In the early nineteenth century the Latin American liberator Sim=n Bolfvar had posed important questions about who the land belonged to and how progress could be reconciled with liberty and justice. But the questions remained unanswered in the societies that Bolfvar's initiative had liberated. Thus, little more than a century later, the Mexican Revolution posed essentially the same questions. The government of Mexico was as corrupt as possible and the system of peonage in the country not only reduced the peasants to lives of serious want and oppression, it also undermined any hope the nation had for a modern economic system. The Mexican revolution came from many directions from the many parties who felt that they had not only been exploited by the Diaz regime but had been defrauded by its 'revolutionary' successor. Operating from the demand for land in the south to the demand for democracy in the north--and many gradations in between--the revolutionaries struck repeated blows in favor of liberation but with little conception of how a modern Mexican state should look or who should run it. Mariano Azuela's novel Los de abajo (1915) and Luis Bu¦uel's film Los Olvidados [The Dispossessed] (1950) demonstrate the unanswered state of Bolfvar's important questions--before and after the Revolution. Other stories, by the modernist Latin American writers Marfa Luisa Bombal (Chile) and Juan Rulfo (Mexico), show aspects of the split in the societies and cultures that either divided the people from their natural setting or ruthlessly tied them to it without hope of escape if escape should become necessary.
The Indian leader Demetrio Macfas is a classic case of the man who wishes to fight for his own liberation but is unsure of what that liberation would look like. At the beginning, of course, he is sure that he must have control over his own life--including ownership of the land that provides his livelihood. But the confusions of the ...