Cartucho

Nellie Campobello, Cartucho

By their nature, revolutions are both confused and confusing. They are the point at which one regime of sense gives way to another: they register a break in the prevailing discourse and the birth of another way of seeing and telling. By definition, the old ways of describing the world are no longer fit for purpose when the revolution comes around; but the new ways are not yet fully formed. A revolution is always in some sense illegible, unrepresentable, as the conditions of its representation have yet to appear.

But as such, in retrospect, revolutions are always portrayed as too legible, too easily represented. The new discourse assumes the revolution that enabled its emergence as a ground that can never be fully questioned. Revolutions are, in short, quickly naturalized, and their illegibility is erased or over-written by what becomes the common sense of the new order. The moment at which everything is still in play is forgotten or even forcibly repressed in the name of a genealogy that has to secure the new regime of intelligibility.

The challenge, then, is less to explain the revolution than to recover the revolutionary perspective itself, from which what is going on is always beyond full comprehension. Anything else is (quite literally) counter-revolutionary, as it goes against or undoes the force within the revolution that disrupts the existing discursive regime and makes space for a future that has to be strictly unknowable. To put this another way: explanation is the prerogative of constituted power, a tactic by which apparently to confirm that the present is the past’s inevitable telos; but the constituent power that drives the revolution has no fixed end.

This then is the virtue of Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: that, though it was first published a decade or more after the events that it depicts, it strips them of the sense that had accumulated around them under the PRI. Campobello neither provides nor seeks explanation for the “tales of the struggle in Northern Mexico” that she relates. Rather, she conveys the revolution in all its confusion and indeterminacy, without ever sacrificing immediacy or concreteness.

The fragmentary style of Campobello’s text never aspires to unity or totality. There is no fixed beginning or end; instead, we are always in the midst of things, from the opening lines in which we are told that “Cartucho didn’t say his name. He didn’t know how to sew or replace buttons. One day his shirts were brought to our house” (6). It is not that temporal markers are entirely absent, it is just that they don’t pin the episodes down to any linear chronology, any all-encompassing narrative arc: “It was the fourth of September, but of what year?” (84). At any one moment Pancho Villa’s forces may be in town; but soon enough we will find ourselves among Carranzistas, before the Villistas sweep back in again.

There are endings, of course. Men die. Over and over, men die. But often enough the narrator doesn’t enquire why, and when we are given reasons they are as disparate and disordered as the ebb-and-flow of troops and weapons: “He died for a kiss the officer gallantly awarded him” (25); “He just had the face of a man lulled by fate” (55); “he was dying for a cause different from the revolution” (18). Even cause and effect are apparently inverted, as when one soldier is said to have “embraced the bullets and held on to them” (66), as though bodies drew bullets from guns.

Some of this effect is achieved through the device of a child narrator, whose memory clings to the sights and sounds of life in wartime, rather than to the justification that surround them: “I’m telling what impressed me most, no longer recalling any of the strange words or names I didn’t understand” (42). Overwhelmingly, however, there is also the sense that in a revolution, it is not just bodies that are felled, but with them a set of discourses that can simply no longer be spoken or heard. One man, before he is shot, cries out that “A man who’s going to die has a right to speak!” But moments later “everyone turned their backs on the grey form left lying there, pressing into the ground the words they never let him say” (52).


Week 5 – Cartucho

Death, death, death. It’s almost a miracle if one of the vignettes doesn’t have someone die in it. Told from the perspective of a child, these fragmented bits of story shed a different light on the revolution. It is quite horrible for anyone to have to experience so much brutality, let alone a child. Her perspective on death is something that I will probably never understand. It’s hard to determine how she actually views the deaths. In one way, it seems like she finds it exciting. “Guts! How nice!” she exclaims at one point, and does not give it much more though after that. Gore hardly seems to affect her in any way that one might expect. Could it be that it is so horrible beyond her comprehension that she can find it so amusing? Or is it that murder, death, and gore alike were so commonplace in her day-to-day life that she had grown accustomed to it? Another of her unusual reactions was when a man died outside of her window and she was so fascinated by his body that she claimed it as hers. When the body was removed, she felt like someone had stolen it from her, and hoped that someone else would die close to her house. One part I found interesting was when her friends Zafiro and Zequiel were killed, she broke the syringe that she used to squirt water at them. This was the most emotion that she exhibits.

Throughout the book it is apparent that the narrator and her mother are in favour of Pancho Villa, creating his image to be very powerful and mighty. However, there is at least one vignette where we see that not all that are on Villa’s side are good. General Fierro orders his driver to be shot because his head hit the roof of the car due to some obstructions on the road. Before the man was dead, they also cut off fingers to steal rings and stripped him bare of his clothes. A lot of the men had little respect for the dead.

Another oddity is her personification of her doll, Pitaflorida. She talks about Jose Diaz, a handsome man who stole the hearts of many women. She decides that Pitaflorida will be married to Diaz. But just like Nellie/the narrator, Pitaflorida only exhibits a small amount of emotion, so there is some comparison to be drawn here.

I kind of wonder what the idea was of putting all of these events out of chronological order. One moment you are introduced by a character and their death, and then several pages later it is another part of their lives.

2 Things

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.

Week 4: Underdogs

This weeks reading was a novel by Mariano Azuelo published in 1915. The novel tells the story of Demetrio Macías and his humble beginnings as a peaceful farmer, who transforms into a revolutionary general. What must be noted of course is the band of rebels that Macías leads are not in fact ideal revolutionaries. As the book progresses we see that the rebels begin looting and pillaging the villages that they begin to “liberate”. I find it difficult even considering Macías as a revolutionary for this very reason.

Throughout the novel I found myself thinking similar things as Viva Zapata! I had mentioned in class that I thought the Mexican revolution a failure because it never overthrew the bourgeoisie, but rater replaced one rich, corrupt president with another. The failure of the Mexican revolution lies within the fact that agrarian reform is not enough of a platform to transform society. Agrarian reform is a difficult subject for many Marxists, because it can be enacted in a variety of different situations and for different reasons. If we look to the Cuban revolution, we can see that agrarian reform worked in many aspects, notably that large landowners had their land expropriated so as to be distributed back to the peasant population. However, it must also be noted that the Cuban revolution aimed to transform society as a whole, implementing various institutions and nationalizing industry. It is this combination of centralizing the means of production in the hands of the proletariat, which allows a revolution to succeed.

Vladimir Lenin once said “Everything but power is an illusion”, and this basic fact is essential to the revolution. The Mexican revolution is a prime example of how this statement is true. In the novel Underdogs the common theme expresses how at first the revolution is pure, but as time goes on its leaders betray the revolution. The fatal flaw of this revolution is that the Mexican people were coerced into believing that once the revolutionary army overthrew the previous government, all it would take to achieve a lasting political change was a new president and governing body. The revolution is so much more than this however. Linking back to the quote from Lenin, power is what drives change, and this change can only be brought about if those in power are overthrow by those with the means to take power. Ever since the introduction of capitalism, only the proletariat has the ability to take power from the bourgeoisie. Limiting a revolution to a simple change in government is doomed for failure! Without removing the underlying issues of the revolution, in this case the idea of property and land reform we cannot expect to see a successful revolution. It is capitalism itself that must be the enemy of the revolution, and this enemy should always be the focus of the revolution. Without explicitly removing capitalism, a permanent revolution is not possible as exemplified in the Mexican revolution.


The Man on the Outside

The book The Underdogs explains what the lives of revolutionaries were like during the Mexican revolution. At the start of the book, we encounter a scenario where a mysterious man is eating at a rancho when two federals appear out of now where and kill the dog and attempt to sleep with the woman present. From the start, we are showed the levels of corruption within the federal army, and it is because of this corruption that the revolution is occurring. As the story continues and we learn more about Demetrio Macias, the supposed leader of the group of revolutionaries centered around Lemon we learn about the distrust and hatred that the local people have towards the Federales. As the revolutionaries fight their way through the Sierra Macias is wounded after a fight with the Federales eventually seeking shelter at a small pueblo.  It is at this point that eventually that Luis Cervantes or curro as the revolutionaries called him, Luis was a medical student and revolutionary sympathizer who eventually got enlisted in the army. During his time in the army he learned about the hatred that even some of the soldiers inside of his regiment had towards the Federales, eventually Luis escapes in attempts to join up with Macias. Much to his dismay, Luis is not immediately accepted by the revolutionaries, but it is because of this rejection that he is able to see and observe the revolutionaries in this outsider perspective. As Luis is held up in the jail fearing for his life, he reflects on this aspirations of joining the revolutionaries and how the revolutionaries standing in front of him lacked all of the characteristics he dreamed of. This outsider perspective that Luis gains although it tests Luis’s dedication to the cause allows him to better understand his compatriots. Much like his army experience Luis is eventually allowed to join the revolutionaries eventually coming to understand each and every one of their goals and ideologies much like his army counterparts. The role that Luis places in the story is two parts on one side of it, he is proof of the hatred between the revolutionaries and the Federales which is evident on the group’s unwillingness to accept him for anything else than a Federal. But it is during this time of rejection that he is able to become the observer of the group, even with his desire to join he is objective of the goals and abilities of the revolutionaries. It is these observations of the group which gives allows us to understand both Luis’s plight but also the groups. Their hatred and fear of the Federales and the comradery that they share is what makes us as readers become engaged in their struggles.

Week 4 – The Underdogs

This week we were asked to read The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela. The book is a diary-like account of a small group of Mexican revolutionaries fighting on the northern front. As I was reading the book, the Luis Cervantes character made me think a lot about perspective in a revolution.

Luis Cervantes (loosely based on the author himself)  is a medical-student-deserter from the federal army that joins Demetrio and his band of rebels. Cervantes is often the voice of moral reason after the author describes seemingly thoughtless looting by the bandits, often is ignored after trying to give political context to the struggle and seems to have a power over everyone else that stems from his intelligence. Now considering that the character is based on the author it is a very glowing and honorable picture that he paints of his role in that world. However, it really made me think of the author’s perspective as I read the book and how it seems to shape not just his memory of himself but of all that happens around him. For Example, the level of violence he saw during his time with the revolutionaries clearly shocked Azuela and the theme of desperation and senseless brutality is a constant in the book. I do not doubt that there was extreme violence but I imagine it was especially shocking to a medical student from the city. I think that context is important and the rebel’s actions may not seem as ruthless or as sudden if one considers the environment from which they rose to take up arms.

Another theme that I was thinking about as I read the book was hierarchy within a movement for equality.   Demetrio and his men have no real voice within the politics of the revolution and are used as muscle by the generals in charge. Despite successes as a group they never seem gain any real voice and the source of their oppression is just replaced with different head. It seems like this is almost inevitable when in a movement, the voices of los de abajo are not considered and a few of those in charge reap the benefits and eventual position of power that results from the resistance. In this kind of struggle, power is gained with violence/money and is destined to replicate the injustice it seeks to tear down. It seems that any movement for change must model the kind of world it wants to create.

Los de Abajo

After reading the first few chapters of Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs I began to suspect that the novel would follow the same broad narrative path as Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the hero of the Revolution replaced by the fictional but no less charismatic Demetrio Macias. From the offset he is shown to have quite the reputation, scaring away to Federal soldiers by his mere presence, and only sparing them because “Their hour hasn’t struck yet”. Demetrio also has a stoic disposition, as well as an apparent talent for leadership, painting him as a perfect icon for the Revolution.

However, the rest of the novel puts him under much less of a positive light. This shift begins with the question of his motivations, which – unlike Kazan and Steinbeck’s version of Zapata – do not concern the retribution of lands to their rightful owners. Rather, he seeks vengeance against a local figure of authority whose beard he spat on, and who retaliated by sending Federal soldiers to burn Demetrio’s house down. The men who follow him do not fight for any nobler goals, and most of them seem to have joined Demetrio because they were on the run from the law. Even Luis Cervantes, who shows a strong sense of moral righteousness in the way he embraces revolutionary ideology, only joined the movement after his perceived mistreatment in the ranks of the Federal army. He even attempts to justify Demetrio’s own involvement through ideology, telling him that they are “fighting tyranny itself”.

However, Demetrio shows little interest in achieving any sort of grand socio-political result. He even seems uninterested when Cervantes suggests he should join with other revolutionary forces, and only changes his mind at the prospect of obtaining a high military rank. Cervantes himself, although initially trying to stick by his ideals, eventually gives in to the attraction of material gains, and joins the other men in looting. The only character to display any form of moral integrity is Camilla, whose kindness and naiveté strikes a stark contrast with Demetrio and his followers, and her death at the hands of War Paint only serves to emphasise the weakness of morality in the face of violence. All of this serves to make the point that while idealism may have been present, the fighters in the Mexican Revolution was to a large extent motivated by a combination of circumstance and desire for material wealth. While it is still possible to sympathise with such characters, it also makes it difficult to perceive them as heroes. In fact, were it not for the fact that they are fighting in a revolution, we would probably see them as no more than simple bandits.

In fact, the revolution helps vindicate their deeds, and allows them to gain wealth and glory through violence in ways that would be impossible in peaceful times, where they would be destitute outlaws. The Revolution is all they have left.

The Underdogs

It’s a familiar story: the Revolution starts with high ideals and good intentions, but soon goes sour; it takes on a logic of its own, of interminable infighting and violence for the sake of violence. Those who originally railed against corruption become corrupt themselves; things end up as bad if not worse than they were at first. At the end we’re left doubting that so much sacrifice and pain was worth it. It’s the story told, of the Russian Revolution, in Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which ultimately “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

On the one hand, this is the revolution as senseless expenditure, as upset without outcome. In the words of Jacques Mallet du Pan: “la révolution dévore ses enfants,” the Revolution devours its children. On the other hand, this is equally the revolution as return, as full circle of the wheel of history. In the words of The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” This from a song with the title “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Yet for some reason the impulse to revolt lives on–the Arab Spring might be just the latest example–despite the fact that so many revolutions seem to take a wrong turn somewhere.

The Underdogs

Hence the dilemma for a book such as Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (Los de abajo), which provides this narrative for the Mexican Revolution, focusing on the Northern front in the years 1913 to 1915. It has to account for the revolution’s causes, the reasons why people might have believed that only violence could transform their circumstances, as well as its effects, a world in which all sense of cause or effect has disappeared, in which violence has become its own raison d’être. As one character puts it near the end of the novel, considering which side to choose among the various warring factions: “Villa? Obregón? Carranza? X . . . Y . . . Z! What do I care? I love the revolution like I love an erupting volcano! I love the volcano because it is a volcano and the revolution because it is the revolution!” (124).

One answer to this problem is to point out that, ultimately, revolutions perhaps have very little to do with politics. At least, they have little to do with politics if we conceive of the political in terms of the making of decisions, of choosing between options. Demetrio Macías, the main character of The Underdogs, a man who the book portrays rising through the ranks of the revolutionary forces, actively refuses the right to decide when he, too, is asked “on which side are you going to fight?” His response is to “[bury] his hands in his hair, [scratch] his head” and reply “Don’t ask me questions like that [. . .]. All ya have to do is say: ‘Demetrio, you do such and such,’ and I’ll do it, end of story!” (116). So it is not that the revolution is (to adapt a phrase from Carl von Clausewitz) “the continuation of politics by other means.” If anything, the revolution is actively anti-political, the expression of a dissatisfaction with the limits of the political.

It is not that politics is absent from The Underdogs. It figures primarily through the novel’s other main character, Luis Cervantes, a deserter from the federalist side who attaches himself to Macías’s gang early on, in large part (we are told) for lofty reasons: “the suffering and misery of the dispossessed,” whose cause he sees “as the sublime cause of an oppressed people demanding justice, pure justice” (22). Throughout the novel he seeks to translate the revolutionary violence into lofty sentiment. For instance, as he puts it to Macías: “You do not yet understand your true, your high, your most noble mission. [. . .] You have risen up against the cacique system itself, the system that is devastating the entire nation. We are constitutive pieces of a great social movement that will lead to the exaltation of our motherland.” To which Macías himself responds: “Go on, bring us two more beers” (42).

So politics is disdained and seen as almost entirely irrelevant. Ultimately, Cervantes abandons the revolutionaries, leaving behind only a note encouraging one of them to come north of the border, open a Mexican restaurant, “and in a very short time we can be rich” (120). Yes, he opts out of the corruption and the ceaseless violence. Yes, as a result, he’s the only one to survive to the novel’s final pages. But that’s precisely because, however much he tries to articulate the spirit of the revolution, it is clear at every moment that he misses it entirely. The revolution forever escapes its political articulation. And perhaps that goes as much for its hackneyed narrativization in The Underdogs itself.


Underdogs – SPAN 280 – Blog 4

Underdogs is a novel that looks at the Mexican Revolution through the perspective of the revolutionaries who were fighting against the government. There were those supporting Zapata in the south, and those supporting Villa in the north. Both though were revolting against Porfirio Diaz dictatorship which had taken away their land. Therefore, one of the key defining aspects of the Mexican Revolution was this fight for land, for land was not only a part of identity, but it was also a symbol of wealth, a means to cultivate and trade with others their agricultural goods. It was also, however, associated with having a job and was also deeply tied to family life. Therefore, not having land was not just a problem; it also posed a threat to family life and survival who without it would have no means of food, or wealth to buy things. This problem goes back to our discussion on the Communist Manifesto in regards to inequalities, expropriation of land, and class struggles between the bourgeoisie (who in this case is the government) and the rural proletariat (the campesinos or famers). This blog is not intended to be historical or explanatory, but to emphasize once again certain recurring themes such as class struggle, revolutions, land, inequalities, power, and capitalism. I would however like to bring to attention some things that I found interesting about this novel. To start off, I would like to talk about the names of the characters, some of which have this high-status, honorable connotation. For example, Demetrio, Anastasio, Pancracio, War Paint, and Luis Cervantes who got his name from Miguel de Cervantes who if you don’t know, was a very famous Spanish writer, also author of Don Quijote. It seems as if by giving the characters these well-thought of names, the author is giving more meaning and clarity into the revolution and its cause. There is also something I appreciated about this novel, and that is how the novel challenged our assumption that the revolutionaries were the “good guys” because they were fighting to bring change and put an end to the despotic regime. What this novel also shows is the more personal stories of the revolutions that we don’t often find in history text books. The revolutionaries it seems were also bad (men) in that they stole, destroyed, and abused women throughout their journey, sort of like scavengers who do not care about the consequences they have on others just that it serves them in some way. This then relates to the title, Underdogs. The title can be directed not only at the Federales or the government itself, but also at the revolutionaries. This revolution, depending on how you look at it, and to what extent you are affected by it, is a story not about humans fighting humans, but of animals fighting animals as neither side behaved well. What I also appreciated about the novel was the numerous references to nature. This is important because once again, land (and nature) played a huge role in people’s lives. It was part of identity, but also of culture. The many references to nature only makes this revolution more of a personal story where people are fighting for something dear to them as they do not want to lose that. As part of the “personal” story, I like how the novel also engages us in the conversations that these soldiers had. History books also don’t tell the conversations, or stories that soldiers shared amongst one another. Certain topics in the novel would come up such as family, fear, politics, humor, songs, money, etc. This once again shows that the revolution is not just about fighting, but it’s about people. As a side note, one other thing I found very interesting was how in one part of the novel, it mentions that there are 2 things men fight to protect: family and their country. We can now add to the Mexican Revolution, this concept of fighting for families as well. And finally, I would like to end with a quote found on page 43 where it says “the revolution is a fight for principles and ideals, not to kill”. I think this challenges one of our main conceptions of revolutions as being violent. According to some people, they don’t want to fight, kill, or cause anyone any harm. All they ultimately want is change, ideals, principles; peace. People make revolutions violent, but it is not necessarily the case that the revolutionaries are for the sole purpose of inflicting pain.