
This chapter begins by providing a brief gloss of the Mexican Revolution and its significance for Mexicans in the United States. It then focuses on a small number of exemplary writers in order to chart the widely divergent political spectrum represented by their literary output. These range from poetry calling for revolution produced by members of the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), to the culturally conservative novels that called for Mexican immigrants to return to their war-torn homeland immediately or risk the cultural corruption of US influence, to feminist writings that argued for the centrality of women in the war’s military and political affairs. Taken together, these diverse writings reveal members of the Mexican diaspora in the United States to be producers of knowledge, as they elucidated through engagements with the revolution the place of Greater Mexico at the center of issues encompassing ethnic, national, and transnational concerns.
The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the first major revolution of the twentieth century, was a seismic event that transformed Mexico and deeply influenced the United States. Initially, the war was fought to overthrow the regime of Porfirio Díaz, who was held in high regard for his exploits in various wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Backed by the military, he appointed himself president in 1876, and ruled for the next thirty-four years. His regime was marked by great economic prosperity and political stability. It was also marked by violent repression, political surveillance, and economic policies that encouraged the growth of large haciendas at the expense of small farmers and communally owned lands. Previously independent peasants were left landless, and by 1910, the rural masses were on the brink of starvation. Dissatisfaction and anger were also rampant among Mexico’s middle classes and industrial workers. Lack of democracy, which meant lack of access to political power and subordination to an all-powerful state bureaucracy, increasing taxation, and resentment at the privileges accorded to foreigners profoundly affected Mexico’s middle classes.
These radically different segments of the population came together in a tense alliance in order to overthrow the regime, rallying around the wealthy landowner Francisco Madero. Díaz fled into exile in 1911, and by the end of that year Madero had been elected to the presidency. However, this result did not bring political stability. The historical consensus is that Madero was a weak leader, and that this led to his assassination in February of 1913. While he lost almost all of his support during his brief presidency, in death he instantly became an honored martyr, galvanizing the splintered factions of the revolution into action. Factions led by Venustiano Carranza, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapato, and Alvaro Obregón came together and succeeded in overthrowing the counterrevolutionary government of Victoriano Huerta almost immediately. However, their alliance quickly disintegrated due to their differing goals and the desire of several to grab power. The ensuing years were marked by continuing violence and instability that eventually saw the death of one million of Mexico’s 15 million citizens, and every major leader of the revolution met a violent death. Many mark the end of the revolution in 1920, the year of Carranza’s assassination, but violence continued well into the next decade.6
While nation-based histories would contain the story of the revolution within Mexico’s borders, in truth the war was a transnational event from its very inception. This is unsurprising when we remember that those who lived on either side of the international boundary had functioned as a cohesive community for decades, moving freely back and forth across the border well into the twentieth century. When the revolution began, the borderline did little to stop Mexicans north of the Rio Grande from participating. On the contrary, significant groundwork for the war was laid in the United States, with ethnic Mexicans working together to plan the overthrow of the Díaz regime. Richard Griswold del Castillo puts this point more starkly: “The Mexican Revolution was launched from the barrios of San Antonio, Laredo, El Paso, and Los Angeles” (42). This does not mean, however, that Mexicans in the United States were unified in their responses to the revolution. They were a diverse group marked by differences in key elements of identity formation, such as class, race, and regional background, and encompassed an array of subject positions as migrants, immigrants, exiles, and deeply rooted residents who traced their family lines back to when the US Southwest was still the Mexican north. Accordingly, they spanned the political spectrum, as they ranged from radical anarchists to conservative counterrevolutionists.7
Regeneración, one of the most influential Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States during the revolution, was the principle outlet for the ideas and positions of the PLM, an anarchist party established by Ricardo Flores Magón in 1900. Flores Magón, his brother Enrique, and other key party members were persecuted in Mexico due to their calls for the overthrow of the Díaz regime, and were forced to seek refuge in the United States. They settled in Los Angeles in 1910, where they continued publishing their newspaper with great success, reaching a circulation of roughly 30,000 that stretched into Mexico. They used Regeneración to promote an anarchist position dedicated to proletarian social justice, championing the total destruction of the existing order, including the capitalist system, the government, and the church. While the party’s overriding objective was to unite all oppressed people in a borderless, multinational, multiethnic solidarity, Flores Magón could not ignore the subjection he witnessed of Mexicans in the United States. He wrote articles denouncing the escalating violence perpetrated against border Mexicans, while also voicing vehement opposition to the possibility of US intervention in the Mexican Revolution. As Griswold del Castillo argues, Flores Magón believed that Mexicans struggling against political tyranny and economic exploitation in Mexico were leading the way for the liberation of working-class Mexicans in the United States. Furthermore, though he had little interest in championing nationalist causes, he suggested that US disrespect for the Mexican nation ultimately would lead to negative consequences for Mexicans north of the border (46).
Artistic expression featured prominently in Regeneración’s pages, reflecting the PLM’s belief that art had a crucial role to play in any social movement. Flores Magón elaborates on such ideas in a 1920 letter to Elena White, in which he assails as “nonsense” a modernist current celebrating the idea of “art for art’s sake.” He states that such is his “reverence” for the power of art that it “hurts” him to “see it prostituted by persons, who having not the power of making others feel what they feel, nor of making [them] think what they think, hide their impotency” under the “art for art’s sake” motto (qtd. in Streeby 5). By implication, true artists are those who have the power to make others feel and think as they do, who can, as Shelley Streeby elaborates in her discussion of this letter, employ a sentimental mode that inspires feeling, thought, and direct action at odds with state and capitalist power, while envisioning an alternate, socially just world (5–6). For the PLM, then, art not only helped the movement define its goals, it also cultivated the “formation of spiritual affinities between strangers who could then reach out and support one another spontaneously” and promoted a “philosophical attitude that led individuals to revolt against what might otherwise have been naturalized as ‘their lot’” (Lomnitz, par. 4).
Flores Magón’s brother Enrique wrote numerous poems for Regeneración that exemplify such principles. Though the PLM was not a nationalist group, Enrique’s poetry at times strategically cultivates and mobilizes national sentiment in order to foment a spirit of rebellion. “Tierra y Libertad,” which appeared in Regeneración on February 14, 1914, appropriates Mexico’s national hymn. The official version speaks from the perspective of the bourgeois nation-building project, urging all Mexicans to fight to the death if their homeland is attacked in order to defend the principles of “unity” and “liberty” for which it stands. In contrast, Enrique’s version speaks from the perspective of the oppressed, the country’s true heroes. Again, the call is for combat, but this time the enemy is not imagined to be a rapacious foreigner, but rather a group of internal foes: the rich, the clergy, and the government. He writes,
Fernándo Grijalva Tapia observes that if the official hymn obscures class divisions through abstract appeals to unity, such divisions explicitly animate Enrique’s version, which entreats its audience to “rip off the chains of slavery” in order to “take back the land” and “win liberty” (67). The cry of “land and liberty” that gives the poem its title and that reappears at its conclusion was the PLM’s motto, and was famously taken up by Emiliano Zapata and his followers as their rallying call.8 Thus, Enrique makes specific reference to the revolution, entreating those moved by his message to join the rebellion raging at that moment and to help realize his vision of a Mexico for the people. Moreover, as Louis Mendoza argues, PLM rallying cries around national identity were not directed solely at those within Mexico’s borders, “but also at Mexicans in the United States who were being affected by unequal development in the process of expanding capitalism.” He further elaborates that “Mexican nationalism need not be Mexico-specific but, rather, a response to a trans-border capitalism that simultaneously prompted migration from Mexico and forced people into a new relationship with capital in a land that was both foreign and familiar” (107).
Regeneración published at least one essay on the subject of women’s equality in each of its issues. Emma Pérez argues, however, that if the PLM’s male leaders were visionaries when it came to imagining an alternate world based in economic, social, and political liberation, they fell short when it came to imagining the liberation of women. She singles out Ricardo Flores Magón’s essay, “A la mujer” (“To Women”), which appeared in Regeneración on September 24, 1910, as representative of PLM views. She credits him with a perceptive analysis of women’s social condition (“If men are slaves, you are too. Bondage does not recognize sex”), but draws attention to his flawed conceptualization of women’s “natural” roles, of their important but ultimately secondary duty to, in his words, “help the man; to be there when he suffers; to lighten his sorrow” (62). As feminist scholars such as Pérez, Clara Lomas, and Ana Lau and Carmen Ramos have shown, women were an integral part of the PLM network, and their roles went far beyond the “nurturing” of men envisioned by the male leadership. Women were central to the launching of the revolution in numerous ways, not least through their work with the Spanish-language press in the borderlands.
The foremost poet among these revolutionary women was Sara Estela Ramírez. Born in Coahuila in 1881, she moved to Laredo, Texas in 1898 to accept a teaching position. She immediately became an integral part of Laredo’s vibrant intellectual and political life, publishing articles and poems in the local Spanish-language newspapers La Crónica and El Demócrata Fronterizo, and publishing two literary periodicals of her own, La Corregidora and Aurora, between 1904 and 1910. She was an active member of the PLM, “counting herself amongst the growing numbers of opposition press journalists that were decrying, both North and South of the Rio Grande, the conditions under which Mexican people were living” (Hernández, 16). While her poetry did not appear in Regeneración, her writings were published in the PLM’s supporting network of local newspapers, which the party considered crucial for the success of its cause (Gómez-Quiñones, 23). Her poem “21 of March: To Juárez,” which appeared in El Demócrata Fronterizo on May 9, 1908, is one of her more explicit calls for an uprising against the Díaz regime. Perhaps her most well-known piece is her prose poem “¡Surge!,” which was published in the April 9, 1910 issue of La Crónica just months before her premature death at the age of 29. The poem is a passionate admonishment to women to transcend the narrow roles society prescribes for them, and to embrace “lives of action … lives dedicated to noble and grandiose tasks” (Hernandez, 22). She writes “Sólo la acción es vida; sentir que se vive, es la más hermosa sensación” (Only action is life; to feel that one lives is the most beautiful sensation). Ramírez does not directly reference political rebellion here. However, Zamora points out that it might not have been socially acceptable for Ramírez to make explicit appeals for women to organize “as women.” He teases out the poem’s political undertones by focusing on the keyword “action.” When she thematizes action in her other works, she is normally urging Mexicans to organize both as Mexicans and as workers. Thus, “when Ramirez remarks that ‘only action is life,’ she may be suggesting that women can achieve authenticity by participating in struggles for democratic rights” (166). Moreover, and as Lau and Ramos argue, for many of these women, gender rebellion and political rebellion emerged simultaneously, and were mutually constituting. Thus, raising one often necessarily implies the other (23).
Like Ramírez, Leonor Villegas de Magnón played an important role in Laredo’s political and intellectual culture through her work as a writer, teacher, and activist. They were both part of the same circle of friends who participated in the revolution. Of particular importance in this circle were Nicasio Idar, his daughter Jovita, and the rest of the Idar family, a number of whom were leading figures in civic organizations, labor organizers, and active in city politics. Most importantly, they published La Crónica, a weekly newspaper that ran from at least 1910–1914, and which stood alongside Regeneración and San Antonio’s La Prensa in terms of circulation and influence (Kanellos 2000, 100). Both Ramírez and Magnón published in the newspaper. However, neither Magnón’s nor the Idar’s politics were as radical as Ramírez’s, and they were not members of the PLM. Rather, they were Tejana “progressives,” a term used by historian Benjamin Johnson to describe Tejanas/os who supported the revolution but had much more moderate agendas than the PLM anarchists (42).9
Magnón was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 1876, the same year that Porfirio Díaz began his thirty-six-year dictatorship of the country. Although born into an affluent and cultured family that was part of the Mexican frontier’s “rural aristocracy,” her unhappiness with the inequalities of the Mexican social order and the political corruption that undergirded them compelled her to risk her family wealth by participating in the overthrow of the Díaz regime. What followed was a series of remarkable exploits, as she tended to injured revolutionary soldiers, housed political exiles, engaged in numerous acts of political intrigue, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Pancho Villa, Alvaro Obregón, and Emiliano Zapata. Moreover, she became an important confidante and advisor to Venustiano Carranza, a future Mexican president, and the person who urged her to write down and publish her experiences of the Mexican Civil War.
Magnón wrote the first version of her memoir, entitled La rebelde (The Rebel), in the 1920s. Writing in Spanish and with Mexican audiences in mind, she had two interrelated objectives: to challenge Mexico’s negative view of the northern borderlands, and, following from this, to memorialize and validate the borderlands’ female revolutionaries, especially those who were members of the nursing corps she created – La cruz blanca – and who played key roles in the war’s military and political affairs. The Mexican center historically has regarded the northern frontier with contempt, viewing the region as a “cultural desert” (Zuñiga 19) and, even more, as an untameable zone of rebellion unassimilable into the national body (Alonso 18). María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba notes that the “barbaric” cultural desert in the Mexican imaginary includes the US Southwest along with northern Mexico (498). As Clara Lomas asserts, La rebelde’s importance stems in part from the fact that “it is one of the few documents produced between 1910–1920 that challenges the stereotypes of Texas Mexicans held by both Mexican and US dominant societies” (“Introduction” xii). The memoir’s key intervention in this regard is to push back against a faulty Mexican historiography that had begun to erase fronteriza/o contributions to the war before the last bullets had even been fired. Magnón makes this aim explicit, lamenting that “history has assumed responsibility for documenting the facts, but it has forgotten the important role played by the communities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and other border cities which united themselves in a fraternal agreement” (qtd. in Lomas 1994, xxxix). In contrast to such histories, Magnón positions border Mexicans at the center of the revolution, and thus at the center of the defining event of twentieth-century Mexican history. She chronicles the actions of those fronterizas/os, such as the Idars, who dedicated their lives to social change, and who did so in the multiple ways dictated by their positions between nations. Thus, many actively engaged in the revolution at the same time that they worked as labor and political activists seeking to improve the positions of Mexicans in the United States.
Magnón makes clear throughout her historiographical project of revision that border women will take center stage, a strategy she references numerous times in the memoir, as when she writes that “la historia relatará los hechos militares, aquí solo toca hacer vivir y recordar a las heroicas olvidadas” (history will relate military matters, here the concern is to keep alive and remember our forgotten heroines) (73). Lomás explains that Magnón was troubled not only by the erasure of these women from official accounts, but also by the way in which the few females who were recognized were mythified folkloric figures such as “la Adelita” and “la soldadera.” These figures were celebrated for nothing more than their beauty and for their roles as the love interests of the male soldiers. In contrast, Magnón’s portrayals of “rebel women” run the gamut from rural, destitute soldiers’ companions to middle-class teachers, journalists, propagandists, printers, telegraph operators, nurses and to bourgeois socialites, all of which challenge the masculinist official history of the revolution (xxxiii). And of course, the strongest challenge to such histories comes from Magnón’s self-portrayal as an “independent, intelligent, and extremely outspoken woman” (“Transborder Discourse” 67).
María Cristina Mena was a contemporary of Magnón’s, but her background and experiences as a writer were very different. Born in Mexico City in 1893, she came from an upper-class family with strong ties to the Díaz regime. Sensing that increasing domestic turmoil in the country might explode into all-out violence and retribution against Díaz’s supporters, her family sent her to New York City in 1907 to stay with family friends. In 1916 she married the playwright Henry Kellett Chambers, and over time she became friends with major modernist authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Mena was already an accomplished writer by the time she married, having published numerous short stories in some of the most prominent journals of the day, the majority of which appeared in Century Magazine. Her timeliness as an “insider” writing about Mexico during the revolution gave her a high level of visibility, which she took full advantage of in order to focus attention on the causes and possible solutions to the problems overwhelming her homeland, while also providing a more balanced portrait of Mexico than her US readers would otherwise be exposed to.
While Mena was not a direct participant in the revolution in the manner of Flores Magón, Ramírez, or Magnón, her stories in Century did intervene in US perceptions of Mexico during the revolution, doing so by subtly challenging the periodical’s typically denigrating depictions of her homeland. Century promoted itself as a cosmopolitan magazine with a focus on political and cultural events, and featured literary pieces, travel narratives, and cultural criticism. Doherty and Tiffany Ana López explain that during the revolution the magazine increasingly portrayed Mexico as a threat to the nation’s borders, both because of the mass migration that would result from the war, and because of the revolution’s threat to economic and political ties between the two countries. A 1914 editorial by W. Morgan Shuster makes this point, arguing that if Mexico, with its “thousands of ignorant and blameless peons, Indians, and other citizens,” did not heed the civilized world’s demands for peace, that the “international police power which in the end must reside in the leading civilized nations of the earth” would have to intervene through force (qtd. in Doherty, 168).
At times Mena’s stories display a condescension toward their Mexican characters that seems to align them with the Century view of Mexico as premodern, exotic, and “other.” Yet, as López shows, Mena distinguishes her stories from typical Century fare in that she “humanizes her characters, giving them dignity, and portraying them in complex ways rather than as one-dimensional caricatures” (68). Such is the case in “The Gold Vanity Set” (1913), which features a young Mexican “indita” named Petra, who steals a US tourist’s makeup compact in order to offer it to the Virgin of Guadalupe in prayer that her husband will remain sober and stop beating her. At first glance, the story might seem simply to reinforce stereotypes of indigenous peoples as quaint and superstitious. However, it shows the indigenous characters resisting the colonizing gaze, most explicitly when Petra staunchly refuses to allow Miss Young to take a picture of her. Marissa López observes that moments such as these “stand as an indictment of the United States’s paternalistic and exoticizing view of Mexico” (100). Moreover, they exemplify what Tiffany Ana López has identified as Mena’s “trickster discourse,” one that purposefully moves between Anglo-American and Mexican perspectives in order to disrupt and challenge dominant US reading practices and understandings of Mexico.
While Mena’s work challenges general US views of Mexico, it can also be read in light of the revolution’s impact on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, and Mexican fears of US imperial aggression during the war. One sees such layered meanings in “The Education of Popo,” the story of a wealthy US family – the Cherrys – that visits an affluent Mexican family – the Arriolas – in order to initiate a business relationship. Alicia Cherry, the recently divorced daughter of the US family, pursues the fourteen-year-old Popo Arriola, who is enchanted with the attentions of his blond-haired, blue-eyed visitor. Alicia encourages the flirtation until her ex-husband appears and she suddenly breaks off with Popo. At that point, the superficiality of her intentions becomes apparent to the dejected and suddenly more mature Popo. Doherty argues that “this story of a sexually exploitative relationship symbolizes American imperialism south of the border,” and that Alicia and Edward indicate the United States’ “consume and dispose” stance toward Mexico: “Alicia and Edward are literally products of American capitalism, ‘ugly American tourists’ who expect to be served … and who use the Mexicans for their own pleasure” (2001, 176).10
While Mena was critical of the US relationship to Mexico, she seemed happy to live out her life in her adopted home. Such was not the case for a significant number of Mexicans who found themselves in the United States due to the chaos of the revolution, and who were driven by what Nicolás Kanellos identifies as the “dream of return.” The resulting literary expressions are marked by a “double-gaze perspective” as these writings “forever compare the past and the present, the homeland and the new country, and see the resolution of these conflicting points of reference only when the author, characters, and/or the audience can return to the patria” (Hispanic 7). Such literature opposes the celebration of the American Dream, focusing instead on what the narrators see as the ills of American society, with oppression of the working class and racial discrimination chief among them. They promote the idea that “it is far better to suffer oppression and poverty among one’s own people in the homeland than on foreign soil,” and, even more, that “it is the patriotic duty of the sons of Mexico not to abandon their native land but to invest in their country’s future and to respect its history and culture” (Hispanic 68). Consequently, the most despised characters in these writings are those that assimilate into US culture, the “pochos,” “agringados,” and “renegados” who speak a corrupted Spanish-English hybrid, embrace US materialism, and subscribe to Anglo-America’s lax social mores. Such defilement typically is represented most scathingly through female characters that flout their traditional gender roles. As Gabriela Baeza Ventura explains, women were tasked with preserving and transmitting Mexican cultural values and practices through their roles as mothers, and this role was even more crucial in the hostile and corrupting environment of the United States (31). Figures such as the “pelona” – so-called because they adopt the short hairstyles, clothing, and morally corrupt behavior of “flappers” in the United States – always indicate moral and cultural ruination.11
Conrado Espinoza’s El sol de Texas (Under the Texas Sun) (1926) exemplifies this nationalist ideology of return. Espinoza was active in Mexican politics in the early 1920s, a period that continued to be marked by the violence and political disarray of the revolution. Finding himself in danger due to his political associations, he was forced into exile in the United States, where he worked for numerous Spanish-language newspapers. John Pluecker observes that Espinoza’s novel manifests a complicated narrative position with respect to the Mexican immigrant laborers that are its focus. On the one hand, it celebrates their resilience and capacity for resistance in a foreign land that subjects them to racial exploitation at every turn. On the other hand, the author’s nationalist stance demands the rejection of those immigrants who fail to return to Mexico as soon as they are able, and who are doomed to lose their cultural and moral integrity under the defiling influence of the United States (114).
Espinoza illustrates the imperative of return through the alternative scenarios presented by two families, both of whom go to the north in search of economic opportunities that their war-torn home cannot provide. In their minds, the United States promises “peace, work, riches, and happiness,” and they will no longer have to fear the “villistas or the carrancistas, the government or the rebels” because they have left the revolution behind (“¡Ahora sí que nada habían de temer de villistas ni de carrancistas, de gobierno ni de rebeldes!” 8). The first family, composed of Quico and his wife and children, embraces life in the United States, despite the racism and oppression the members face both in the cotton fields and outside of the work environment. So thoroughly do they take to their new lives that they lose their honor and dignity, with their son becoming a lazy drunk and their daughter a prostitute. In contrast, the second family, made up of Don Serapio and his two sons, is incorruptible. Almost as soon as they reach the United States they realize their mistake, which Espinoza dramatizes through the exploitative conditions under which they are forced to work, and the resulting death of one of the sons. For the rest of the novel the remaining family members strive to return home. The tragedy of the novel is that “the family had to leave home to learn to love their nation, to become patriots” (Kanellos, Hispanic 68).
Daniel Venegas’s serial novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o, cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed) appeared in Los Angeles’s Spanish-language daily newspaper El heraldo de México in 1928. Little is known of Venegas’s life. He ran a vaudeville ensemble from 1924–1933 called Compañía de Revistas Daniel Venegas that performed his plays in theaters catering to the working class, and published a weekly satirical newspaper called El Malcriado (The Brat) from 1924–1929. The penchant for burlesque and social commentary that characterize his work in the newspaper reach full fruition in Don Chipote. The eponymous protagonist leaves his impoverished home after hearing false tales of riches in the United States from a returning migrant. What he finds instead is a corrupt US society, racism, and the dehumanization of immigrants. His wife, Doña Chipote, makes the trek north to retrieve him, and the novel ends with him back in his homeland. His disillusionment with the promise of the United States is made clear in the novel’s final line: “Los mexicanos se harán ricos en Estados Unidos: CUANDO LOS PERICOS MAMEN.” (Mexicans will make it big in the United States … WHEN PARROTS BREAST-FEED).
Don Chipote serves as a remarkable early example of Mexican American working-class literature, communicating its searing criticisms of the treatment of Mexican laborers through the vernacular and cultural expressions of the laborers themselves, with whom Venegas identified (Kanellos, “Introduction” 1). While the novel vilifies Anglo-American culture and society, it offers equally denigrating attacks of Mexicans themselves, as it satirizes the immigrant “greenhorns” who believe that everything about the United States is superior to Mexico. Finally, and as was typical of such “dream of return” stories, the narrative saves its most intense criticism for “assimilated” Mexican women. Thus, the sole purpose of the Mexican female laborers in Venegas’s novel, whether they be waitresses, vaudeville performers, or prostitutes, is to take advantage of Don Chipote. These women have embraced US cultural norms by working outside of the home, through their “flapper” way of dressing, and in their morally corrupt behavior. It is left to Don Chipote’s wife, Doña Chipota, to act as a counter to these “Americanized” women. Representing the nuclear family and Mexican cultural values, she journeys to the United States to rescue her husband and to “reestablish social order by returning him to Mexico” (Kanellos, “Introduction” 10).12
While scholars have long been interested in fronteriza/o literary engagements with the revolution, the extensive mapping I provide here would not have been possible prior to the early 2000s. Many of the texts I cite have been made available over the past twenty-five years by the Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, based at the University of Houston. With its focus on recovering works by Latinas/os in the United States written before 1960, the project has unearthed a body of writing by authors who were not fully interpellated into US citizenship, and who were still active participants in Latin American political life. This literature has made it possible to alter the geographical imaginary that traditionally organizes Latina/o literary studies as a field. In the cases studied here, fronteriza/o engagements with the revolution raise numerous questions. For example, what Mexican and Latin American cultural and historical coordinates become more evident as influences on Mexican American narratives when viewed through the transnational lens required by this literature? How do Mexican American writers transform these influences to engage their positions as subjects of the United States? How might this literature reshape understandings of Mexican literary history? In what ways have Mexicans in the United States acted as as dynamic parts of multiple nations and of transnational phenomena? Scholars will examine these and other generative questions as they continue to consider fronteriza/o engagements with the Mexican Revolution.
1 For an account of this episode in the novel’s publication history, see Robe.
2 For more on the Mexican center’s “centrifugal” power, see Leal.
3 Of interest for this discussion is Schedler’s reading of Los de abajo in the context of works by US writers of color such as Américo Paredes through the concept of “border modernism.” He focuses on the formal aesthetic strategies these writers used to critique elite notions of modernism and modernity from their bordered perspectives.
4 This transnational geopolitical dimension distinguishes the Chicana/o studies framework I describe from one such as the equally generative “regional” framework Parra applies in his study of novels of the revolution. For an overview of the use of transnational approaches in Chicana/o literary studies, see Orchard and Padilla. For an argument about the importance of what he calls Chicana/o studies’ “centrifugal” mode of transnationalism and its influence on hemispheric studies, see Luis-Brown.
5 Elsewhere I have read Los de abajo alongside Mexican American literary engagements with the revolution in terms of what I call “the ‘other’ novel of the Mexican Revolution,” indicating “narratives that demand a reckoning with the refuse of nations – those migrants, immigrants, and border subjects who were cut loose by the Mexican nationalist project, and who subsequently probed the cracks in that project from a transnational perspective” (67). See also Parle, who studies novels of the revolution that were published by San Antonio’s Casa Editorial Lozano, a press owned by Ignacio Lozano, publisher of the important Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa.
6 The historiographical literature on the revolution is vast. Examples include Gilly, Knight, and Katz. For a good overview and critique of this literature and the different stages of its development, see Vaughan.
7 A very partial list of work that examines the role played by Mexicans in the United States in the revolution includes Griswold del Castillo, García, Montejano, Zamora, Pérez, Lomas, and the collection of essays edited by Marroquín Arredondo, Pineda Franco, and Mieri. For an engaging microhistory of the Revolution in El Paso, Texas, see Romo.
8 The PLM and Zapata’s influence continue to be felt in Mexico to this day through the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), an insurgent collection of indigenous and non-indigenous groups fighting for “economic equity and democratic freedoms” (Saldaña-Portillo, 402). The EZLN sees itself as the ideological heir to Zapata, especially with respect to his struggles for land reform and redistribution, among other issues. For analyses of the EZLN in Chicanx and borderlands contexts see Saldaña-Portillo and Martín.
9 For more on the women of this circle, especially in terms of their roles as educators, see Enoch.
10 For an analysis of newly recovered works by Mena housed at the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston, see Toth.
11 The underlying ideologies in these immigrant narratives overlap with but are not identical to writings that promoted the idea of “México de afuera,” the extreme belief that Mexico had been so transformed by the “bolchevique” hordes spearheading the war that the only true Mexican culture survived in the exiled colonies north of the border. Like Espinoza and Venegas, who I discuss below, these expatriates were culturally conservative, viewed even the slightest gesture toward assimilation as cultural defilement, and demanded that women adhere to traditional gender roles. However, they differed in that they were unsympathetic and even scornful toward the working classes, and refused to return to Mexico until the revolution had been defeated and the Porfirian social order had been restored. For more on this group, see Novoa, Ventura, and Kanellos.
12 See M. López for a discussion of the ways in which Don Chipote challenges the class biases inherent in the “México de afuera” ideology.