Imagining the Mexican Revolution

Imagining the Mexican Revolution: Versions and Visions in Literature

and Visual Culture

Edited by

Tilmann Altenberg

With a Foreword by Leonard Folgarait

Imagining the Mexican Revolution: Versions and Visions in Literature and Visual Culture,

Edited by Tilmann Altenberg

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Tilmann Altenberg and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5316-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5316-3

To Ruth, Maxim and Edgar

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi Foreword .................................................................................................. xiii Images and Imaginings of the Mexican Revolution: 100 Years and Counting Leonard Folgarait Acknowledgements ................................................................................ xxvii Introduction ............................................................................................ xxix Tilmann Altenberg Part I: Literature Chapter One ................................................................................................ 3 Geografía y procesos culturales en la narrativa de la Revolución mexicana (Azuela y Campobello) Max Parra Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Towards a Broader Definition of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution Sarah E. L. Bowskill Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Los de abajo: An Early novela de la tierra? Pascale Baker Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 57 With the Benefit of Hindsight? The Mexican Revolution in José Vasconcelos’s Ulises criollo and La tormenta Mark Millington

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 The Mexican Revolution According to Italian Novelist Valerio Evangelisti: Il collare spezzato Inke Gunia Part II: Visual Culture Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87 Francisco León de la Barra, la prensa y el linchamiento del caudillo Francisco I. Madero Rafael Barajas Durán (El Fisgón) Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 109 The Mexican Revolution in the Visual Discourse of the 1968 Student Movement Juan J. Rojo Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 123 Executions by Firing Squad: How Shootings Were Shot in Films of the Mexican Revolution Tilmann Altenberg Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 157 Zapata on Film: Dreams, Nightmares, Realities Niamh Thornton Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 175 Pancho Villa en pantalla Sabine Schlickers Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 195 La ley de Herodes: poner en tela de juicio el mito de la revolución en el cine de finales del siglo XX Adriana Ortega Orozco Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 219 Ars Combinatoria Reloaded: Notes to Reconstruct Salvador Toscano’s Monumental Film Compilation Gregorio Rocha

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Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 235 Arte y poder en la Revolución mexicana María de las Nieves Rodríguez y Méndez Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 253 José Clemente Orozco: una figura del romanticismo y apoliticismo posrevolucionario Ana Cecilia Hornedo Picture Credits ......................................................................................... 269 Contributors ............................................................................................. 271 Index ........................................................................................................ 275

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

For illustrations please see the picture insert at the centre of this volume.

Fig. 6-1: Alfredo Zalce, “El criminal Victoriano Huerta se adueña del

poder. 19 de febrero de 1913” Fig. 6-2: José Guadalupe Posada, “¿Para qué son tantos brincos estando

el suelo parejo?” Fig. 6-3: José Guadalupe Posada, “Calaveras del montón” Fig. 6-4: Chop, “Calaveras del montón” Fig. 6-5: José Guadalupe Posada, “Paz y renuncia” Fig. 6-6: Álvaro Pruneda, “Lasciate ogni speranza” Fig. 6-7: José Guadalupe Posada, “Gran marcha triunfal” Fig. 6-8: Ernesto García Cabral, “La alternativa” Fig. 6-9: Rafael Lillo, “Un presidente de follaje” Fig. 6-10: Ernesto García Cabral, [untitled] Fig. 6-11: Santiago R. de la Vega, “Dichos nacionales” Fig. 6-12: Ernesto García Cabral, “Partido ‘amarrado’” Fig. 6-13: Atenedor Pérez y Soto, “Bonilladas” Fig. 6-14: BO, [untitled] Fig. 6-15: RM, “Los primeros efectos de la suspensión de garantías: ojo por ojo, diente por diente” Fig. 6-16: Maria, “A la hora de la comida” Fig. 6-17: Ernesto García Cabral, “En la fiesta floral” Fig. 6-18: Rafael Lillo, “Estamos en la edad de las locas esperanzas, dijo

D’Artagnan” Fig. 6-19: Ernesto García Cabral, “Así como el general…” Fig. 7-1: “Monumento olímpico a la Constitución” Fig. 7-2: “El derecho a ser libres no se mendiga, se toma!” Fig. 7-3: “La fiera del 68 tiene sed de sangre” Fig. 7-4: “Cueto, Mendiolea, Frías, Corona del Rosal, Echeverría…

agresores del pueblo mexicano” Fig. 7-5: “1968, año de la prensa vendida” Fig. 7-6: “¡Libertad a los presos políticos!” Fig. 7-7: “Sí, señora, su muchacho está muerto; pero piénselo bien… Si abre la boca está expuesta a perder sus otros hijos” Fig. 8-1: Flor silvestre: José Luis awaiting his execution

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Fig. 8-2: Flor silvestre: firing squad against dramatic sky. Fig. 8-3: José Guadalupe Posada, “Corrido: Cuatro fusilados zapatistas” Fig. 8-4: José Guadalupe Posada, “Fusilamiento” Fig. 8-5: Vino el remolino y nos alevantó: as traitor, Esteban is shot in

the back Fig. 8-6: El prisionero 13: first group of prisoners in position Fig. 8-7: El prisionero 13: prisoners about to be executed Fig. 8-8: El prisionero 13: soldiers aiming at prisoners Fig. 8-9: El prisionero 13: soldiers waiting for order to fire Fig. 8-10: Old Gringo: Harriet Winslow’s reaction to an execution Fig. 8-11: El hombre de Río Malo: execution viewed from passing vehicle Fig. 8-12: El hombre de Río Malo: reaction shot of bandits Fig. 8-13: El hombre de Río Malo: establishing shot providing spatial

context Fig. 8-14: Enamorada: firing of shots prior to swish pan Fig. 8-15: Un dorado de Pancho Villa: firing squad without victims Fig. 8-16: Zapata: el sueño del héroe: peasants lined up to be executed Fig. 8-17: Old Gringo: startled Ambrose Bierce trying to understand the

“joke” Fig. 8-18: Juana Gallo: defiant attitude in the face of death Fig. 8-19: Juana Gallo: shot reminiscent of photograph showing Fortino

Sámano facing the firing squad in 1917 Fig. 8-20: A Bullet for the General: shot integrating visual elements taken

from Édouard Manet’s painting of Emperor Maximilian’s exe-cution in 1867

Fig. 12-1: Cataloguing card with text of inter-title from the archive of the Carmen Toscano Foundation

Fig. 12-2: Discarded frames from Salvador Toscano’s unfinished compila-tion film project

Fig. 14-1: José Clemente Orozco, Manifestación Fig. 14-2: José Clemente Orozco, Las masas Fig. 14-3: José Clemente Orozco, Zapata Fig. 14-4: José Clemente Orozco, La revolución social Fig. 14-5: José Clemente Orozco, El carnaval de las ideologías

FOREWORD

IMAGES AND IMAGININGS OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION:

100 YEARS AND COUNTING

LEONARD FOLGARAIT

Every reader of this book probably knows what we mean by the historical event we call the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Yes, we know what is meant by that designation in a general way, as a way of fixing a series of events of that year which changed Mexico’s political leadership. But what is most compelling to me about the Mexican Revolution is how quickly it conceptually slips over into something else, from an objective event into a more subjective phenomenon. The participants of the 1910 event felt that same slippage, I believe, as we do today. The campesino who picked up a rifle to march endlessly across the dry fields of Sonora must have struggled with the question of who the enemy really was and what an ultimate sacri-fice on the battlefield would really mean.

Collections of essays, such as this one, particularly in or shortly after 2010, are driven by the compulsion to find the charged balance the revolu-tion strikes between its status as an event and as a much more abstract phenomenon. Yes, it happened as a discrete event, but we continue to experience it as an extended historical memory, partly through its more material manifestations, such as literature, music, film and other images. It is the medium of visual images that concerns me here, not only for what they record as information, but even more so for how their formal proper-ties express a charged relation with history. Images are quite suitable for this kind of investigation as they are markers of the time of their produc-tion, but also exhibit an oddly extended state of being expressive every time they are looked at, long after their time of manufacture. They trigger that phenomenological effect that turns them into agents that pull us back into history as we pull them forward into our present. This great fluidity of

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expressive agency gives images that power to hold us in their grip, to make us say, “yes, that image matters, still.”

The more we know in concrete, factual terms about the event we call the Mexican Revolution, the less we are agreed on its overall, general purpose and meaning. Before we knew so much, say in the 1930s to 1950s, we relied on the official histories and the official rhetoric, on the inflated icons of certainty, such as the figure of Francisco “Pancho” Villa, which migrated from the dry battlefields of northern Mexico to Hollywood soundstages. These icons were larger than life, charismatic, and depend-able, thus widely proliferated. Now that we know so much, with sophisti-cated historical archaeology to dig out the facts for us, with super-micro histories on the revolution in small villages, for instance, the mighty, monolithic icons are crumbling, creating an open space for something to happen. But what does and will that something look like?

A revolution is not what we academics make of it, a researchable and reportable event, open to master interpretations. It is, as any other histori-cal moment, random in the extreme, resistant to characterization, chaotic, lived-through, died-for, profoundly violent and cathartic beyond our pow-ers of imagination, archival or theoretical. But not having lived through it, all we do have is our own reality through which to refract archival facts. In the end, we do need to trust our powers of rigorous research and interpre-tive imaginings to make that history matter. We need, in other words, raw materials to ponder, documents to decipher and listen to, or look at, which is why images call so much to me as an art historian. I am really a histori-an who considers images as my primary material, as my documentary medium. Images were made in time, are events as much as are battles or political speeches, are conditioned by the ideas in currency at the time of their manufacture. They do not need written documents to back them up, as they are documents already, as powerful and mysterious as any other. They participate equally with other sorts of documentation to tell us of their time so that we may learn truly important lessons about then and about now.

The images created during and after the revolution are countless, and it would not be useful here to perform an overview of them, a quick but superficial sampling from the standard genres and media. Rather, I want to focus on two questions, the first being: how are images and historical writing on the revolution joined, in the form of book covers of significant histories written since the late twentieth century, and, the second question: how does the image of one particular participant in the revolution continue to set the terms by which we are even allowed to pose our questions about this event? That historical agent is Emiliano Zapata.

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In our look at several of these book covers, we realize, of course, that the author probably had little or nothing to do with the choice of such an image, that publishers need to pitch books with an attractive or provoca-tive image as part of the marketing of scholarship. However these things get decided, such images are carefully chosen according to some sense of the contents, some connection to the intellectual material. Book covers, then, are loaded propositions about the subject of the book, in this case about the Mexican Revolution.

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack Jr. is one of the classic studies of our field, its cover of the 1968 paperback edition blatant-ly bearing the face of its central protagonist. Three horizontally striped colour fields that organize the design of the cover are those of the Mexican flag, with each panel bearing some important information: the green panel, the title; the white, the author’s name; and the red, the face of Zapata. The colour white of the name, Zapata, in the top panel, becomes the back-ground colour to the red letters on the central panel, the red of the letters coming from the panel below, bearing his face. In other words, there is part of Zapata in every panel of the Mexican flag—he is everywhere part of Mexico. The letters on the green and white panels are distinct in form and colour from their background, but Zapata’s face is infused into the red, so that there is no distinction between form and background—he is at one with his context, with all of Mexican history, not just the revolution. The image of Zapata derives from a photograph, meaning an image that we can trust, as we depend on photographs to tell us the truth, but is so highly manipulated with a high-contrast graininess that Zapata seems to also escape the details of photographic objectivity to project into our subjectivi-ty through the more abstract and rougher force of his personality. We know and respect the Womack book for its rigorous objectivity, but the cover image is interested in creating a mythology of Zapata, that Zapata is the revolution, is Mexico. The intense stare into the eyes of the viewer is intended to condition the reading of the text.

The cover of The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910 by James W. Wilkie of 1970 at first seems simply odd, a bit too light in tone for such a serious subject, with the whimsical jostling of the letters of the main title, setting up a quirky rhythm of typography. Does this mean that the revolution cannot be disciplined to stay on one register, that it is out of our control even in terms of graphic design? Looking down the cover to the subtitle, however, we see that the basis for this study is economics, and that the book is filled with charts and graphs of the kind that track the erratic behaviour of economic and social metrics, with numbers jumping up and down as they move across years of

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measurement. The cover tells us that the revolution is a matter of graph dynamics, and not of mythic heroes like Zapata.

We find Zapata again, on the cover of Mexican Revolution: The Con-stitutionalist Years, by Charles C. Cumberland, of 1972, this time in the company of Villa, surrounded by their followers for a historic photo opportunity in Mexico City in 1914. Again, the power of photography to document historical truth, but again stylized, this time by the green tonal-ity. And again, the power of Zapata to look seriously, directly, into one’s eye, this time that of Villa, who glances down, not returning that look of power. Zapata also looks more like one of the people, holding his som-brero, while Villa holds a more official looking military hat. Even in this casual moment, Zapata dominates the situation and distorts the sense of what this book is about, which is mostly about how both of these mythic figures were marginalized and eventually rendered powerless.

A quick example, from 1997, on the cover of Biografía del poder: caudillos de la Revolución Mexicana (1910–1940), by Enrique Krauze, uses the same photograph, this time styling it with a faded gold colour on the Presidential chair. See the original caption on the photograph itself, “Villa en la silla presidencial”. This version also makes clearer how Zapata is grabbing on to the armrest of the seat of power, inching his way into Villa’s moment of illusory glory.

Again, we find the flag, on the cover of the second edition of Is the Mexican Revolution Dead?, edited by Stanley R. Ross in 1975, as if the flag is equal to the revolution or refers to it alone rather than to the longer stretch of modern Mexico. Again, photography, strongly manipulated, the masses blending into the green and red colours. An odd detail here is the happy, celebratory mood of these Mexicans, certainly not supported by the sad story within the covers.

In the case of La Revolucioncita Mexicana of 1978, by Rius, one of Mexico’s most respected historical satirists, the cover illustration by Rius is fully representative of the irony and dark humour of the contents. Rius has drawn a backwards gun, which is, in a note of surrealism, speaking the words of the title from its barrel. So, the revolution is a bizarre weapon that shoots not bullets, but words of deprecating humour, “the tiny, trivial revolution”. The tag on the trigger guard bears the logo of the PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, but in this case missing the R, missing the Revolución altogether. The other little tag says, with appropri-ate sarcasm, “Lo hecho en México está bien hecho”. But perhaps the most telling detail of the cover of the 1983 edition is the printed belly band highlighting the fact that within five years of its original publication,

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Rius’s book had already reached its fifteenth edition, feeding an obvious need of the Mexican public eager to laugh at its own so-called revolution.1

And now, back to Zapata, looming out of the bluish background of the cover of Competing Voices from the Mexican Revolution, edited by Chris Frazer in 2010, clearly posing, but with the details deliberately left murky and unclear. Before we look at this cover more, we need to consider the photograph on which it is based. This was published in 1914 and is some-what in the genre of an official portrait of a leader of armed forces. The direct expression, raised rifle, hand on sabre, crossed gunbelts, and deco-rative sashes, all speak of a highly self-conscious presentation to the wide audience to whom thousands of copies would be distributed. Many readers have surely seen this particular image of Zapata more than any others, and it has become the quasi-official icon of his legacy. Why is this so? The architectural space he occupies seems solidly built, the perspective of the walls and floor take us back into space as into his future, and the steps to the left suggest his fate of physical and political ascent. His followers are there, three or four to the right, sitting and in shadow, but with a rifle raised in case of danger to their leader. Zapata is shown as powerfully armed, but at rest. His finger is not on the trigger of the rifle, and the sabre is sheathed. This is not a vicious killer, but a thoughtful wielder of power, backed by his protectors. His eyes seem to be making direct contact with the viewer, but are actually shifted just a degree to our right. This is a crucial distinction, as although we seem to be in his range of vision, and thereby the object of his attention, he is looking to a farther horizon, taking in the bigger picture of his physical as well as political and military con-text. The large, billowing brim of the sombrero seems to spread out in all directions as a visual metaphor for this expansiveness of awareness. The viewer is suddenly aware that Zapata is concentrating on what is behind us, and we are engulfed in a larger space of vigilance, dominated by the man who, if need be, will take aim with his rifle and draw his sword to protect us. Here, clearly, is Zapata the historical agent who explained his commitment to his cause in the following words, in 1914: “And so, let the war go on! I’m not going to make deals with anybody. I’ll continue to fight, even though they kill me and all those who follow me” (quoted in Parkinson 1975, 199).

Looking at the book cover, we become aware of the changes made by the designer. The hat is cropped down, as is the group of his followers. It is not clear exactly where his hands are placed on the weapons or where his eyes are directed. This voice from the revolution, this highly propagan-

1 More recent editions use a different cover design.

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distic image of Zapata, is seriously muted by the contemporary competing voice of this press in 2010. Even the title, superimposed over his body, further obscures details of his costume. Zapata both dominates and is swallowed up by this design.

In the case of Episodios de la Revolución Mexicana by Carlos Alvear Acevedo of 1988, we have the iconographic attributes of Zapata and Zapatismo: the sombrero, rifle and gunbelt. It is important to note that these symbols are not usually associated with any other faction of the revolution, such as Villa or his followers; so again, it is Zapatismo that sets the tone for scholarship on the revolution.

A more recent biography, Emiliano Zapata by Juan Gallardo Muñoz, of 2003, features the iconic portrait, but this time the figure emerges alone, as from a fog. His name is emblazoned in gold, as he is by now a “personaje ilustre”, as that theme of this series of biographies is seen at the bottom of the cover, and fully under the aura of mystification.

A study from 2001, Los orígenes del zapatismo by Felipe Arturo and Ávila Espinosa, uses the same photograph as on the Womack biography, but now reversed, the head leaning into artefacts from the iconic standing portrait, the rifle and the crossed gunbelts, floating in space as ghostly presences that are so closely associated with him. It is interesting that in the photograph itself, it is clear that he is not armed, but that that associa-tion has to be brought in by this designer as an obligatory move to make certain that Zapata is always seen in the context of weapons.

We now shift the topic to bring it into a contemporary context. The revolution reappears in 1994 with the introduction of a group of

armed fighters who take on the name and spirit of Zapata. These are the Zapatistas from the state of Chiapas, made up mostly of Maya farmers, whose formal name is Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). The spokesperson of the EZLN is the Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, usually called the Subcomandante Marcos, or El Sup to his followers. On the cover of Shadows of Tender Fury of 1995, a collection of writings by Subcomandante Marcos, it is clear that the graphic designer explicitly connects a reduced version of the standing portrait of Zapata, framed as a precious object, with a grainy image of Marcos, seen in his signature look, the ski mask—there is no photo of him ever without that mask. The new Zapatista movement is too complex to treat here, but it is highly relevant to comment on the revival of Zapata as the correct and, apparently, only candidate to resurrect for a contemporary revolutionary movement. The direct link between the original and the new Zapatismo is made quite explicit by Marcos on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Zapata’s assassina-tion on 10 April 1919. He writes on that date in 1994:

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As in 1919, we Zapatistas must pay in blood for our cry for land and free-dom. As in 1919, the land does not belong to those who work it. As in 1919, the bad government leaves those without land no other choice but to take up arms […] We salute you, Zapatista brothers and sisters! Death to the almighty government! Long live the EZLN! (Marcos 1995, 194)

The EZLN gets to the heart of the political issues and to the heart of the loaded question: what happened to the revolution? And, although the government has sent troops into Chiapas and bombed EZLN camps, the difficult ideological question becomes: how can the government attack a movement with Zapatismo at its centre, Zapata being one of the touch-stones that all governments since the 1930s have depended upon for their legitimizing rhetoric? According to the EZLN, the government has long ago given up on the revolution, but the Zapatistas have not.

The title and the design of Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, edited by John Holloway and Eloína Peláez in 1998, say it all in terms of the connections between 1919 and the 1990s. The cover also includes another part of the Marcos visual identity, his pipe. The title and the design basically say: this is what a Zapatista looks like. Here we enter the curious paradox between Zapata himself being very identifiable through his facial features, and his namesakes of today taking on non-identifiable appearances as their identity. The ultimate paradox is that with the pipe, and with careful attention to his eyes, this is clearly identifiable as Marcos, but, apparently, the guise of masking becomes critical to his mission. It may be that no other face than Zapata’s can properly represent a Zapatista movement, and therefore Marcos needs to hide his as a token gesture toward that end.

In the case of The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy by Neil Harvey of 1998, the author has reproduced a photo-graph taken by him of an EZLN poster he found in Chiapas, again making clear the connections between Zapata and Marcos. They both face to the right, both make direct eye contact, and the EZLN quotation, barely reada-ble, is superimposed on the figure of Zapata, not that of Marcos, making their connection unbreakable visually and politically. Here, we are study-ing not only the book cover, but a visual provocation by the EZLN itself, one that is thinking through how to best promote their cause in visual terms.

A poster of 2010, announcing an academic consideration of the EZLN sixteen years after its appearance (“Miradas de lucha sobre el Zapatismo”), again depends on that very useful photograph of Zapata, this time hovering over a group of indigenous people wearing the mask of the Zapatistas. They do not seem armed, but the mask speaks clearly of their allegiances.

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And now, let us turn to a quick series of images from the Internet, without detailed documentation as to their sources or dates, but maybe more interesting for that as well: anonymous propaganda from and for the EZLN.

In my first image (“Yo estoy resuelto”), another well-known photo-graph of Zapata featuring his penetrating gaze, again digitally manipu-lated, is juxtaposed with his famous phrase: “Yo estoy resuelto a luchar contra todo y contra todos sin más baluarte que la confianza y el apoyo de mi pueblo.” And here appears the red star, which is the logo of the EZLN. Note the repeat of red for “mi pueblo”, equating the cause with the people, but the star contained within the shape and sense of “Yo”, making the personal political, and vice versa.

In another image, “Bienvenidos”, we find Zapata again, on a painted wall, the pose of the standing portrait reversed, the sombrero now con-taining his slogan, “Tierra y Libertad”, and next to his face, another of his sayings, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja.” Note the spiral form of a shell in the centre and words in the indigenous language, Tzeltal, which translate as “In the great snail shell, our words circulate.”2 The shell, as of 2004, has been used by the EZLN as a metaphor for the spiralling spread of the movement. It also appears in ancient Maya mythology as a symbol for signalling from mountain to mountain.

In my next image, “Solidaridad Chiapas”, we see a call for solidarity between the Zapatistas and the people of the villages in Chiapas, with gigantic hands opposing instruments of war directed toward these inno-cents by government forces. Note two apparently opposing elements of style and content in this image: the people of this village, el pueblo, are rendered in an intentionally naïve, or unschooled style, perhaps based on the style that they themselves might use in their own figurative art, the voice of the people expressed through style mostly, but also in the narra-tive shown here, posing without weapons, smiling, going about their busi-ness. This innocent folksiness is countered by the high-tech voice of the email address given in the lower right. These Maya campesinos, timeless in their village culture appearance, are fully wired into the Internet, and will spread their message with email and with images such as this one. See also the shell at the bottom of the group of villagers, as they will spread the word outwards, in a spiralling fashion. This poster is about searching for and constructing an audience for the solidarity between indigenous peoples and the Zapatistas. After all, every cause needs a wide base of 2 This linguistic information was provided by Peter Mancina, graduate studies, Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, as facilitated by Prof. Ted Fischer of the same department (email, 16 July 2010).

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support, and here we have a call for one, which includes, in the treatment of the huge hands pushing away the weapons of the government, an influence from the canonical figures of the Mexican mural movement of the 1920s and 1930s, especially recalling the style of José Clemente Orozco. This stylistic detail is foregrounded due to the size of the hands, but also distanced through the black and white treatment. A memory of the muralists is allowed some limited voice in this movement that is rooted in a pre-revolutionary culture but is addressing explicitly post-revolutionary issues.

Let us look at a photo of Marcos, again from the Internet, with battered cap, trademark mask and pipe, and the headset that keeps him wired to the world (“Marcos”). To get a better sense of the power of this man to com-mand such wide attention, these are some of his pronouncements, all from 1994:

We follow the motto: “Now or maybe never.” (Marcos 1995, 29) This [movement] promises not only the destruction of an unjust and arbi-trary system; it is, above all, a hope that dignity and rebellion can be converted into dignity and freedom. (47) With this Declaration of War, we ask other Powers of the Nation to take up the fight to depose the dictator and restore legitimacy and stability to this nation. (52)

These words must be seen in the context of the following image of Marcos speaking (“Zapata vive”). But speaking is not enough, as two images of Zapata hover around him. The caption makes clear that Zapata never died in the hearts and minds of those oppressed by the government.

A number of Internet images use the red star. A bizarre image, “Somos la dignidad rebelde”, shows a masked member of the EZLN bearing the red star on a red tongue, channelling Mick Jagger, the street fighting man, for dramatic effect. An attempt, in the drawing and writing style of a child perhaps, to speak to the humanity of the EZLN, uses the text: “Abajo y a la izquierda está el corazón” (“Abajo”). A flower of peace is held aloft, and there is not a weapon to be seen. How interesting, also, to see Mexico equated with the world, with the red star acting as the equal sign. Another appeal to youth involves a masked kid spray painting the red star, in the high-tech style of Japanese animé and manga (“Enlace Zapatista”). Again, the tools of propaganda are common items at hand, such as spray cans, but projected into the cyberspace of the Internet.

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Artefacts of pop culture, such as anti-haute couture clothing, show Marcos on a skirt (“Marcos skirt”), and also, more interestingly, his image on a T-shirt (“Marcos T-shirt”). The attributes of the iconography of Marcos became so legible that they could be reduced to their essence: mask, pipe, crossed gunbelts, with the exclamation points bookending this visual statement. The eyes, face and body are missing, because they are not necessary. The colours of the shirt are those of the Mexican flag, but now superimposed on the US-American flag. This background flag is hung vertically, with the red and white stripes running up and down, as are the red and white exclamation marks on the shirt, a new form of these stripes. The form and colour of US nationalism have been co-opted to contribute to the exclamation of this young American Zapatista. The EZLN move-ment has crossed the Río Grande, and has thus become a border issue as well.

One sees masked and armed dolls as well (“Zapatista dolls”), cute and menacing at once, pulling the indigenous craft of doll making into the armed struggle, but also, again, expanding the audience for the Zapatistas, including those who would make such dolls.

In an image by Juan Kalvellido (“Zapatista”), a little, cartoonish Zapa-tista, in indigenous dress, has penned a manifesto to the world, in the ancient medium of writing with quill on parchment, but is reaching the world through the Internet again, casting the message globally, around the world upon which the tiny figure, now gigantic, studies his prose.

In the summer of 2010, I was touring the countryside of France, simply as a tourist, when I stopped into a small café in the town of Baccarat for a cool drink. It turned out to be a café frequented by the workers of the crystal factory. There are pictures on the café walls of the political heroes of these workers, all 8-by-10-inch glossy photographs, although how John Wayne and Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into working class consciousness was a mystery too deep for me to investigate at the moment. But, surpris-ingly, or maybe, of course, on the same wall, appear other faces, those of Sid Vicious, Albert Einstein and Emiliano Zapata, in the permanent pose that we have seen so much already. How much do French factory workers in the early twenty-first century know of this Mexican fighter, surely exo-tic in his get-up and general appearance? How much, in this context, does he carry of his original message, and does this iconic image speak so much of a generic radical opposition to any social status quo by its very iconicity that it has survived its voyage from a faraway place and time to become, still, legible and relevant? Or has he become simply a pin-up, a photogenic tough guy who could shoot it out with either Wayne or Schwarzenegger, who would fit in with the pacifism of Einstein and the chaos of punk, or

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maybe embody that range between such polar opposites? Or does he remind the French workers of the current Zapatismo of the EZLN? It is interesting, is it not, that none of these figures needs a caption, that their currency of instant recognition is so much taken for granted.

These, of course, are unanswerable questions, but it is a profound fact that the image of Zapata and all it carries about the surviving meaning of the Mexican Revolution hangs on this wall in this company. This surviv-ing meaning, we have seen, cannot ultimately be packaged for easy and consoling consumption. That Zapata here does not hang next to Madero and Carranza and Napoleon and De Gaulle somehow protects him and his message from political domestication. But we do need to worry that he not be asked to simply act out a theatrical role or take on a stage name. At least we do still have such things to worry about, to make these things still matter.

That question of the survivability of the Mexican Revolution into and past its hundredth year, as expressed through images, is best captured through my last image, “Nos vemos en 2010”, another of those random and anonymous images floating as photographs through the Internet, mate-rializing on any screen, infiltrating any space and any consciousness. Zapata again, recognizable in spite of massive image manipulation, the strong red making him and his double pistols pop off the white back-ground above “nos vemos en 2010”. The image, in its original manufac-ture, will surely fade on the wall that it is spray stencilled upon, but its makers just as surely know that the digital incarnation of the image will last long after the wall has been defaced or painted over by official poli-tics, that it can never really be destroyed.

It is worth pondering the caption a bit more. “We’ll meet in 2010” is only one possible translation. Another is in the present tense, “we meet in 2010”, suggesting that in 2010, the year itself, the heightened recognition of the revolution at the one-hundred-year marker creates a space, an ideo-logical and political opening, in which the fate of the revolution must be considered. But let us take the word vemos quite literally: “We see each other in 2010.” Zapata and his time and his historical fate stare at us across a century to make eye contact and to call us to our own responsibility, in the explicitly visual and optical sense of “to see”. Finally, the phrase also means “we see ourselves in 2010”. The inclusive we insists that 1910 cannot be put away on a bookshelf by our teachers and pundits, not pushed back to the safety of a quaint past, but exists in a highly flexible present in which the questions that mattered in 1910 matter still today, and even more so. So flexible is that stretched present that the typography of the caption recalls the blockiness of pre-Hispanic glyph writing, but as if

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morphing into the high-tech computer fonts that mark our present. The issues of liberation and armed struggle that drove both old and new ver-sions of Zapatismo were partly based on pre-Hispanic forms of working and owning the land, and partly on the modern technologies of communi-cation and guerrilla warfare.

This image takes us back in time and forward into the question: What will the two-hundredth anniversary of the revolution look like? Will we then be saying “we’ll meet in 2110”, or “we see each other in 2110”, or “we see ourselves in 2110?” The only thing that we can be certain of is that images will carry much of the force of those recognitions, and that Emiliano Zapata will continue to haunt the ever-expanding historical pres-ence of the never-finished, or never-started, revolution.

Works Cited

Books3

Alvear Acevedo, Carlos. 1988. Episodios de la Revolución Mexicana. Mexico: Editorial Jus. http://tinyurl.com/lgwx5yt

Arturo, Felipe & Ávila Espinosa. 2001. Los orígenes del zapatismo. Mexico: El Colegio de México / UNAM. http://tinyurl.com/csqwohf

Cumberland, Charles C. 1972. Mexican Revolution: The Constitutionalist Years. Austin: University of Texas Press. http://tinyurl.com/nped83z

Frazer, Chris, ed. 2010. Competing Voices from the Mexican Revolution. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. http://tinyurl.com/nv5rm2q

Gallardo Muñoz, Juan. 2003. Emiliano Zapata. Las Rozas, Madrid: Dastin. http://tinyurl.com/cukbarc

Harvey, Neil. 1998. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://tinyurl.com/phg3dbj

Holloway, John & Eloína Peláez, eds. 1998. Zapatista!: Reinventing Revo-lution in Mexico. London: Pluto Press. http://tinyurl.com/cpybwkl

Krauze, Enrique. 1997. Biografía del poder: caudillos de la Revolución Mexicana (1910–1940). Barcelona: Tusquets. http://tinyurl.com/o8amwmz

3 Where URLs are given after the entries, these refer to reproductions of the book covers discussed in the text. All URLs have been shortened using tinyurl.com and are accurate as of 17 April 2012.

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Marcos, Subcomandante. 1995. Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Translated by Frank Bardacke, Leslie López, and the Watsonville, California, Human Rights Committee; introduction by John Ross; afterword by Frank Bardacke. New York: Monthly Review Press. http://tinyurl.com/cene7d7

Parkinson, Roger. 1975. Zapata: A Biography. New York: Stein & Day. Rius [Eduardo del Río]. (1978) 1983. La Revolucioncita Mexicana. 15th

ed. Mexico: Posada. http://tinyurl.com/nkdjq9q Ross, Stanley R., ed. 1975. Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? 2nd ed.,

revised and enlarged. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. http://tinyurl.com/phlykf5

Wilkie, James W. 1970. The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://tinyurl.com/p76z2ew

Womack Jr., John. 1968. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Knopf. http://tinyurl.com/ckuu4o2

Images from the Internet

“Abajo”. http://tinyurl.com/cmq8wnv “Bienvenidos”. http://tinyurl.com/p2hhjrt “Enlace Zapatista”. http://tinyurl.com/cws2ptq “Marcos”. http://tinyurl.com/cpedszc “Marcos skirt”. http://tinyurl.com/7cnjqv4 “Marcos T-shirt”. http://tinyurl.com/c9svao8 “Miradas de lucha sobre el Zapatismo”. http://tinyurl.com/co7x9hl “Nos vemos en 2010”. http://tinyurl.com/bvho3v5 “Solidaridad Chiapas”. http://tinyurl.com/k93rxnm “Somos la dignidad rebelde”. http://tinyurl.com/bw6kvpt “Yo estoy resuelto”. http://tinyurl.com/d3u8bcd “Zapata vive”. http://tinyurl.com/7umpvcr “Zapatista”. http://tinyurl.com/88kfjkx “Zapatista dolls”. http://tinyurl.com/c8hczj4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most chapters of this book are extended and enhanced versions of papers originally given at the international conference “100 Years of the Mexican Revolution”, held at Cardiff University in September 2010. Thanks are due to Andrea Noble for co-organizing the event and getting Durham University involved as co-host and co-sponsor; to the Santander Universi-ties programme for its generous financial support; to Cardiff University for providing logistical support.

The preparation of the book manuscript would not have been possible without the expert linguistic help of Ruth J. Owen with chapter eight and her copy-editing of the English-language chapters, Beatriz Rubio Arribas’s copy-editing of chapters one, six and eleven, and Katia Chornik’s copy-editing of chapters ten, thirteen and fourteen. Finally, I would like to thank the contributors for their willingness to engage in a dialogue about their work and our topic, both at the conference and subsequently.

THE EDITOR

INTRODUCTION

TILMANN ALTENBERG This book explores how the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has been imag-ined, adapted, manipulated and fictionalized in the one hundred years since its inception. The materials studied range from early films and political cartoons to novels, autobiographical writing, placards, muralist painting and Hollywood biopics. As the authors study these cultural artefacts from different angles, the historical referent comes in and out of focus, whilst a strong sense of the Mexican Revolution as myth emerges, a myth that shapes our idea of the revolution, its protagonists and its national legacy. It is a myth that involves the legendary leaders Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata, but also the ordinary people of the time—female and male, local and foreign, peasants, those otherwise on the margins, even tourist onlookers. Part I of this book focuses on narrative texts, the written stories of the Mexican Revolution which offer a spectrum of plots and characters that have shaped the linguistic formation of the revolution; Part II explores how throughout the twentieth century visual culture has appropriated the Mexican Revolution to create stunning graphic images and, at the same time, shaped the look of it in our mind’s eye.

Part I: Literature

Opening the focus on texts, Max Parra reassesses two early narratives of the revolution, Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo and Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho, examining their specific conceptualization of geography in relation to the texts’ ideology and wider cultural implications. He sees the experience of geographical uprooting and its disastrous social conse-quences as the central subject of both Los de abajo and many post-revolu-tionary narratives of later decades. Parra further suggests that while in Mexico this thematic strand ends with Juan Rulfo, it finds a strong echo in Chicano literature. In Cartucho the vision of the events narrated is strictly regional and lacks any awareness of the national scale of revolutionary struggle. Parra argues that the geography in Cartucho is an emotionally charged, socialized space. Consequently, the places referred to in the

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stories themselves generate meaning, as they index specific events whose memory is shared by the local population.

Sarah E. L. Bowskill’s chapter makes a case for opening up the canon of Novels of the Revolution to include lesser known and hardly studied texts. In examining four largely forgotten novels, Bowskill reveals their interest as historical documents that enhance our understanding of the Mexican Revolution. She further highlights the socio-political importance of the two female-authored novels under consideration, arguing that they provide an alternative perspective on the revolution and its legacy and assert women’s place in post-revolutionary Mexico. The exclusion of these texts from the canon prompts Bowskill to scrutinize the process of canon formation in post-revolutionary Mexico. Among the reasons identified for the silence surrounding these novels are the texts’ seemingly tenuous link with the revolution, use of human relationships and private settings to comment on the political situation, their unfashionable allegorical design and female authorship.

In her chapter, Pascale Baker offers a fresh perspective on Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela, linking it to the nineteenth-century civilization versus barbarism polemic, in particular to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo. In her reading, the text’s ambivalence towards the Mexican Revolution, and modernity more widely, anticipates a key characteristic of telluric novels such as Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes and Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos.

Mark Millington’s chapter examines the first two volumes of José Vasconcelos’s four-volume autobiography, published around 15 years after the end of the revolution. Focusing on perspectives of and attitudes towards the Mexican Revolution, which often emerge between the lines or even contradict what Vasconcelos explicitly states, Millington suggests that Vasconcelos’s negative assessment of the revolution reveals his conservatism and personal disappointment. The chapter comes to the conclusion that Vasconcelos’s polarizing autobiographical account is ulti-mately more concerned with settling scores and self-justification than with helping understand the complexities of Mexican reality.

Inke Gunia’s reading of a recent Italian novel about the Mexican Revolution, Valerio Evangelisti’s Il collare spezzato [The Broken Collar], explores the text’s hybrid poetics, taking into account its rich paramedial and paratextual references. In her chapter, Gunia shows that while the novel’s paratextual environment emphasizes the rigorous historical research supporting the story, the narrative itself shares characteristics of the Mexican Novel of the Revolution, the Spaghetti Western and the horror film genre. Gunia attributes the novel’s commercial success to this