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The Underdogs is considered the most influential novel of the Mexican Revolution. It is a classic story in this genre. Originally published in an El Paso newspaper in 1915, The Underdogs became one of the most critically acclaimed novels of Spanish American literature by 1950.
Azuela’s structure for the novel implies his own journey through the Revolution. Its promise was strong and its ending quite weak. Part I includes twenty-one chapters, Part II has fourteen chapters; and Part III has just seven chapters. He provides a beautifully developed story about the Mexican Revolution and leaves conclusions about the revolution suspended for the reader.
Carlos Fuentes, one of the Mexico's best-known novelists, compares The Underdogs to great epic poems. The storyline includes great heroic characters and heart-breaking tragedy and death. The great and idealistic revolutionary ideas fall into lawlessness and banality. This theme is repeated in world literature from the great Greek epic poems through the novels of the French and Russian Revolutions. Azuela’s novel, however, lacks the philosophy to support the revolutionary cause. Luis Cervantes is one of the only characters who embodies a sense of the ideas behind the revolution. Demetrio is an epic character in his great heroism and yet he lacks any political ambition. He fights for the peasants, but he does not have a strategy to meet his goals. When he learns about the need to vote for the next president, Demetrio explains that he has no political aspirations. He cannot read. He simply wants to go home. In this way, he is like Odysseus in his longing for home but he lacks the great victories to satisfy any sense of purpose or legacy from his work.
Other critics note how Azuela’s writing recalls Dante’s Divine Comedy. The final lines of the book may suggest Demetrio’s ascent into Heaven. Is he a hero? At other points, Demetrio seems...
Mariano Azuelo’s The Underdogs was originally published in 1915. It appeared between October and December in an El Paso newspaper. By 1952, the novel was recognized worldwide as the classic story of the Mexican Revolution.
The main character, Demetrio Macías, joins the rebel forces and eventually earns the position of general in Pancho Villa’s army. Villa and other generals in The Underdogs are presented as the Robin Hoods of the Mexican people—taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The Underdogs also draws comparisons to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and the French revolutionaries attempts toward democracy and equality.
The first part of the novel corresponds to the second phase of the revolution. Opposition forces gain strength against the Huerta government. The revolutionary armies are led by Pancho Villa, Carranza, Obregón, and by peasants under Zapata- joined forces. Huerta resigned as president of Mexico and fled to Spain. The revolutionary armies entered Mexico City, and the novel focuses on the dissension within these revolutionary forces, particularly between Villa and Carranza. The main character, Demetrio, and his men represent the peasant guerrilla forces in the revolution. The Federales (government troops) blaze their way through the countryside—a disorganized and corrupt government stealing from the poor.
Many novelists published work in Mexico from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, but The Underdogs achieved both widespread popular and critical acclaim. Azuelo was one of the first writers to speak out against the corruption of the post-revolutionary government and society. In 1924, The Underdogswas referred to as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution. Its depiction of the charisma of Demetrio warms readers to the cause of the Revolution. The disillusionment following the Revolution is heart-breaking and Azuelo’s early twentieth century novel explains an impoverishment within Mexico that persists into the twenty-first century. The characters, dialogue, descriptions, and narration set an early mark for the accomplishments of Latin American writers that have influenced the literary landscape since the 1960s.
Mariano Azuela knew firsthand the materials of this novel, for he had served as a military doctor with Pancho Villa’s Golden Boys. His vivid account of revolutionary Mexico was first published serially in a small El Paso newspaper. Almost forgotten, it was revived in 1924 and won immediate fame for its author. Pessimism marks this story of “those below”—los de abajo—at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. This is no overall picture of the revolution but rather a blending of excitement, cruelty, and beauty as seen through the eyes of a man practically pushed into the struggle, a soldier who fought because the enemy was in front of him. Best known of Azuela’s sixteen novels, The Underdogs has appeared in dozens of Spanish editions and has been translated into many languages.
This favorite story about the Mexican Revolution still merits its international fame. It has both literary and sociological worth. Azuela’s honesty glitters in it because he does not overly caricature the Porfirista enemy even while lampooning him. Neither does Azuela spare the hypocrisies of his own side. His characterization is true to life, and his action scenes are fast and clear. Violence, pathos, beauty, and tragedy are etched against Jalisco’s night-blackened hills, so that the reader receives an indelible image of revolutionary pageantry, with its women soldaderas, bandoliered rebels, uniformed federales, and greedy nouveau riche who muddy the pond of revolutionary ideals. While painting only local vignettes of a nationwide holocaust, The Underdogs presents both the seedy and the inspiring aspects of the entire event.
The genuine worth of this novel was not recognized until almost a decade after its publication. By the mid-1920’s, however, it had been translated into various languages and was considered both a Latin American and a Mexican classic. It was written almost literally amid powder smoke, when Azuela was in despair because he saw that the revolution was drowning some injustices in blood only to spawn others as bad and as self-perpetuating. The virtue of the novel thus lies in its eyewitness impressions of intense, futile events. Azuela captures the excitement of times when bandoliered peons rode and marched off to war to the strains of the “Zacatecas March” or “La Cucaracha,” when the Victorian, Bourbonic, ordered age of Porfirio Díaz was dying. Lamentably, it was being supplanted by a violently conceived but stillborn new order that was not even to attempt many of its reforms until many dismal years later.
Ranked internationally as the best novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs helped transform the novel into the most important literary genre of Latin America. (Before 1910, novels by Latin American authors had inspired few translations and little fame beyond the local regions in which the individual novels were produced.) The Underdogs may also be the first Latin American novel whose singular literary style was shaped by the subject matter rather than by academic tradition. For example, in this work, time is telescoped to reflect the rapidity of events, and linguistic nuances tinge different aspects of the novel, including characters, scenes, and episodes. Individual members of Demetrio’s command symbolize certain features of Mexican society—one soldier is a former barber, others are peons, both poor and prosperous, and there are also prostitutes, virtuous countrywomen, a former waiter, and many other types. Although the venal characters are city dwellers and never country folk, the latter are sometimes ignorant.
Using an elliptical style, Azuela selects and spotlights a few specific characteristics of a person, a scene, or a situation so as to describe it deftly. He thus uses disjointed scenes, rather than systematic chapters, to strengthen the overtone of violent eruption. Selfishness wins, idealism is crucified, and the novel’s true protagonist—Mexico’s poor—does not march out of misery.
Although fragmented into many swift scenes, the novel is divided into three basic sections. The first section has twenty-one chapters and reflects hope; the last two sections have a total of twenty-one chapters and reflect failure. It is in the latter two portions of the novel that the filth, nastiness, and lewdness of war are best painted, when persons such as Cervantes realize that the revolutionary issues will not be decided by logic or delicacy but by brute power, as symbolized by self-made, upstart generals who care little for ideals.
Azuela uses colors and details well. The natural dialogue is regionalistic but not difficult and, although each personality uses special shades of language that subtly characterize him or her, a high percentage of the characters speak in standard Spanish.
The revolution ultimately disappeared without having helped the common people who needed help; rather, it had made their lives more difficult. Azuela’s sympathy in The Underdogs is thus always with the poor, whom he neither idealizes nor attacks. For the opportunists who betrayed the revolutionary ideals, he reserves a special sarcasm.
Azuela’s masterpiece became the standard novel of the revolution, which was the first significant socioeconomic upheaval in Latin America. Most other revolutionary movements of the preceding years had not sought to aid the submerged masses, the mestizo, the Indian, the laborer, the underdog in general. Following Azuela’s example, many Mexican and other Latin American novelists took up the fight for reform, denouncing tyranny and championing the cause of the forgotten. Since 1916, numerous starkly realistic novels have been published throughout Latin America that defend the underdog.
- www.enotes.com/topics/underdogs/critical-essays#critical-essays-critical-evaluation
This novel is described in several places as a classic of modern Hispanic literature and it really is a powerful book. Since it's appearance it has been published in more than 27 editions and in several languages.
The edition I just read is a Signet Classic paperback. It comes with a very useful introduction by Ann Castillo, author and American Book Award winner. The introduction serves extremely well to explain the Mexican Revolution to readers like myself. And novelist Mariano Azuela knew what he was writing about, having served as a doctor in Pancho Villa's army and having participated in several key engagements in that conflict.
The first edition of this novel, published in installments in El Universal Illustrado, a Mexico City magazine in 1924, bore the subtitle: "Sketches and Scenes of the Mexican Revolution." And it does have an episodic quality, rather than being a long continuous narrative. It doesn't attempt to encompass the entire Revolution but, rather, it concentrates on a handful of meaningful encounters throughout, both in battle and in conversations between the various players in the struggle.
The historic background, of course, is that in 1911, Emiliano Zapata, a peasant, rose up against the Madero government demanding agrarian reform with the shout: "Land and Liberty." His men were mostly Indians, poor, badly fed and poorly armed. As one character explains: "The revolution benefits the poor, the ignorant, all those who have been slaves all their lives, all the unhappy people who do not even suspect they are poor because the rich who stand above them, the rich who rule them, change their sweat and blood and tears into gold…" But in the end, it would seem all they won was a new bunch of corrupt dictators to rule over their lives.
There was little ideology involved in the uprising. There was no Karl Marx to provide intellectual spine and there was no awareness of the French Revolution with its "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Indeed, one of the novel's two main characters, a student named Luis Cervantes, joins the rebels and attempts to give some philosophic credence to the events. But in the end, he gives up, as did the author himself when he left the country entirely and went to El Paso, Texas, to write his novel.
The other leading character is Demetrio Macias, a naïve, peace-loving Indian who finds himself compelled to join the rebels to save his family. He becomes a successful soldier of the Revolution and eventually ends up leading a sizeable part of Pancho Villa's army. Part of the story concerns itself with Luis Cervantes' largely unsuccessful attempts to impart some ideological underpinnings to Macias and the other leaders of the struggle.
However, on both sides, in the government and in the rebel ranks, there is so much treachery, betrayal, cynicism, assassination and lack of moral leadership that the movement can hardly do anything else but fail. When the rebels win some form of victory they aren't a whole lot better than the people they replace. The poor are still poor. And we still see that even today.
One of the things that strikes you hard when you read this novel with all its skirmishes and full-scale battles is the sheer bloody needless cruelty of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Rape, burning people's homes, torture, massacres of women and children and on and on…. It's depicted here in all its horror. You initially wonder what people were like, back in those days. But, as one critic has pointed out, this is really a novel about ALL wars. And on television this morning, here in February 2001, I saw Yugoslav war criminals being sentenced in a UN court for precisely the same crimes committed just a few years ago. It's interesting, too, that Mexico still has its rebels - Los Zapatistas - creating problems in the south. Does anything ever change?
In my humble O: The Underdogs is a very cynical, pessimistic, despairing kind of novel. But if you're at all interested in Mexican history it's a powerful and essential read. - Allan Cogan
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