Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho was a fascinating read. The text was structured in the exact way that I think memory often operates: short, vivid pictures of vague people and experiences. Reading Cartucho, I felt I was actually experiencing and reflecting on these snapshots of the Mexican Revolution with the narrator.

The text had an unsettling contrast between the curiosity of childhood and the haunting depictions of death and violence around her. Campobello’s narrative embrace of the gruesome was both poetic and upsetting. One passage in particular that stuck with me came on page 8 in “El ‘Kirilí,'” “El ‘Kirilí lay there in the water, his body turning cold, the tissue of his porous flesh clutching the bullets that killed him.” In this way, Campobello’s vignettes are both eerie and beautiful, as I’m sure childhood itself was in this exact time and place in history.

The juxtaposition between childhood bliss and the inhumanity of war was inescapable in Cartucho. One scene illustrative of this tonal shift came on page 36 as Campobello “buries her nose” in a slice of watermelon just before seeing a man be hanged before her very eyes.

What I found especially interesting was not only Campobello’s acknowledgement of the brutality around her, but also her complete embrace of it. One quote that illustrates this comes on page 39, “I liked hearing those tragic stories. It seemed to me I could see and hear everything. I needed to have those terrifying pictures in my child’s soul.” Given the deluge of tragedy she was subject to, it’s not surprising to me that Campobello would be able to describe these atrocities in such detail while being detached from nostalgia.

I believe that Campobello viewed herself, even at that young age, as a valuable collection of memories and stories from the front lines of tragedy. As a child and a girl, she was powerless to stop any violence or death around her, but her true power lay in her capacity to be an archive of truth and a vessel for the memory of those who had lost their lives.

This brings me to think about the function of memory and how Campobello’s text serves as an inheritance of collective memory. The stories were not just her own personal accounts but also many of her mother’s, which had been passed down to her almost as heirlooms. In a broader sense, I think the ballads Campobello included later in the text also serve this function – as a heritage of collective memory. She writes, “They all had favorite songs, which they left as an inheritance to others who loved them too… This song belong to all of them. They would sing it together, in a circle, with their arms around each other’s shoulders” (78-79). In this sense, collective memory is a ballad itself, shared among comrades and neighbors and passed down through the generations, forever holding the legacy of those who could no longer sing along.

Question for discussion: Storytelling seems to be a very unique talent (that I do not possess!); would you consider yourself an effective storyteller? How do you know?