The Underdogs Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  PART 1

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  PART 2

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  PART 3

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  Notes

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE UNDERDOGS

  MARIANO AZUELA (1873-1952), the most prolific novelist of the Mexican Revolution and the author of its most important novel, was born in a small city in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. He studied medicine in Guadalajara and served during the revolution as a doctor with the forces of Pancho Villa, which gave him firsthand exposure to the events and characters that appear in The Underdogs. Azuela is buried in the Rotonda de Hombres Ilustres, Mexico’s equivalent of Westminster Abbey.

  SERGIO WAISMAN has translated Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City, for which he received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Award, and three books for Oxford University Press’s Library of Latin America series. He is the author of Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery and the novel Leaving, and is an associate professor of Spanish at The George Washington University.

  CARLOS FUENTES is the author of more than twenty books, including This I Believe, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and The Old Gringo. His many awards include the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the National Prize in Literature (Mexico’s highest literary award), the Cervantes Prize, and the inaugural Latin Civilization Award. He served as Mexico’s ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977 and currently divides his time between Mexico City and London.

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  This translation first published in Penguin Books 2008

  Translation copyright © Sergio Waisman, 2008 Foreword copyright © Carlos Fuentes, 2008 All rights reserved

  Los de abajo published in the United States of America in 1915.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3852-7

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  Foreword

  “Revolutions begin fighting tyranny and end fighting themselves. ” So said Saint-Just, the French revolutionary who in 1794 was guillotined in the combat between the factions once united against the monarchy. Is this the fate of all revolutionary movements? It does seem to be the case: Russia, China, Cuba. The United States completed its exclusive 1776 revolution and faced Shays’ Rebellion only through civil war and battles over civil rights.

  The Mexican Revolution (1910-20 in its armed phase) began as a united movement against the three decades of authoritarian rule of General Porfirio Díaz. Its democratic leader, Francisco Madero, came to power in 1911 and was overthrown and murdered in 1913 by the ruthless general Victoriano Huerta, who promptly restored the dictatorship and was opposed by the united forces of Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and those of the agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata in the south. But when Huerta, defeated, fled in 1915, the revolution broke up into rival factions. Zapata and Villa came to represent popular forces, agrarian and small town, while Carranza and Obregón were seen as leaders of the rising middle class that Díaz had suffocated under the patrimonialist regime of huge haciendas using low-paid peon labor.

  Mariano Azuela (1873-1952) was a country doctor who joined first Carranza, then Villa. In 1915, right in the middle of the war, he sat down and wrote a disenchanted tale of revolution sprung from one man’s experience. A chronicle, a novel, a testimony, The Underdogs is all of this, but above all it is a degraded epic, a barefoot Iliad sung by men and women rising from under the weight of history, like insects from beneath a heavy stone. Moving in circles, blinded by the sun, without a moral or political compass, they come out of darkness, abandoning their homes, migrating from hearth to revolution.

  The people of Mexico are “the armies of the night” in Azuela’s book. They give the reader the impression of a violent, spontaneous eruption. But be warned. The immediacy that Azuela brings to the people is a result of the long mediacy of oppression: half a millennium of authoritarian rule by Aztec, colonial, and republican powers. If this weight of the past at least partly explains the brutality of the present, it applies not only to the mass of the people but also to the protagonists, the leaders, the individuals that Azuela thrusts forward: the revolutionary general Demetrio Macías and the revolutionary intellectual “Curro” Cervantes, accompanied by a host of supporting players. Like the people, Macías and Cervantes are heirs to a history of authoritarian power and submission. But if the rebellious mass is moving, however blindly, against the past, Macías and Cervantes are repeating the past. They are rehearsing the role of the Indian, Spanish, and republican oppressor, Macías on the active front and Cervantes on the intellectual side. They both see Mexico as their personal patrimony. They want to be fathers, judges, teachers, protectors, jailers, and, if need be, executioners of the people, but always in the name of the people.

  The Underdogs thus presents us with a wide view of the social, political, and historical traits of Mexico and, by extension, of Latin America: it is a degraded epic but also a chronicle of political failure and of aspiring nationhood. There are no Latin American novels prior to independence in the 1820s. I might say that it is the nation that demands its narration, but also that narration needs a nation to narrate. This, indeed, links the origins of both the North American and Latin American novel. Whatever they actually are, they first appeared along with “the birth of the nation.”

  The novel is a critical event. Religion demands fai
th, logic demands reason, politics demands ideology. The novel demands criticism: critique of the world, along with a critique of itself. While literature and the imagination are deemed superfluous (especially) in satisfied societies, the first thing a dictatorship does is to censor writing, burn books, and exile, imprison, or murder writers.

  Do we need authoritarian repression to demonstrate the importance of literature, the critical freedom of words and the imagination? I cannot separate Azuela’s moral and literary significance from the fact that he drew a critical portrait of the Mexican revolutionary movement as it was happening, setting a standard of critical freedom that has prevailed in my country in spite of seven decades of authoritarian rule by a single party. There has been repression in Mexico—of political parties, individuals, unions, agrarian movements, journalists—but writers have maintained a high degree of critical independence. This is thanks to a very early exercise of this independence by Mariano Azuela and The Underdogs, followed by the critical chronicles of Martín Luis Guzmán, José Vasconcelos, and Rafael Muñoz.

  This critical tradition against all odds should be compared with the silence imposed on Soviet writers by Stalinism, the exile of German writers from Nazi Germany, or the persecution of North American authors during the McCarthy era. The margin of critical and creative freedom, menaced by the political powers—always, everywhere—was maintained in Mexico thanks, in great measure, to the stakes planted by Mariano Azuela.

  Azuela began his writing career with a Zolaesque naturalist novel, María Luisa (1907), and went on to register the foibles of politics (Andrés Pérez, maderista, 1911), political bosses (Los caciques, 1917), the middle classes (Tribulaciones de una familia decente, 1918) and the labor movement (El camarada Pantoja, 1937). The Underdogs (Los de abajo), nevertheless, remains his signature book, and its universal import is well taken as he describes human conduct that has the troubling quality of repeating itself everywhere and in all historical periods. The forces of social ascent and corruption: “Now we are the swells,” the grotesque camp follower La Pintada [War Paint] says as she assumes the heritage of the former proprietors.

  Corruption unites the best and the worst. In one of the greatest scenes of the novel, several characters, pretending to sleep, see the others in the act of stealing. A common language of dishonesty, cover-up, and government by kleptocracy is born. It is a thieves’ pact of worldwide resonance. This is, indeed, a disenchanted epic, in which fatality engenders bitterness and bitterness enhances fatality, both illustrated by the scene where General Macías rolls a stone down a hill, murmuring: “Look at this stone, how it cannot stop.”

  And yet, perhaps this epic of failures (or failed epic) is a great novel because, for all its realism, even in spite of its cynicism, it is astonished by a world it no longer understands. And it is this wonderful sense of surprise that gives Los de abajo its lasting wonder.

  —CARLOS FUENTES

  Introduction

  The Underdogs is the most important novel of the Mexican Revolution. In its pages, we follow the actions of a band of revolutionaries—led by the protagonist, Demetrio Macías— at the height of the revolution’s armed phase, from 1913 to 1915. The novel works mainly with realism to portray many of the harsh details and effects of the revolution, indirectly drawing our attention to the possible motivations that drive Demetrio Macías and his men to fight. The novel is written in fragmentary prose, and although it is interspersed with moments of beautiful description, it is driven primarily by the dialogue of the protagonists and the surrounding characters themselves. This, combined with frequent, jarring narrative changes—such as alterations in verb tense; choppy, staccato exchanges in the dialogue; and temporal and spatial jumps—serves to reflect the jarring experiences that the characters encounter.

  The Underdogs is deeply intertwined with the historical context in which it is set: the Mexican Revolution, and in particular some of the major events of the revolution in the northern states of Mexico. Demetrio Macías and his revolutionary group are followers of the legendary Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the most important revolutionary leader from northern Mexico. The novel begins at the peak of Villa’s popularity and ends two years later, when Villa has begun to suffer a series of decisive defeats in the fighting between the different factions of revolutionaries.1Part of the route that Macías and his men take in the course of the novel parallels that of another leader of a Villista revolutionary band: Julián Medina, a historical figure mentioned in passing early on in the novel, who became one of Villa’s generals during this time.2The relevance here is that Mariano Azuela joined Medina’s group and served as its medical officer during almost exactly the same period covered in the novel.3The author of The Underdogs is thus able to write a novel—Azuela actually began composing the novel while he was with Medina’s group—that draws directly on his own experiences of many of the very events that we find when we read the text.

  Azuela finished writing the first version of The Underdogs in El Paso, Texas, where he took refuge in 1915, and the first edition of the novel was published there.4Though it would take nearly ten years—during which time Azuela returned to Mexico and undertook several important rewrites of the novel—and a new publication of the work in Mexico City for The Underdogs to begin receiving the kind of critical and popular acclaim it now holds, this cultural connection between Mexico and the United States should not be overlooked. On the one hand, it reminds us of the repeated U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs. On the other, it points to the close, nearly inextricable cultural and social connections that have existed between the two countries at nearly all levels and during almost all moments in modern history. This connection was most certainly present during the Mexican Revolution, and it persisted through much of the twentieth century, remaining very much alive today.

  Although they are protagonists in some of the key (and at times bloodiest) events of the Mexican Revolution, the characters of Azuela’s novel are in many ways swept up in something they do not quite comprehend. In addition, as Carlos Fuentes points out in his Foreword, if The Underdogs can be thought of as an epic—in that it follows Demetrio Macías’s travels and battles, from humble beginnings through periods of intense fighting and much glory, and finally back to Macías’s original point of departure—then it is certainly a failed epic. I would add that, paradoxically, this constitutes one of the strengths of the novel, as it highlights the fact that The Underdogs is replete with ambiguities. Is the novel revolutionary—in the way it underscores the poverty and ignorance of Mexico’s peasants and lower classes, and the injustices separating their condition from that of the few land-owning elite? Or is it counterrevolutionary, in the ways it reveals the barbarism and banditry of those who fought on both sides of the revolution, thus suggesting that the objectives of the revolutionaries were personal in nature, as opposed to ideological? Is the novel about the early dreams of the revolution, or about the eventual and perhaps inevitable disillusionment with the original objectives of the revolutionary movement? Is the novel meant to be realistic, and is it trying to chronicle the revolution in a way analogous to how the printed media and the new technology of the radio were doing at the time? Or does the novel seek a different aesthetic altogether, one still rooted in the late nineteenth century, with its naturalistic and at times Modernista descriptions?5Or is the novel perhaps already a harbinger of an avant-garde type of narrative, the first modern Mexican novel in the line of fiction that Fuentes would famously call “the new narrative” of Latin America?

  Not only is it impossible to resolve these ambiguities, it is also in fact not desirable to do so. For these ambiguities are part of what lends The Underdogs its importance and its role as a classic of Latin American fiction. The Underdogs is a foundational text that has helped to shape Mexican identity and Mexican and Latin American literature for nearly a century, not only influencing subsequent historical novels but also serving as a model because of some of its narrative techniques. The Underdogs forms part of w
hat has come to be known as the subgenre of the novels of the Mexican Revolution. (The other, most important, early representatives of this subgenre are Martín Luis Guzmán’s 1928 El águila y la serpiente [The Eagle and the Serpent] and Nellie Campobello’s 1931 Cartucho [Cartucho].) Meanwhile, marks of the influence of Azuela’s The Underdogs can be seen in writers from Juan Rulfo to Carlos Fuentes, to name just two of the most prominent figures of modern Mexican letters.

  The overarching challenge for the translator, then, is to figure out how to re-create a masterpiece that carries such weight in its original culture. And the first challenge that the translator encounters is how to translate the title itself. In Spanish, Los de abajo literally means “those from below.” The novel was translated as The Underdogs by E. Munguía Jr. in 1929, and it immediately became known in English, and has remained in print, by this title since that date. But “the underdogs” may not be the best translation of the title. On the one hand, it has a strong sports resonance that seems somewhat out of place for such a story. On the other, although Demetrio Macías and his men are unquestionably those from below—at the most basic level, in an economic and social sense—it is not clear that the English expression “the underdogs” captures this same meaning. Macías and his men are peasants, subjects from the lower classes; they are in many ways archetypal characters representing the mostly rural masses who had been excluded from the gains and benefits of Porfirio Díaz’s modernizations, and the very classes who rose up in the revolution—first against Díaz, then against Madero, and finally against Huerta (see “Chronology of the Mexican Revolution,” p. xxi).

  And yet, “the underdogs” is not entirely an incorrect translation, either—and besides, as is often the case in literary translation, it is not exactly a matter of “correct” or “incorrect. ” A better translation may have been “those from below” or “those from the lower depths,” but neither of these sounds that great, and it would be extremely disconcerting to English-speaking readers who already know this novel as The Underdogs. In addition, and perhaps most interestingly, although prior to being translated as “the underdogs” this term did not have the same meaning in Spanish as los de abajo, now that it has been translated as such, it seemingly does have the same—or at least a parallel—meaning. In other words, translation has not only brought a new work of literature into our culture, it has also affected our language. “The underdogs” now means what it has always meant in English, but it also connotes what los de abajo denotes and connotes in Spanish—at least in the context of the novel in question. For these reasons, Azuela’s classic of the Mexican Revolution remains, in my translation in the pages that follow, as The Underdogs.