Before you make any assumptions based on the post’s title, I’m not underwhelmed because I didn’t like the book (to clarify, I didn’t like the book but thats not the reasoning here), I’m underwhelmed because I carry in some sense the same disappointment that Luis Cervantes felt about the revolution and the way it eventually manifests, and leaves behind the country and its people in replacement with this weird sense of calamity and loss. I think because I am still young and my life has barely started yet, my brain doesn’t have the capacity to process this kind of dejectedness that the characters possess especially towards the end of the book, which is something I guess people kind of attribute to just having experienced “life”. I really empathized with this quote in the foreword: “Revolutions begin fighting tyranny and end fighting themselves”. I think the meaning here in the passage referred to the political situation where revolutionaries fight against the dictator and end up fighting among factions to choose who gets to sit in the now vacated seat, which was Mexico’s situation. But I think to read into this quote more deeply, people start this war clear that the enemy was the tyrant and his oppression they were all against, but end up fighting themselves as they find they now find this tyrant within themselves and are unclear where their values lie as well, eventually submitting to having no values, in my opinion, which resulted in more barbaric behaviour. I think this parallel was drawn by Azuela himself the best, where Demetrio finds himself in situations he’s experienced before but on the other side, be it the battle in the valley/canyon/sierra place, or raiding others houses. Reading those scenes also furthered the despondency I felt.

Another interesting thing to think about is how the book directly translated means “Those from below”, as mentioned again in the foreword. For me, the feeling the directly translated title gives is a greater sombreness, compared to “Underdogs”, which also has its own zing to it, but I guess has a more English nuance to it which kinda takes away from the original title. I think the title obviously has some relation to the class structure in place here in reference to Demitrio and his troops, but I also think there’s a sort of relation to how the scene starts with them in high ground attacking “those from below” and ends with them being the ones from below, as they were killed. I think this also ties in again with class structure, since the “curro” Luis Cervantes is not there as they were dying one by one at the bottom.

To finish off with a question: Did you guys like this book? What part about it was something you enjoyed or something you really didn’t like? I personally wanted to jump to the next page whenever they mentioned Camilia. That girl has already been through enough.