Los de abajos (The Underdogs) by Mariano Azuela - Book Review

Los de abajos (The Underdogs) by Mariano Azuela is a cyclical narrative, originally published in Spanish and divided into three parts. The first covers the peasant Demetrio Macias’ flight from his home, his wounding and recovery in a small village, medical student and journalist Luis Cervantes’ joining his ragged band of rebels, and the Revolution’s victory at Zacatecas. The second details the now General Demetrio Macias’ wanderings about Mexico and his love affairs with War Paint and Camilla. Between skirmishes, he and his men plunder and loot and rape everything in sight. The final section finds them all either already dead or dying of thirst. The great Pancho Villa is defeated, and Macias’ body lies in a canyon not far from where his journey began.

The central conflict of this novel stems from Macias’ inability and/or refusal to find a purpose for his and his people’s actions. Demetrio Macias often admits how bereft he truly is. “What are we fighting for? That’s what I’d like to know”, he asks Cervantes early on. When Macias’ ex-lover stabs his current lover to death, all he can do is repeat an old refrain: “Someone plunged a knife/Deep in my side/Did he know why?/I don't know why/Maybe he knew/I never knew”. More than once, when his men look to him for leadership beyond mere bravado, he has nothing for them. To a point, the character of Luis Cervantes serves as a voice of reason for Macias. It is this young intellectual who articulates for the other men why they are fighting and what they must continue to fight for, namely “to reclaim the sacred rights of the people”. He tries to provide them with ambition and purpose beyond their farms, and later, with his invitation to a business opportunity outside Mexico, beyond the endless death. It is Cervantes who advises Marcias to join Natera at Juchipila, therefore making his greatest moment of victory in the battle at Zacatecas and his promotion to general possible.

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In Part 2, Marcias and his people listen less and less to reason, and consequently they deteriorate in a progressively chilling spiral of violence, debauchery, and murder. Cervantes asks, "General, look at the mess these boys have made here. Don't you think it would be advisable to forbid this sort of thing?". Not only does he go unheeded, but he also beholds the revolutionaries’ rejection of purpose, despairs, and is himself partially corrupted.

Cervantes’ departure for El Paso in Part 3 suggests the complete loss of reason now endemic to the Revolution. He has been replaced by the poet Valderrama, a “madman whose vast prophetic madness encompassed all about him, the dusty weeds, the tumbled kiosk, the gray houses, the lovely hills, and the immeasurable sky”. Both men make impassioned speeches, but the similarities end there: Valderrama adores revolution for its own sake, while Cervantes was in love with the ideology and rhetoric of revolution and saw it as a means to the ultimate end of ridding Mexico of tyranny. By all accounts, General Macias’ struggle with his lack of purpose never finds any sort of satisfactory resolution. What reason there might have been has left for Texas, and an explanation for all the revolutionaries have suffered (and made others to suffer) is nowhere to be found.

During the conclusion of The Underdogs, this question attacks Marcias from all sides. His estranged wife, his men, and the deserters in the sierra each put it to him in their own way, and he has no answer. When that same Anastasio asks why they still kill, his general cannot say. Even in death, “Demetrio Macias, his eyes leveled in eternal glance, continues to point the barrel of his gun”. The only resolution is that there is no resolution, and so the volcano of the Revolution never ceases, and never accomplishes what it set out to do.