Book Review: Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead by Stanley Brandes

Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead:

The Day Of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

by Stanley Brandes

      In the 1990s while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I went to a Day Of the Dead celebration. On the day after Halloween, a crowd gathered in the neighborhood of Barelas. Many wore skull masks or homemade calavera costumes. Some just wore ordinary street clothes. Some solo musicians strummed guitars while others beat on congas. There were kids and adults, people of all ages, ethnicities, and economic classes. Political activists and artists showed up and camera crews from the local TV stations were there to make 30 second clips to be shown at the end of the 6:00 news. The crowd formed into a procession and circulated through the main streets of Barelas. It was fun and inclusive. Nobody was turned away or told to leave. Occasional cars would pass by, the drivers honking their horns to arouse cheers from the procession, but there were very few people standing on the roadsides watching, something unusual for a parade. But the emphasis was on participation more than observation. After winding through the neighborhoods a few times, the sun began to set and the procession found its way to the Mexican-American community center where information booths were set up and vendors sold sugar skulls, tamales, and hot chocolate.

This way of celebrating the Day Of the Dead is controversial to some. Purists might think it is an inauthentic reinterpretation of a holiday that doesn’t respect Mexican traditions. Less conservative people might say it is an educational opportunity that raises awareness of the Chicano community in America and brings people of other backgrounds into friendly contact. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes, in his study of the Day Of the Dead Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead, explores the way this most famous of Mexican holidays has changed in practice and meaning over time.

While doing fieldwork in the town of Tzintzuntzan, set in the Mexican state of Michoacan, Brandes began seeing changes to the way the Day Of the Dead, which should properly be called the Days Of the Dead because it is celebrated on November 2 and 3 on All Souls Day and All Saints Day, was celebrated. More people from outside the town were coming in for celebrations and a commercialized aspect was being introduced. This was in the 1960s. To his surprise, the local people welcomed these changes. So he set off to explore the origins of the holiday, how it changed over time, and what it has become today.

Brandes starts off with the common belief that the Days Of the Dead originated with the pre-Conquest indigenous people under the Aztec empire. After checking all the written records in the documented history, he did find evidence that those people had festivals commemorating death, but he did not find any direct connection to the Days Of the Dead. In fact, in most of its aspects, including sweet foods, altars, and the symbol of the skull, it appears to have been imported to Mexico by the Catholic church. In its most traditional form, people built altars in their houses, cleaned ancestral graves, gave sugar skulls to children as gifts, and attended an overnight mass in the cemetery. It was a small affair that mostly involved the family and not much else.

During the Mexican Revolution, the artist Jose Guadalupe Posada used iconography from the Days Of the Dead to make scathing commentaries on the politicians of his day. This brought the holiday into greater prominence both nationally and internationally. By the 1970s, the Mexican government realized how the Days Of the Dead could be used to promote a stronger cultural identity for Mexicans and attract tourists for the commercial benefit of the country at both local and national levels. As Halloween became more popular in Mexico and elements of the two celebrations merged, some Mexican intellectuals started questioning the meaning of the Days Of the Dead and how it related to Mexican national identity.

The controversies get more heated as Brandes’ studies take him north of the border into the United States where he examines the use of the Days Of the Dead as an educational tool. A whole passage is dedicated to how the holiday is presented in public schools, children’s books, and displays in libraries and community centers. He goes a little too in depth here for my tastes. He examines some of the Latino community’s reactions including controversies about what is presented and how. From my own point of view, which has nothing in common with anything the author says, these types of educational programs either overly-glorify aspects of cultural diversity or underwhelm the observer with watered down versions of cultural differences. From my own American perspective, educational programs teaching people about a holiday like Thanksgiving can be misleading. Books and displays make it look more festive than it really is and present history as if it is an important part of every American’s life. The truth is, most Americans can’t explain what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about let alone how it originated. Most people see it as a time to eat like pigs and care little about its intended meaning. Thanksgiving dinners with my family tend to be less than exciting and often not much different from other dinners we have together with the exception of what we eat. Likewise Mardi Gras, as celebrated in New Orleans, is a huge party where lots of people get blind drunk, but very few of them have any idea of what the celebration is actually about. But a survey of children’s literature on these holidays would give an entirely different picture. Community educational displays are also often weak and shallow without providing much in the way of experience or insight; they often come across as little more than scraps of information in a society already super-saturated in information and advertising. My whole point here is that attempts at teaching cultural and national traditions should be looked at with a critical eye since the people producing them mostly fail to give an accurate picture, usually little more than a small taste, of what they present. This applies to the educational representations of the Days Of the Dead just as much as to Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras.

There is little wonder that Chicano community leaders and their supporters raise questions about the authenticity of how the Days Of the Dead are promoted and celebrated in the United States. Brandes examines the whole spectrum from an activist group, at one extreme, that tries to create a Days Of the Dead celebration that is entirely composed of pre-colonial indigenous cultural motifs and from there to a working class neighborhood fiesta with music, dancers, theatrical performers, and vendors that seeks to build bridges between communities while fostering a positive image of Chicanos to those of other ethnicities. Beyond that is a Days Of the Dead art fair in the Mission District of San Francisco that is organized by a Korean woman and has displays that only marginally touch on the themes of the holiday. This is further complicated by the fact that the Mission District used to be a Mexican and Central American enclave that has since been gentrified and now is a predominantly Korean and Asian neighborhood. Brandes analyzes how each festival along this entire range generates its own controversies and disputes about representation and the Mexican-American identity in the USA. This is important as the Chicano community is growing and they need to establish some sense of identity in a sometimes hostile cultural environment where your average citizen knows nothing about Mexican culture aside from tacos, undocumented immigrants, and drug cartels along with whatever caricatures and cliches are found in popular culture.

Brandes finishes the book with a discussion on how the Days Of the Dead prove that Mexicans have a uniquely jocular attitude towards death. He contrasts Mexicans with other Western nationalities who he claims are more serious and less accepting of death. I have to say I disagree with him strongly on this. While I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of Mexican people, I can say that Americans are not any less casual about imagery representing skulls, grim reapers, ghosts, or other things we consider to be macabre. Horror movies are wildly popular as are haunted houses that are staples of carnivals and amusement parks, not to mention the ones that crop up at Halloween time. Jack o’lanters are ubiquitous in the Fall. Skulls are common on t-shirts, album covers, and tattoos. People tell jokes about death and it is a common subject for songs especially in the punk, goth, and metal genres. There was a musical trend in the 1950s called “death rock” in which teenage crooners sang about losing lovers in car wrecks. Death and murder as plot devices are ever-present in movies and TV shows. True crime is a popular genre in literature. And doesn’t he even know about the Grateful Dead? That cult band has done more to spread Days Of the Dead imagery around El Norteno since the 1960s than anybody else with their t-shirts and album covers. The list can go on forever. We see so many skulls and crossbones in America that it hardly even registers with us. Nobody is sad, disgusted, offended, or disturbed when somebody wears a Misfits t-shirt in public. We have a casual attitude towards death too; it just manifests in a different cultural style. Brandes isn’t the only anthropologist I know of who has made this erroneous claim about Mexico either. Leave it to the academics to be completely unaware of their own culture, the one they live in. I guess fish don’t comprehend the water they swim until they reach dry land.

While the conclusions aren’t infallible, Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead provides a useful history and cultural analysis of Mexico’s most famous holiday. It forces us to question what cultural authenticity really is and also draws attention to socio-political issues embedded in representations of traditional practices. Stanley Brandes doesn’t come to any strong conclusions, but he thoroughly provides enough information to give the reader direction in how to think about Mexico and the Days Of the Dead.

 

Book Review: The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 by Michael J. Gonzalez

The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940

by Michael J. Gonzalez

      Tons of books have been written about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. They vary widely in length, attention to detail, attitudes towards the people involved, and political bias in general. They also contradict each other depending on what information the authors had access to. Content can be confusing as well since different leaders and factions of the Revolution changed allegiances and sometimes fought with those they previously supported. And from the top political leaders to the military commanders to the common rank and file soldiers, there is an extremely wide range of reasoning for joining in the battles. Whether it was even one revolution or a series of loosely related rebellions and counter-rebellions is still an open question. In short, learning about the Mexican Revolution can be a mind-boggling task. Some places are better than others to start. Michael J. Gonzalez’s The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 is one of the better entry points into this vast and overwhelming period of Latin American history.

As a historical text, this one reaches back into the 19^th century, charting the rise of Porfirio Diaz. He can largely be credited with ushering Mexico into the modern age by introducing industrial technology into the country and embracing liberal, big business economic policy. While this benefited the wealthy class most, it also left the majority of Mexicans behind in poverty. The hacienda system of economic organization also disinherited some agriculturalists from their holdings. American businessmen and multinational corporations, especially oil companies, were given almost free access to Mexico’s natural resources. None of this benefited the Mexican people except for the well-connected oligarchs and technocrats. It is the old story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Porfirio Diaz became more autocratic and dictatorial while the rest of the country went into economic decline.

A pro-democracy movement started with the Portuguese aristocrat Francisco I. Madero. The initial battles of the revolution started when the peasantry joined forces with members of the middle and upper classes to overthrow the Diaz regime. This inspired land reform movements led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. After Madero’s assassination, the Huerta counter-revolutionary presidency took over. It was short lived and after the revolutionary conference of Aguascalientes, another landowner named Venustiano Carranza took office and established a new Mexican constitution. As the warfare wore down, leaders like Obregon, Calles, and Cardenas institutionalized the ideals of the Mexican Revolution although the Zapatista ideal of land reform that received so much support from the rural peasantry fell by the wayside. Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI, was established but, unfortunately sold out by becoming more autocratic and corrupt, allowing foreign corporations to access their resources once again though to the chagrin of the American empire, the PRI nationalized the oil fields. They continued making noises about pushing Mexico towards the status of a first world nation, but forward movement progressed only in bits and pieces. The PRI betrayed some of the dreams of the Mexican Revolution, but not all of them. The realization of that dream is yet to come.

Gonzalez’s analysis of the years following the end of revolutionary combat operations is one of this book’s strong points. A lot of books on this subject end with the political ascendancy of Obregon. It’s as if the forces set in motion by the revolution just abruptly stopped in 1920 according to many accounts. Of course, any student of history will tell you that isn’t a realistic way of looking at political upheavals. Otherwise this book is mostly a top down view of the Mexican Revolution meanng the emphasis is placed on politics at the governmental level. While the activism and leadership of Villa and Zapata are readily acknowledged, they take a back seat to what went on at the federal level. Villa’s stint as governor of Chihuahua is never even mentioned. Details of different battles are almost entirely left out and biographical information about key figures in the revolution is absent too. This book really just documents and summarizes the high points of the movement according to Gonzalez’s viewpoint. He does this in a way that is accessible, clear, and engaging though.

The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940 serves as an easy introduction to this pivotal conflict in Mexico’s modern history. It draws you in and prepares you for further reading from more in depth sources. It can also be of interest for those who already know about the Mexican Revolution and who the major figures were. It can clarify the intricate mess that more complete studies make it out to be. It can also be a good recap or refresher if you’ve previously read about it and want to get back into the subject matter after some time has passed. Michael J. Gonzalez has written a good functional book that doesn’t exhaust the subject matter but does prime you for more. The Mexican Revolution is a significant event in the formation of the Mexican national identity and understanding what went on will help you understand the roots of contemporary Mexico and their relations with the rest of the world, especially with the United States. This book is a good place to start. 

 

Book Review - Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask by Nick Henck

Subcommander Marcos:

The Man and the Mask

by Nick Henck

It was the night of New Year’s Eve, 1994 in San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in the Mexican state of Chiapas. An army of guerilla warriors blocked off all roads to the city and seized the town square. Their spokesman emerged, wearing a green army uniform and a black ski mask. He smoked a pipe. He called himself Subcomandante Marcos and his image would soon spread around the world. Marcos’s army was called the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional or the EZLN, though they commonly came to known as the Zapatistas. Since it was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Subcomandante Marcos declared this to be an uprising against the establishment, one that would put the rights of Mexico’s Indios in the spotlight in a bid for higher living standards and greater political autonomy. Nick Henck’s Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask gives a comprehensive history of the EZLN movement and the most in depth biography of its leader to this day.

After the uprising in 1994, and a few years into the 2000s, Subcomandante Marcos’s identity remained a mystery even though his image and message spread rapidly around the world due to media coverage. Nick Henck did a bit of digging around to find out who he was and where he came from. The first third of the book gives as much biographical information as he could find. Marcos’s true identity was that of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente. He came from a middle class background, got a college education at a liberal arts university, worked as a philosophy professor at another university, and got drawn into left wing politics. Initially he was a Marxist and joined a radical activist organization called the FLN. Their plan was to overthrow the Mexican government and establish a new socialist state. This section on the early life and radicalization of Marcos wears a little thin at times. The author gets sidetracked into some long discussions about the political climate of Mexico and its history that don’t help to clarify or add much to the overall story of Marcos and the EZLN. The narrative picks up again in the second section.

By the mid-1980s, Marcos had had enough of revolutionary theory and decided he wanted action. The FLN assigned him to the jungle highlands of Chiapas to prepare for guerilla warfare. He attracted a loyal army of Mayan Indios and landless agricultural workers. Marcos learned to speak their language, lived according to their lifestyle, and ate only the food that they ate. Critics of Marcos have accused him of exploiting the Indios and luring them into a political conflict they otherwise would not have engaged in. His supporters have countered this accusation by pointing out that he completely integrated into their society and became one of them. He still lives a humble existence with the Mayan people to this day. In any case, he spent ten years preparing the EZLN army for the uprising of 1994.

One interesting problem Marcos encountered along the way was related to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communism. Marcos had been teaching Marxist and Maoist political theory to his followers for some time when the Iron Curtain came down and suddenly the politics of the Left looked irrelevant. The FLN realized they had to change their message or else they would never be taken seriously so Marcos eventually phased out the Marxist jargon and began emphasizing the need for stronger representation of Indigenous people in the Mexican government. He came to advocate for the Mayan people to have their own semi-autonomous government, acting as a sub-nation within the nation of Mexico.

The third section of the book explains what happened after the initial uprising of 1994. After some minor skirmishes that resulted in a small number of Zapatista deaths, Marcos realized his guerilla army was outgunned. The uprising caught the media’s attention and he seized on the opportunity to bring the cause to the public. The Mexican middle classes came out in strong support for the Zapatistas and as long as they stayed in the eye of the press, the EZLN maintained their support. Subcomandante Marcos also pioneered the use of the internet as a tool of revolution. He reached a worldwide audience by writing communiques that were witty, imaginative, and a bit fantastical. Some of his supporters even claim they had valid literary merit though only time will tell if that is true. Pro-Zapatista activist groups sprung up on every continent and suddenly the subject of post-colonialism and the rights of Indigenous people around the world filtered into a new Leftist reorientation, carrying over into the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 and Occupy Wall Street a few years later.

Subcomandante Marcos was winning a war of wits with the Mexican government. This probably was aided by the widespread opposition to Mexico’s PRI party that had been ruling the country since the 1930s. With minimal violence, a high profile media campaign, massive street demonstrations and conferences of varying success, the Zapatistas managed to establish their own alternative government based on traditional Mayan principles in Chiapas and also got their cause brought up in a Mexican congressional hearing. Finally they succeeded in striking a deal with the government that was beneficial to the Indios of Mexico. In the end, Marcos hed led a semi-successful political movement with minimal bloodshed. Subcomandante Marcos has since remained reclusive, living with his people in the highlands of Chiapas. He remains a mysterious figure and actually sounds like a pretty decent guy. One thing you can say after reading this biography is that he was authentic and sincere.

There isn’t much to critisize in this book. There are some slow parts in the beginning that border on irrelevancy, but everything else is clearly written and sufficiently explained. There are some missing pieces that could have been included though. A brief description of Mayan culture would have enhanced the context and a little more description of the jungles and mountains would give it an added depth. It would also be helpful to hear more from the Mayan people themselves about the EZLN; it would be interesting to hear what they thought of the outsider Marcos considering he was a middle class mestizo who came to them from Mexico City. Although it is beyond the scope of this book, it would also be interesting to learn about the long term effects of the EZLN uprising and whether or not it continues to make a difference in the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous people.

This is the best book about Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas, and the January 1, 1994 uprising I know of so far. It’s also inspirational. Marcos spent a decade preparing for a guerilla war. Once it started he realized that bloodshed would lead to nothing but mass suicide for his followers. He was quick-witted and pragmatic enough to see how he could influence public opinion without having to resort to further violence. More than ten years after the initial siege of San Cristobal de las Casas, the EZLN were able to get something they wanted. Patience, adaptability, and communication were their greatest allies. They proved that change doesn’t have to be immediate or even grandiose. There is a lot for future activists to learn here. The fact that this political movement happened fairly recently in Mexico makes it all that much more interesting.

 

Book Review: Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico by Bill Weinberg

Homage to Chiapas:

The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico

by Bill Weinberg

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a ragged army of soldiers seized San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in Mexico’s poorest state Chiapas. Wearing ski masks and homemade army uniforms, the rebels carried rifles and pistols, though many of them were actually carrying wooden sticks made to look like guns. The rebel army was the EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas, and they were primarily made up of Mayan Indians. Some people took them to be a low-level threat and some tourists weren’t happy about the uprising disrupting their travel plans. Some might have even said the EZLN were quaint. But the Zapatista uprising shook Mexican society to its core, sparked a few other insurrections, and brought attention to the problems faced by the poorest people in the country. Although incomplete in ts scope, Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas puts the rebellion into context and looks at its short term consequences.

The book starts off with a whirlwind tour through Mexican history going back to pre-colonial times, detailing the relations between the indigenous Mayans and the Uto-Aztecan empire that conquered and assimilated them. By Weinberg’s account, rebellion has been a part of Mayan heritage from the beginning. After the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic church arrived to do the dirty deeds of the Castilian empire, the tradition of Mayan uprisings continued. Some elements in the church had humanitarian sympathies and defended the Mayans against the excessive cruelties of the colonialists and this alliance between Catholic activists and the indigenous people of Mexico continues to this day. Weinberg’s history of Mexico is brief and serves the purpose of setting a historical context for Mayan and Indian political resistance in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He strongly emphasizes the history of the Mayan people. If you’re familiar with Mexican history, this part of the book might feel incomplete. If you’re not, it might feel a little muddled and confusing. But this book isn’t about the grand scope of Mexican history and the opening chapters do serve their purpose of drawing a connecting line from the Mayan past to the present.

The same can be said for the chapters on modern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution gets explained, especially the cause of land reform heralded by Emiliano Zapata, the guerilla fighter that inspired the EZLN in the 1990s. A lot of attention is also drawn to the domination of Mexico by the American government and multinational corporations during the industrialization and modernization process. Weinberg goes into great detail about how outside interference in Mexico’s culture and economy led to the widespread environmental damage, economic displacement, and loss of ancestral lands for Indians and campesinos. He brings us up into the 1990s when the corruption of Mexico’s dominant PRI political party and American free trade agreements under Reagan and Bush, like GATT and NAFTA, were ratified and exacerbated the unresolved problems the Mexican Revolution was meant to correct. These chapters are heavily detailed and the reader may feel lost in the weeds, especially in sections detailing environmental sciences and economics. Weinberg overdoes his explanations in a way that could alienate his audience.

Then we come up to New Year’s Day of 1994, the day that the NAFTA treaty went into effect, giving oil companies and other multinational corporations sweeping rights over Mexican natural resources, manufacturing in the maquiladoras along the border, and industrialized agriculture that killed off varieties of traditionally grown produce and further disinherited Mexicans from privately and publicly held land all for the sake of making money for American businessmen.

A decade previous, in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandon jungle along the border of Guatemala, a mysterious figure arose and began preparing armies of Mayan people to fight the Mexican government. His name was Subcomandante Marcos and no one knew who he was at first since he hid his identity behind a black ski mask. The New Year’s uprising of 1994 led to some small skirmishes with a small amount of casualties, mostly EZLN fighters. The Zapatistas realized they could not fight Mexico with arms so instead they captured the media’s attention and Marcos reached a global audience by posting dispatches on the internet that gained worldwide sympathy. The Mexican middle classes took sides with Marcos and the Zapatistas and their message caught on in all continents and regions of the world. Their message was simple: they wanted land, they wanted self-governance, and they wanted all the material benefits of modernity. They wanted political participation in the Mexican government and desired to be like a semi-autonomous nation within the nation. They eventually built a parallel government in rural Chiapas and refused to recognize the official governments run in the urban municipalities of the state. The conflict between the EZLN and the government was unresolved at the time this book was published. Weinberg is successful in defining the goals of the EZLN, but falls short on writing about their history. A lot of his account is bogged down with descriptions of his travels into Zapatista territories, hidden in the mountains and jungles, and his attempt at getting an interview with Subcomandante Marcos himself, which eventually happens but doesn’t lead to any great insights.

The next section of the book looks at other indigenous uprisings that happened parallel to or after the EZLN uprising of Subcomandante Marcos. The most interesting chapter gives an account of indigenous people rebelling against oil companies in the state of Tabasco who wrecked the environment and contaminated their drinking water making farming almost impossible and causing a wave of health problems. The author again bogs the reader down with excessive details. You might need to be an expert in chemistry or biology to fully understand everything he writes. He could easily make the point abut environmental destruction and its impact on the agricultural economy without going into such fine, technical details. But it is a good section because it documents some attempts at revolutionary activism that probably will otherwise be forgotten due to lack of attention from other writers.

The rest of the book moves sideways into accounts of the intersection between the Mexican government, landowners, the military, law enforcement, and the drug cartels in the North, especially in Sonora. The Tarahumara or Raramuri Indians get caught up in this mess due to poverty and lack of political power. These chapters get to be frustrating because the author introduces a lot of government officials, law enforcement officers, military generals, and hacendados who made the mistake of involving themselves in drug trafficking. Most of these people get assassinated soon after they enter the narrative and a lot of this just reads like lists of people you know close to nothing about getting murdered. It barely has any connection to the EZLN, indigenous people, or the state of Chiapas. It should probably have been left out of the book altogether.

Bill Weinberg gives us an interesting glimpse into the world of indigenous political activism in Mexico. As mentioned before, the main issues of the narratives get somewhat obscured by too much extraneous information. A lot of the information gathered by Weinberg is incomplete which isn’t entirely his fault. The historical roots of these indigenous uprisings, especially those of the Zapatistas, was not well known at the time of writing. Furthermore, he also wrote this too close to the time of the events themselves. There isn’t enough historical distance on his part to give these uprisings the clarity they deserve. But still it’s good to read about how indigenous people can organize and challenge the injustices of the Mexican political and economic system.

Despite all its many flaws, including sloppy writing and a thick jungle of arcane details that is hard to see through, Homage to Chiapas is worth reading once just because it draws attention to struggles that are not well-documented elsewhere. On a final note, the title should probably be changed as very little of what takes place in these pages happens in Chiapas. Besides, it is more of an homage to Mayan people and the EZLN than it is to Mexico’s poorest, but also one of the most fascinating, states. The dense jungle, the highlands, its ancient temples, its history, and the culture of its peoples make it a place worth visiting and learning about all on its own. 

 

Book Review: Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint by H. Andrew Chesnut

Devoted to Death:

Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint

by H. Andrew Chesnut

Over the last two decades, interest in a skeleton saint has grown in both Mexico and Latino communities north of the border in the U.S.A. In fact, the popularity has begun to spread outside of Latino communities too as different ethnic groups become familiar with each other. This saint is called Santa Muerte and it has also begun to attract media attention because of its popularity with Mexican drug cartels and other people associated with the underworld. What the media doesn’t tell you is that Santa Muerte’s appeal is wider than realized and in fact most of her devotees are ordinary people without any nefarious intentions. Anthropologist R. Andrew Chesnut sets the record straight in his study of this fledgling religious movement in Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint.

After stating his intention to save the Santa Muerte community from negative publicity, Chesnut examines the history of this saint. He starts by discussing the Uto-Aztecan death goddesses. But he is more convinced that the image of Santa Muerte was not part of pre-Conquest culture and actually arrived with the Spanish invaders and the Catholic church. They brought over images of the Grim Reaper which sprung up during the Black Plague. The intention was to scare the people of Mexica into submission, but secretly some people were secretly putting the Grim Reaper on altars and making sacrifices to him for favors. Similar traditions have proliferated in Central America and Argentina, but these involved a male Grim Reaper and appear to be unrelated to the current phenomenon of Santa Muerte. In recent years, due to syncretism with African diaspora religions like Candomble, Vodou, and Santeria, Santa Muerte has emerged from hiding and taken on a new life.

In Mexico City, a grocery store with a shrine to Santa Muerte started attracting so much attention that the owner began offering monthly prayer and worship services complete with mariachi bands. Another chapel called the Temple of Death opened and the cult has been snowballing in membership ever since. Chesnut uses the word “cult” in the Latin sense of the word “cultus” which means “religious community” and in no way applies to the more current usage indicating authoritarian, high control groups led by charismatic leaders.

Each chapter in this book is about the different ways Santa Muerte is worshiped and petitioned for favors with some commentaries on who her devotees are along the way. Whether people are making offerings for money, work, love, or protection from harm, most ceremonies are relatively benign and innocent. Offerings of candles, incense, food, and drinks are common. The most controversial gifts include alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Animal and human sacrifices are mostly the stuff of urban legends and media sensationalism.

While there are Santa Muerte devotees from all walks of life, a quick survey of the book reveals that most of them are working class mestizos like truck drivers, small business owners, police, and prison guards. There are, however, some upper class and educated followers too. Some are lawyers, some are teachers, and some are celebrities or corporate businessmen. A couple people the author interviews are goths with black clothes, nose rings, and tattoos. It should be considered that some people from a counter-culture like that might be pre-disposed to being receptive to a saint whose appearance is that of the Grim Reaper in women’s dress. And while Chesnut does rightfully downplay the media’s negative association of Santa Muerte with criminal activity, he does provide a chapter detailing the appeal of Santa Muerte to drug cartel members and organized crime gangs since altars to the Mother of Death are commonly found on their premises during police raids.

While the author does provide a lot of details regarding the practices and culture of the Santa Muerte cult, he doesn’t do any heavy theorizing and there is only minimal explanation as to why it has grown in popularity. He does identify some causes though. One is that Santa Muerte is available to everybody regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or position in life. Santa Muerte is also amoral in a way that has caused the Catholic church to condemn her; she is believed to do favors for good or bad purposes without passing judgment on the devotee and that is why doctors as well as drug kingpins can approach her. Santa Muerte has a strong presence in the ambient popular culture too. She appears in novels, TV shows, horror movies, song lyrics, tattoos, and t-shirts. Finally, Santa Muerte is believed to be more powerful than other saints, especially those approved of by the church.

Chesnut doesn’t explain much beyond that. You are left to your own thoughts as to the proliferation of the Skeleton Saint. Personally I feel that the issues of power and condemnation from religious leaders are a part of the appeal. The skeptic in me that doesn’t believe in magic says that there is an equal statistical chance of any saint, spirit, or deity delivering what a devotee asks for in exchange for ritual offerings. There would be a random chance of obtaining the desired outcome no matter who or what is prayed to. But the perception that any one of these supernatural entities is more powerful than the others is what matters to the believer. Therefore as more people align themselves with the cult of Santa Muerte the more stories of successful rituals will circulate socially making it appear that she is the most powerful of them all. Meanwhile, people are more likely to remain silent about the ceremonies that fail creating a socially derived illusion that Santa Muerte ceremonies have a higher rate of success than they really do.

There might also be a subversive element in the worship of Santa Muerte. Since she is not recognized by the church, interacting with her could be a way of rebelling against traditionally accepted authority. This trend might be wider than Santa Muerte since the author points out that Evangelical Christianity is currently catching up in popularity to the Catholic church while African diaspora religions and secular humanism are also making inroads into Mexican society. This would indicate that Mexico is in a time of social transition and attraction to Santa Muerte is one manifestation of that change in answering to people’s needs.

The issue of power might also say something about who follows Sants Muerte. Occupations involving criminal activities on both sides of the law are extremely high risk. Life is just as dangerous for prison guards as it is for prisoners. People who work in construction, poorly regulated factories, the sex industry, or the taxi business are risking their safety every time they go to work. An unemployed man on the verge of going homeless would have extreme levels of anxiety. Santa Muerte, the most powerful saint, often appeals to those whose lives have put them on the front line of danger or despair so it would make sense that they would petition and desire to placate the representative of death to bless them with the gift of life. As for more mundane concerns like winning a poker game, passing an exam, or attracting a lost lover back, those desiring such favors might as well turn to the most powerful saint available. Why turn towards weaker saints? But otherwise the widespread devotion and rapid spread of Santa Muerte’s cult might be an indication of growing social anxiety. If magic is about power and control, than the growing popularity of a religion involving magic might indicate that wide sectors of society feel as though they have little or no control over the circumstances of their lives. While that lack of control could be present at any given time throughout history, the beginning of a new cultural practice addressing that anxiety might be a sign that the old ways are failing and the younger generations are searching for something more effective. Widespread anxiety might be commonplace, but changing cultural practices could indicate that a precarious rupture with the past might be happening.

R. Andrew Chesnut’s intentions here are to clear up misconceptions about Santa Muerte and advocate for the variety of people who are attracted to her rising popularity. It is written for the general reader. This is good because clarifying the beliefs and practices should encourage people to tolerate something about Mexican culture that they don’t understand. It’s too bad Devoted to Death doesn’t go deeper into an analysis and explanation for what is happening on both the south and north sides of the border though. It would be nice to have heard a professional anthropologist’s views on what this says about Mexican society. He just leaves you hanging to draw your own conclusions.

Anyhow, the next time you see a veladora decorated with an image of Santa Muerte, probably beside candles depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe, in a grocery store, a market, or a bodega you can ask the people selling it how to do a ritual. My experience with Mexicans and Chicanos has been that they are usually eager to talk about their culture with non-Latinos like me if you show a sincere interest. You might open some doorways, make some new friends, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you might even be blessed with good fortunes from the Skeleton Saint herself.

 

Book Review: People Of the Peyote edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

People Of the Peyote:

Huichol Indian History, Religion, & Survival

edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

      If you’ve ever been to Mexico, you might have seen some brightly colored yarn paintings on black backgrounds or other crafts in similar styles using pointilist technique or depicting animals or other objects in ways that might be considered mind altering or psychedelic. You would see these in markets or tourist trinket shops. Sometimes they are on display in art galleries. Chances are you were seeing the creations of Huichol Indians whose vibrant artwork is known for its depiction of mystical and shamanic themes. Their cultural and religious traits are largely intertwined with the use of the hallucinogenic peyote buttons found in the desert. People Of the Peyote, edited by Stacy B. Schaefer and Peter T. Furst, is a collection of essays about the Huichols, mostly centered around their shamanic traditions and religious practices and how they influence their community.

This book starts off with the definition and history of the Huichols who are a sub-branch of the Azteco branch of North American Indians. They live in the Sierra Madre Occidental region in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango. Culturally and geographically they are close to the Cora people and linguistically they are connected to the Pimas of southern Arizona. These early chapters give brief information about pre- and post-Conquest interactions with the Spanish and mestizo population of Mexico. Their social, political, and economic organizations are introduced as well. One chapter is written by a German traveler from the 19^th century named Konrad Preuss. Despite not being proficient in anthropological fieldwork techniques, his writings are highly valued because they provide some of the only accounts of Huichol religion and ritual from that time. Unfortunately, his writing isn’t very good. Another chapter lists the botanical and pharmacological properties and applications of peyote and other plants in Huichol medicinal culture. Also a theory is asserted that the Huichol’s use of peyote, while still being considered traditional, is actually of recent historical origins in their shamanic practices. These early chapters are sometimes difficult to read due to both poor writing, a serious problem for authors of history, as well as an abundance of technical terminologies and analyses that alienate a layperson. Fortunately, the book gets more accessible and interesting as it goes along.

As the more interesting parts of the book begin to pick up, we get some good chapters on the shaman’s role in society. The Huichol word for shaman is “ma’akame” and, as difficult as it may be fore an English speaker to pronounce, it is used throughout the entirety of the book. The mara’akame’s purpose is to organize and lead ritual practices. It gets more complicated than that though since the Huichol rituals are tightly intertwined with social structures and hierarchies, familial roles, seasonal calendars, and agricultural practices. A missing or altered piece of these interrelations can throw a whole village out of balance so the position of mara’akame is one of great responsibility. He also holds the place where the human and spirit worlds interact so of course that is a position of great power and influence. Aside from community rituals, the mara’akame also leads people on ritual peyote gathering expeditions and pilgrimages to the sacred mountain where it is believed that peyote originated. The psychotropic effects of peyote ingestion are also examined from neurophysiological and spiritual perspectives. The authors make it clear that peyote use is taken seriously by the Huichols for creative cultural purposes and that recreational indulgences in the drug is strictly forbidden.

Huichol mythology gets an interesting examination. They have a complex web of deities, elemental spirits including a pantheon of malevolent wind spirits, and animals. They have two deities superficially corresponding to Santa Maria and Jesus Christ although they don’t appear to play a major role in religious practices. Deer occupy a central place in the theoretical aspects of the mara’alame and they believe in a unified trinitarian spirit made up of deer, peyote, and corn which they are different manifestations of the same element. One way to think of it is the way water can hold the three forms of mist, ice, and liquid. This might be hard to grasp for people outside the Huichol culture, but to them it is obvious. This is the challenge of encountering a culture other than your own and that is where anthropologists come in for the sake of explaining this insider knowledge to outsiders. Otherwise, the ritual deer hunt is a sacred practice and a mara’akame who takes peyote can speak with living deer or deer in the spirit world. Huichol religious rituals are re-enactments of mythological stories so the mythology can be seen as an instructional guide to religious practices.

One standout chapter describes the practice of a rare subset of Huichol mara’akame, one that practices shamanic lycanthropy. Through ritual and peyote use, these shamans interact with wolves in the spirit world, eventually learning how to turn into wolves, and communicate with them for guidance on living in the human world. In the older days of anthropology, especially during the colonial era, anthropologists could be guilty of exoticizing the people they studied, especially by over-emphasizing the parts of other cultures that appear bizarre due to being the most different from the culture of the anthropologist. That accusation could apply here to this chapter, but it is probably unjust since the author makes it clear that this is not an ordinary practice among Huichol mara’akame. She didn’t write this essay to dazzle or entertain her audience either; it is a serious attempt at explaining a practice that may baffle anybody outside Huichol society.

By the end, the essays address the issue of how Huichols interact with the modern world, the market economy, and the problems these cause while they try to preserve their traditional culture. More and more, they are forced to interact with mestizos, some of which respect them and some of which don’t. Being at the margins of the economy makes them subject to exploitation for cheap labor. The importation of alcohol and guns are also causing disruptions. An even bigger problem is how they should deal with outsiders coming into their villages. Once the Huichols lived in remote mountain farming communities; now the building of new roads has resulted in busloads of clueless tourists gawking at them like exotic animals and burned out hippies showing up and demanding a shamanic spiritual experience that sometimes results in them running around naked and screaming at the sky until they pass out. Patronizing new age types are showing up hoping to find the crap that Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his fake anthropological books with the fictional character Don Juan. Such intruders are a nuisance and the hospitable Huichols have difficulty knowing what to do with these louts. They have reacted to all this by retreating deeper into the privacy of their own traditions and minimizing their contact with outsiders.

Aside from the previously mentioned difficulties of reading the opening chapters, my only real complaint about this book is that it says very little about day to day life in a Huichol community. Almost every essay is about the religion, mythology, or shamanism of the mara’akame and how they relate to the community as a whole, but it doesn’t give any real sense of what it would feel like to be born into this culture or to live in it for a lifetime. While the things written about in this book are fascinating and written about with sincere interest, sometimes it is worth hearing about the mundane parts of a society too since those also play a major part in holding a society together. My guess is that those mundane details are left out for commercial purposes. The essays were written and collected in good faith by professional anthropologists whose intentions are clearly enthusiastic so I’m assuming they questioned this as they pieced the book together. But very few people read books, an even smaller amount read anthropology books, and of those that do, most of them are probably casual readers who want to read about mysticism and drug experiences without much concern for the people being studied. Book publishing is a business and sometimes authors need to make compromises in order to send something to press. But otherwise these are excellent essays, written with care and clarity so for what it is, it is a great book.

People Of the Peyote leaves me with one last thing to consider. Given that I, and many others, can’t accept the beliefs and practices of the Huichol people as objectively true or as scientific facts, does that mean that I have to reject those beliefs in totality? The anthropologists demonstrate how important their rituals are in maintaining and regulating their society and also how any disruption in these rituals can cause lasting damage to the Huichols who practice them. Should it be considered that scientific objectivity should always be supported as the primary goal of human knowledge? What if believing in something that isn’t real is necessary to maintain social order? But it’s difficult to believe in something once you’ve admitted that it isn’t factually true. As of now, I can’t answer these questions. But what I can say is a big thank you to the anthropologist friend I had in Albuquerque who recommended this book to me after I returned from a trip to Mexico 30 years ago. Good luck Dr. S.T. wherever you happen to be these days.

 

Book Review: Corn Is Our Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom

Corn Is Our Blood:

Culture and Ethnic Identity In a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village

by Alan R. Sandstrom

      “That’s a weird name for a book,” said the bookstore cashier where I purchased Corn Is Out Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom. Of course, things that are unfamiliar are thought of as weird by default. And there is nothing more unfamiliar than a culture you know nothing about. Besides, the title is an idiom and, linguistically speaking, an idiom is a metaphorical phrases that makes no sense when translated into another language. Only those fluent in the language and culture will understand what it means. That is the value of the social sciences and, in this case specifically, anthropology. The author of this book did fieldwork in Mexico for the purpose of being able to explain a foreign culture to those from outside that culture. His intention is to prove that, contrary to what outsiders say, the people he studied are making effective rational choices in the maintenance of their ethnic identity given the living conditions they are faced with.

Sandstrom spent several years off and on over two decades with Nahua Indians in Mexico located in the Amatlan region of Veracruz state. The Nahuas are contemporary descendants of the pre-colonial Aztecs and speak Nahuatl as their language. Very few of them are fluent in Spanish. They mostly survive by subsistence farming, largely maize and beans, although they sometimes take surplus produce to market. Through language, religion, and clothing, they maintain a fiercely independent ethnic identity that is remote from the dominant mestizo identity of most Mexican citizens. Loyalty to their traditions and identity has caused many mestizos to call them irrational, especially because they live so precariously, being marginalized socially and economically, when they could join modern society and live more comfortably with greater wealth. Sandstrom therefore desires to prove that their supposedly irratoinal clinging to tradition is actually a strategy for survival in a host culture that is hostile to them.

The book starts out with a brief history of the Indian people in Mexico beginning with the pre-Conquest Aztec empire up to contemporary post-Mexican Revolution times. The Nahuas have suffered persecution and marginalization all along the way from the conquistadors, the Catholic church, and the modern mestizo state. They are therefore relegated to remote ejidos, or communally owned farmlands, and have little contact with the outside world. But they aren’t hostile people at all. Sandstrom describes them as gentle, quiet, good natured, and avoidant of conflict. The opening chapters are useful, interesting, and informative. The biggest problem is that some of the personal testimonies are dry and a little difficult to follow. However, they do illustrate the types of problems the Indians have with government officials and law enforcement that is corrupt, violent, and exploitative.

The book progresses into chapters on daily life for the Nahua people. Since they are subsistence farmers, agriculture plays a central role in their lives. Their milpas, or farming territories, are arranged according to ownership and, after a chapter describing those ancestral categorizations of geneologies and familial structures that anthropologists love so much, we learn that the Nahuas are patrilocal with groupings of brothers being the central building block of social organization in their society. The distribution of milpas is based on this form of social organization. They also use slash and burn techniques of agriculture and crop rotations that are loosely related to their sometimes unpredictable rainy seasons. All of these horticultural realities have a direct influence over the Nahua’s world view and religious practices. When they say that “corn is our blood” they literally mean that without corn they would die. As a source of food, health, income, and meaning it is the most important thing to them. In America we might think of money in a similar way since, like it or not, we can’t live without it within the context of our culture.

At one point, Sandstrom argues his case that Nahua people are highly rational even though mestizos insist they aren’t and just blindly follow traditions even though it would make more sense to modernize and join the market economy. One claim they make against the Nahuas is that they inist on making maize their staple crop even though beans fetch higher prices at the market. Sandstrom points out that maize is more cost effective, less labor intensive, and easier to grow in high quantities on a regular schedule. Beans on the other hand require higher monetary investments, grow irregularly, and are more likely to get eaten or contaminated by vermin. Beans are also more difficult to harvest and transport to the market. Maize is simply more efficient and more reliable. The mestizos could always ask the Nahuas why they prefer it, but they are human and that means it is better to live in the certainty of their own illusions than to find out the truth.

After describing the material culture of the Nahuas, Sandstrom goes on to examine their religious practices, most of which revolve around their horticultural cycle. They believe in a type of animism or pantheism that is similar to what Hindus and Buddhists believe. There is one unifying spirit permeating the entire world and we only see it in fragments because of our own natural limitations. Like other Aztec derived cultures, they believe in wind spirits that cause illness, accidents, and death. During ceremonies, they attract and then banish them through the use of figures made out of colored paper. Their religious rituals are performed to maintain a balance in the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. Shamans are the religious authorities of the Nahuas and aside from performing rituals, they also act as doctors, fortune tellers, and politicians in the ejido.

By the time Sandstrom returns to Amatlan in the 1980s, the Nahuas have begun to change. The government has built roads into Amatlan along with sturdy houses. They are in the process of bringing in electric power. More Nahuas are learning Spanish and going into the cities to work. American missionaries have also discovered them and done some damage too. A rift in the community happens as Protestant converts refuse to interact with the other Nahuas and the missionaries insist that vaccines are evil so a portion of the converts die from an outbreak of measles that could easily have been prevented.

The end of the book is a thorough examination of how the Nahuas benefit from having a strong ethnic identity that sets them apart from the mestizos in the surrounding areas of Veracruz.

Alan Sandstrom has written a fascinating book about the Nahua people. He advocates for them by making and defending the claim that Nahuas are rational despite what others think. There is one point where he drops the ball in his argument. He addresses the reason why Nahuas keep farm animals even though they don’t eat meat, don’t use them for farm labor, and don’t see them as status symbols. They are economically inefficient because they cost a lot to feed, but he claims the Nahuas keep them so they have something to use their unusable milpas for. But if those milpas are unusable, why have them in the first place? Despite this one weak point, the other arguments he gives are sufficiently strong enough to support his claim. Even without the theoretical argument he makes, this book would still be interesting as it gives such a clear impression of what it is like to live in this culture. And it seems like the ultimate work on anthropology since it is so accessible to lay people without losing its value for professional anthropologists. It isn’t bogged down or made confusing with abstract theories and endless references to other scholars in the field the way a lot of anthropology books tend to be. Better still, the author doesn’t glorify the Nahua people by making them look quaint or by turning them into noble savages of the 20^th century. He makes them out to be ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that is outside the ordinary for most of us.

I’m no expert in the social sciences, but if anybody ever asked me to recommend books from that field Corn Is Our Blood would be one of the first suggestions I would make. Humanizing people in other cultures isn’t a task that should have to be done, but unfortunately it is and this book does a good job of it. It also adds another dimension to whatever it is you know about Mexican society and culture. Like anybody else, I love Mexican food, but there is so much more to this fascinating country and its richly layered culture that should be learned about. You might as well start by letting Alan Sandstrom point you in the right direction.

 

Book Review: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

by Friedrich Katz

      The Mexican Revolution is a difficult subject to approach. It was a loosely organized aeries of uprisings that lasted a little more than a decade. Some of the key figures, especially military commanders were obscure people with obscure motivations. Alliances shifted constantly, sometimes inexplicably. Historical records of events in Mexico at that time were not meticulously kept. A lot of what people know about the revolution is apocryphal and based in folklore, legend, and sometimes propaganda and yellow journalism. It’s no wonder that historians who tackle this field of knowledge often contradict each other in their accounts. It’s hard to tell the truth when the truth is so uncertain. One way of reducing the amount of murkiness and confusion surrounding the Mexican Revolution is to write about it from a biographical standpoint so that one historical figure can act as an anchor, making it easier to organize and analyze the confusing mass of information. That is what the Austrian historian Friedrich Karz does in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.

The whole story starts out in the northern state of Chihuahua where military veterans of the Mexico-Apache wars were given land as reward for their fighting. As the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz grew in power, the increasingly unpopular oligarchs Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were encroaching on people’s land, establishing haciendas, and instituting a system of debt peonage. Francisco Madero started a pro-democracy uprising to unseat Diaz and one of his military commanders was a former bandit named Pancho Villa. This ex-bandit had a natural talent for military leadership and quickly rose in the ranks. His army unit was composed of mostly peasant agriculturalists and Indians and their agitation for land reform and redistribution came into the revolution along with them.

Understanding the mind and personality of Pancho Villa is not an easy task. A lot is known about what he did, but personal accounts of what he was like as a man are on the sketchy side. He is known for being compassionate and cruel in equal measures, he moved easily among the poorest and richest members of society, his educational level was low but he had a natural intelligence and a curiosity for learning, and he was a bigamist who married several women and had a large brood of children. None of this tells you much about the inner workings of his mind. But I also suspect that Katz is not the kind of author who has an aptitude for that kind of writing.

Nevertheless, Pancho Villa’s story is amazing. After helping Madero overthrow the dictatorship, Villa was imprisoned for some unclear reason. After Villa escaped, the military commander Huerta overthrew Madero and reestablished the dictatorship. Villa called up his armies again and the next phase of civil war began. After the revolutionaries called the Conference of Aguascalientes, Villa formed a loose alliance with Emiliano Zapata since both caudillos stood for the cause of land reform. Villa seized power in Chihuaua as acting governor for a while, then eventually returned to fighting in the war, this time against the faction of the revolution lead by Venustiano Carranza, the man who ratified the new Mexican constitution. Just like in the French Revolution, and so many other revolutions in the past, the revolutionary soldiers entered into combat against each other. By the end of the decade, Villa was losing favor with his followers but he kept fighting, probably because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. During this period before his assassination, he led an attack north of the American border on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This led to a brief invasion into Mexico by the American army that resulted in nothing but more chaos.

There is so much more to this story and most of it is written here in minute details. It is an understatement to say that Friedrich Katz is anal retentive. Ultimately, though, he is on the tolerable side of detail oriented writing, thereby making it just possible to digest. If he had given any more details this book would have been impossible to read. But the details are the best and the worst thing about this biography. By giving such long, drawn out explanations, Katz runs the risk of boring his readers to death and drowning them in information. But at least the information is relevant and, actually, it works to his benefit. Since the Mexican Revolution can be such a swamp of muck to unpack, something goes to be said for the excessive details. Writing it all out this way separates the different strands of the history, bringing them into sharper focus, and making it easy to examine each part of the story in clarity. A quality microscope can make a splotch of biological matter easier to see in its complexity by expanding and exaggerating its appearance so its disorganization looks more organized for our perception. That is what Katz accomplishes in this book. Even though this work is so thorough that it can induce migraines for the reader, it is worth the torment of reading it because it ends up being the most comprehensible and clearly written book on the Mexican Revolution I have encountered so far.

Another impressive aspect of this biography is Katz’s unwillingness to take sides in an argument when he feels there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion. A case in point is the issue of why American president Woodrow Wilson supported the Villista forces at first and then switched sides to support the Constitutionalist Carrancistas. Katz gives multiple perspectives on the issue, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion because there isn’t any documented records directly explaining Wilson’s stances. Other issues treated in this similar way are Madero’s reasoning for imprisoning Villa, Villa’s continued support for Madero after being imprisoned, Villa’s reasoning for fighting against Carranza and his troops, whether Villa was persuaded by a German agent to attack Columbus as part of a conspiracy to keep America out of World War I, and who was behind the assassination of Villa. He even contemplates the unanswered question of why Villa continued his campaigns of guerilla warfare for so long after the Revolution had lost meaning for him. While it is useful to speculate on unanswerable historical problems, it is even more commendable when a scholar is humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know what the right answers are.

To be blunt, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a pain in the ass to read because of its length, excessive detail, and Germanic writing style that could very well make your hemorrhoids act up. But if there is only one book you ever read about the Mexican Revolution, this one is worth the trouble. That’s not to say it exhausts the subject matter because it doesn’t. But it does clarify a lot of the confusion surrounding this hotly debated topic of Mexican history. And by the end, it makes it easy to see why Pancho Villa remains a hero of the poor and the working classes in Mexico, along with Leftists in other countries, and such a villain to heartless conservatives who think the world should only belong to them. And Villa is even a saint to some devotees of Santa Muerte.

 

Book Review: Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico by Samuel Brunk

Emiliano Zapata:

Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico

by Samuel Brunk

      Here in Los Estados Unidos we don’t hear much about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Most of what we get are Hollywood caricatures of bandits with moustaches on horses wearing sombreros and bandoliers over their serapes, riding around in the desert, shooting rifles and pistols into the air while swearing in broken English. Of course, when people learn about history through movies they are bound to get a few wrongheaded ideas about life in other countries. (Don’t even get me started on how idiotic the movie Braveheart is) But then there are a few academic works of history in print that attempt to untangle the knots of that seminal time period in Mexican history. The quality varies widely. Pancho Villa has emerged as the most discussed leader of the Mexican Revolution, at least in the writings of American authors. Emiliano Zapata has gotten less attention despite his status as a folk hero in Mexico, a symbol of inspiration for the lower classes, and the guy who used to be on the ten peso Mexican banknote. Samuel Brunk’s Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico serves the two purposes of telling the story from the angle of Zapata and dispelling the conventional interpretation that the Zapatista movement was strong because of its socially collective nature.

Initially the Mexican Revolution began as a reaction to the dictator Porfirio Diaz’s refusal to step down at the end of his term. The highly educated ideologue Francisco Madero started a rebellion in the northern state of Chihuahua with the intention of restoring democracy and enacting rule by constitutional law. The revolutionaries were subsequently called the Constitutionalists in opposition to the conservative, authoritarian Federalists or Federales in Spanish. Of course, Madero needed troops to fight the Federalist army, so volunteers from the peasantry were called up and led by Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa. These troops had a separate agenda from Madero though. They were concerned with land reform since the hacienda system allowed for the stealing and selling of both public and private lands, thereby disinheriting many farmers from their livelihood and forcing them to survive as indentured servants. While Diaz rightfully deserves credit for bringing Mexico into the industrial age, his economic system led to the displacement and downward economic mobility of the lower classes. Through the leadership of Orozco and Villa, they believed that Madero would enact a program of land reform after seizing power in exchange for their support of his revolutionary movement.

The peasantry in the southern states had suffered a similar fate and when news of the rebellion in Chihuahua reached Morelos, a rebellion started independently there too. It was led by Emiliano Zapata, a leader who turned out to be a legitimate man of the people. He drew up his Plan of Ayala, a program for land reform that called for the return of stolen lands and the redistribution of hacienda property to ensure that farmers were allowed to own their own farms and the products of their own labor. The revolution started in the guise of guerilla warfare and the haciendas were seized along with the state of Morelos. Eventually they also seized the city of Puebla and marched on Mexico City to attack the National Palace.

After so much military success, Zapata realized that his revolution was too localized and had its limitations. One was that his army was made up of uneducated laborers and in order to pitch his revolution to people outside his sphere, he needed the attention of the educated classes. The first to be attracted to Zapata was Manuel Palafox, an engineering student who acted as spokesman and advocate for the Zapatistas. Later, a group of urban intellectuals, mainly communist and anarchist in orientation, became allies of the movement and worked to expose the revolutionaries to the wider society, mostly through the media. This is a point where Brunk’s version differs from those previously published. In earlier works on Zapata, the collective and egalitarian nature of the movement were emphasized, but Brunk points out that it was actually a made up of individuals, many with cross purposes to it and their own personal preoccupations. In fact, Brunk’s main argument is that ultimately Zapata’s revolution failed because it was ridden with conflicts. At the heart of all this was the intellectuals who eventually abandoned Zapata. They tried to use him for their own ends and he tried to use them for his own ends and eventually everything fell apart. One problem is that Zapata was actually a capitalist and the intellectuals weren’t. They tried to hijack the Zapatista movement which led to them being unable to coordinate their fighting with the Villistas in the north.

Other identifiable conflicts occurred between Zapata and his generals. Long range communications were difficult in that time and place, so commanders of guerilla bands located far from the center of command were largely on their own, only receiving sporadic communications by courier. There was a lot of competition for promotion in the ranks and conflicts were often solved with brutal violence rather than negotiation. Zapata’s revolution was made up of some rough people and some of them didn’t like taking orders from anybody. The chaotic nature of the organization didn’t help to sustain the revolution. Zapata also had trouble raising funds for weaponry and food for his troops. When they got desperate enough, some of them resorted to banditry, preying on the peasants they had sworn to defend. Eventually all these conflicts caused most supporters to abandon Zapata and the movement died.

Brunk identifies one other big problem. Emiliano Zapata, unlike most other leaders of the Mexican Revolution, was not motivated by personal ambition. He did not seek political office. His goal was to have the Plan of Ayala ratified by the government. After that he wished to return to a quiet life as a farmer. The problem is that the government had no interest in agrarian land reform so Zapata would have needed either to hold political office or work closely with someone who could push his program through congress. Unfortunately, you can’t win a revolution with an idea alone.

Despite giving an interesting counter-narrative to other existing literature on Emiliano Zapata, Brunk’s writing isn’t so great. He writes in long sentences that are loopy and vapid, sometimes being hard to follow. You could also criticize him for not going deeply enough into the life and character of Zapata. But if you want to get hung up on categories, it’s best to think of this as more of a history book than a biography. As far as his thesis goes, he supports his argument about the disharmony of the Zapatistas with abundant evidence so we can say that much of it is good. Really, the best part is the “Epilogue and Conclusion” chapter in which Brunk summarizes his argument and explains it all succinctly and clearly just in case you didn’t draw the right conclusions from the rest of the text. This is possibly one of the best conclusions I have ever read. It makes up for all the messy writing that comes before it.

Samuel Brunk’s account of Emiliano Zapata is interesting for its content even though his ability as a writer isn’t so great. History writers are notoriously bad at writing anyhow, although they are usually not nearly as bad as scientists when it comes to explicatory writing. If you’re interested in this aspect of Mexican history, this one is worth reading once. Otherwise keep in mind why Emiliano Zapata is important. He might have failed in his mission, but he remains a hero because he challenged the government in the name of uplifting the poorest laborers of his country. He brought awareness of the struggles suffered by farm workers into the national dialogue. These are the people who grow our food. Most people, including me, are too dumb to survive from subsistence farming alone. Without the farm workers we would mostly all die. They don’t deserve the contempt they get from the upper classes; they deserve to live good lives just like everybody else. The least you could do is say thanks. And then forget about Marlon Brando wearing brownface in the disappointing biopic Viva Zapata. 

 

Book Review: Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 by Ronald Atkin

Revolution!

Mexico 1910-20

by Ronald Atkin

      Mexico exploded right after the turn of the twentieth century. Political change looked impossible and life for the poor was stagnant and increasingly looking more and more hopeless. Ronald Atkin’s Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 gives an account of this most turbulent decade from multiple points of view.

This history starts with an explanation of the social, economic, and political circumstances that made the Mexican Revolution almost inevitable. The president Porfirio Diaz had stayed in power through dictatorial means for several decades. He had close relations with international businessmen and cientificos, educated members of the upper class who played a similar role to what conservative think tanks do in the USA. Diaz centralized his power through influence over the governors of each state in Mexico. Also of importance was the hacienda system of agricultural production. Led by wealthy hacendados, each hacienda was like a medieval kingdom in miniature with a feudal class structure. The haciendas were like villages where the villagers, campesinos and peons of mostly mestizo and indio ethnicity, lived and worked as sharecroppers and subsistence farmers with most of what they produced being taken to market by the hacendados who enriched themselves on it without giving anything back to the farmers. Outside the haciendas, the peons lived in villages with ejidos or communally owned land where they grew their crops. Since the land was not legally owned by anybody, the hacendados were seizing the ejidos and incorporating it into their haciendas, forcing the peons to work for starvation wages on the haciendas to survive.

Atkin begins by addressing the political structure from the top down. He gives a history of Porfirio Diaz’s regime and how he worked through corruption, nepotism, the media, and fake elections to remain in his place. Despite his old age and growing unpopularity with the Mexican masses, he refused to step down. As we should know by now, the most likely way of ending a dictatorship is through political violence or revolution. That is exactly what happened in Mexico.

From another angle, Atkins writes about the Mexican Revolution and how foreign governments and businessmen were either responsible or influential over it. Those businessmen, mostly American and British, though some were also French and German, were extracting natural resources in Mexico and paying little more for them than shipping costs. This was made possible through a loose network of diplomats and journalists who had access to the president, advising him that relations between their countries would remain strong as long as he allowed the businessmen to do as they pleased. This was not popular in a nation struggling to modernize itself at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Many believed that those resources belonged to the Mexican people and not to wealthy foreigners who cared nothing for their country. When the Mexican Revolution started, however, American president Woodrow Wilson took sides with the rebellion because of his commitment to democracy and political stability. Some of the weapons used by the revolutionaries were purchased from the nortenos and the US actually invaded Mexico twice during the revolution, once in Veracruz and once at the border in Ciudad Juarez.

Ronald Atkin also identifies the significant leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Francisco Madero was the ideologue who sparked the upheavals. After some battles in Sonora and Chihuaha, his forces moved on Mexico City and seized the National Palace. Porfirio Diaz fled the country, and Madero got elected president. Unfortunately he was naive and politically inept. His military general Victoriano Huerta overthrew his government, seized the presidential office, had Madero murdered, and returned Mexico to a dictatorship. This caused another round of battles in the northern states and the Constitutionalist Vensutiano Carranza chased Huerta out of the country. Carranza was an hacendado and even though he sided with the Mexican Revolution, he ultimately used it as a vehicle for seizing the presideny and then throwing the lower class revolutionaries under the bus once he took office.

The alliance between the democratic Constitutionalists and the revolutionaries was never that strong. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were concerned with land reform and economics while the Constitutionalists were more concerned with gaining and maintaining power, mostly for their own benefit. Pancho Villa was the strongest of the agrarian revolutionary leaders. His populist revolt took place in northern Mexico and sometimes it even spilled over the border into the USA. He was the first to see the value of using the newly built railroads to transport troops and war materiels throughout the country. He also saw the value of sabotaging train tracks as a strategy to prevent the movement of the Mexican military.

The other leader of importance was the charismatic Emiliano Zapata. His initial rebellions in Morelia and Puebla started without any imput from the northern revolutionaries. It wasn’t until the Conference in Aguascalientes, in which Zapata’s representatives were in attendance, that the forces agreed to join. Their alliance was not a strong one though. Even though Villa and Zapata eventually did meet once, the two never succeeded in coordinating their military assaults on the government.

Ronald Atkin gives a thorough, fact based account of the Mexican Revolution. He clearly identifies the important people involved, the issues at stake, and the events that impacted the course of the revolution the most. His inclusion of the foreign influences on the Mexican Revolution is also unique in its execution, even if it makes the narrative a little biased towards the American and European point of view. He does capture a lot of nuance though and the minute details are written with clarity despite their complexity. The writing is a little dry though and sometimes lacks the spark it needs to be interesting. It is a history book and historians are not known for being great authors. The biggest disappointment about this book is the overemphasis on the Villistas in the north and the underwhelming account of the Zapatistas in the south. Atkin writes like he has no interest in Zapata’s guerilla warfare campaigns and mentions him only because he feels like he has to. There is so little detail about that aspect of the Mexican Revolution that you have to wonder why Atkin left so much of it out.

If you want a good introduction to the Mexican Revolution, then this is a good place to start. It might be a little dull at times, but it does point you in the right direction if you want to pursue this subject in more depth. It may not be of great interest to experts in Mexican history, but for the general reader it serves its purpose well.