Cartucho, like The Underdogs, encompasses many voices, but is a decidedly different text in many ways. There are two main aspects of the story I found especially powerful.
The first is its complicated portrayal of death (often times many deaths, and violent ones at that) from the perspective of a child. It is not even that the deaths never come across as completely negative but that they become, to some degree, anticipated and exciting. In a section entitled “Through The Window,” the young protagonist describes watching a murder outside her window that leaves a body with “blood pouring out of him through many holes.” She goes on to say, “I became accustom to seeing the scrawl of his body […] The dead man seemed mine […] He was my obsession.” And later, after he is removed she remarks, “That night I went to sleep dreaming that they would shoot someone else and that it would be next to my house.” Throughout the text her mother becomes more and more distressed. At different times she cries, has her daughter visit graves and prays. She is clearly quite affected by the fighting and we know that her daughter must be, to some degree, aware of this since she is the one recounting the events. Despite her mother’s visible pain she remains enthralled by death. I have not yet decided what I think the author intended by writing her reactions this way. I am torn between thinking that her perspective is such precisely because she is a child and cannot understand the severity of what she is surrounded by and giving her much more credit and reading her curiosity as a coping mechanism.
The second thing I found particularly interesting is the way in which safety and masculinity are conflated in this novel. Azuelo certainly implied this but Campobello makes it very evident. We are told the story of the protagonist who looks on as eleven men come into her home and insult her mother. The leader, a man with a blonde mustache, goes onto become famous and well-liked. In exploring her anger towards this man she says, “Two years later […] I saw him […] That day, everything was ruined for me. I couldn’t study. I spent it thinking about being a man, having my own pistol and firing a hundred shots into him.” It does not suffice, even in her own head, to simply imagine herself as soldier. She must first imagine herself as a man so that the idea of becoming a soldier and carrying a weapon seems plausible. In this way defense, of the state or of the self, is relegated to a sphere only men may inhabit. What is worth noting is that the character who tells us this is a child so we can easily see how pervasive (and damaging) these gendered narratives can be.
Yes, I think many of us share the same questions as to why death is portrayed in such detailed and fascinating ways, especially coming from the child.
But I would also like to address your point on gender stereotpyes and this safety-masculinity relation. You bring up an interesting point. And it is one embedded in culture and gender. What’s more, the fact that these stereotypes begin even at childhood is something to take into consideration. I don’t think it is the child’s fault, and neither can we say it is society’s fault. It is just a process, a way of simplifying and making sense of the world, that we associate and categorize things. Thus, in this sense it seems understandable. Though I think, based on this, we should yes at least try to challenge these stereotypes.
S. Yes, it might be worth spending a little more time contrasting this book with Azuela’s (and perhaps also with Viva Zapata!). One question might be how much difference (if any) it makes that it’s written by a woman. Though as you point out, at times the narrator seems to wish that she were a man.