Latin American Studies Association Congress
Saturday, September 8, 2001
Thomas Paine
Looking Back to the End of Time: Millennial Imagery in the Novel El
resplandor by Mauricio Magdaleno
Daniel J. Nappo
Michigan State University
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) brought with
it a multitude of affirmations and contradictions. Those who witnessed
or participated in the Revolution have left us an interpretive tradition
that has described it as interrupted, terminated, in crisis, betrayed,
failed or shrouded in myth. To further complicate the issue, the
Mexican Revolution is unique in that its ideological program was not developed
prior to the period of conflict and instability, but during the post-revolutionary
era (approximately 1920 to 1940), when Mexicans sought to assign meaning
to the prolonged, internecine conflict that claimed nearly a million lives.
The novel of the Mexican Revolution—a genre that achieved international
recognition after the “discovery” of Mariano Azuela in the mid-1920s —represented
an important means for inscribing the interpretation that the victors of
the national struggle wished to convey. New political leaders such
as Adolfo de la Huerta, Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías
Calles—and later the Revolutionary party itself—sought to convince the
people that they were ushering a new age of prosperity, justice and modernity
to the ravaged nation. The novel of the Mexican Revolution served
to affirm the cultural and political legitimacy of the post-revolutionary
State just as the epic murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco
and Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), often painted onto the walls of federal
buildings, commemorated the birth of a modern nation from the ashes of
Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1876-1911). The cultural nationalism
of the 1920s and 1930s became the true—albeit belated—ideological program
of the Mexican Revolution.
Mexican society’s increased attention to the Indian,
or indigenismo, was a fundamental element of cultural nationalism.
One of the most salient examples of indigenismo would be emergence of the
indigenous novel in the 1930s, a genre that examined the problems faced
by the Native Americans with compassion and social critique. In spite
of the fact that the political context from which indigenismo emerged was
somewhat orchestrated by the post-revolutionary regime, El resplandor
(1937), an indigenous novel written by Mauricio Magdaleno (1906-1980),
offers the most incisive and comprehensive criticism of the State to be
found in the entire canon of the revolutionary novel. Magdaleno achieves
this criticism through his extensive use of apocalyptic and millennial
imagery which, in the revolutionary novel, was normally employed to reaffirm
the myth of the Mexican Revolution that was so important for the transmission
of cultural nationalism and the justification for the post-revolutionary
State’s authority . While most other indigenous novels of the same
era portray the Indians as docile or utterly helpless, El resplandor
shows
them actively resisting the forces that continue to exploit them.
This resistance is seen more clearly by analyzing millennial belief and
other subtle strategies of dissidence employed by subordinate groups .
The novel of the Mexican Revolution offers an abundance
of apocalyptic images and millennial themes: plagues, vultures, disasters,
the complete destruction of institutions, the inversion of the “haves”
and the “have-nots” and characters who serve as prophets (both credible
and false). These millennial motifs and the apocalyptic anticipation
of violence become a means of amplifying the destructive force of the Revolution,
because a series of wars and disasters is unleashed as the seven seals
of the mysterious book described in Revelation are broken (Boyer 36-37).
Millennial imagery plays an important role in Mexican revolutionary literature
not only because the coming of the Revolution (viewed retrospectively)
can be presented dramatically, but because the transcendence of suffering
and dreams of a new, utopian society reflect the official ideology of Mexico’s
post-revolutionary State.
The cultural nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s
may be defined as a general consciousness that encouraged Mexicans to discover
and assert their own identity while cultivating aspects of their indigenous
heritage, such as folklore. In spite of the ambitious projects of
José Vasconcelos’ Ministry of Public Education (1921-24), and the
unabashedly “top-down” structure of the Mexican government in the 1920s,
cultural nationalism began as a collaborative enterprise that was not centered
on an official ideology which needed to be obeyed. “For perhaps the
first time in Latin American since independence, the government, peoples
and artists of a nation…were all inspired by the same fundamental desire
to create a new society” (Franco 82). In comparison with other post-revolutionary
regimes, such as those of the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mexican model was
not nearly as oppressive for intellectuals .
Key ideals of cultural nationalism included the
image of a modern nation modeled on pre-Columbian mythology, the Indian
who represented the patently non-foreign element of the Mexican identity,
and the millennial belief that November 20, 1910 signaled the end of a
senescent, unjust social order. Positioning itself after the dictatorship
of Porfirio Díaz and the decade of armed conflict, the post-revolutionary
State consolidated its claim as the self-appointed provider of prosperity,
justice and modernity thanks to the millennial element of Mexican cultural
nationalism. It hardly mattered that Mexico’s new regime converted
itself into an updated, even shrewder version of the Díaz dictatorship
because any order was preferable to the chaos and destruction witnessed
during the decade of armed conflict (Bruce-Novoa 43). Given this
political context, the manner in which a “revolutionary” novelist employs
millennial imagery can be key toward understanding his or her attitude
toward the Revolution: those writers who presented the Revolution
as violent cataclysm that succeeded in restructuring society helped (perhaps
unwittingly) to affirm the legitimacy of the post-revolutionary State.
Social criticism in the revolutionary novels that does not subvert or challenge
millennial conceptions of the Revolution results in little more than a
catalog of whatever social ills were pronounced in a given moment.
Criticism of this nature preserved the mandate of the post-revolutionary
State: by not challenging the fundamental myth of the Mexican Revolution,
any social problem that a revolutionary novel depicted amounted to a work
in progress that the political leadership—this “revolución hecha
gobierno”—would one day complete.
While some of the most controversial revolutionary
novels were published in foreign countries (for example, Martín
Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo [1929, Spain] and Fernando
Robles’ La virgen de los cristeros [1934, Argentina]) or, in the
case of Azuela’s scathing El camarada Pantoja (1937), published
nine years after Calles, the subject of the author’s vituperation, had
left office, writers were generally encouraged by the State to depict the
Revolution as realistically as possible rather than discouraged from treating
certain themes. In December, 1925, the new Secretary of Public Education,
José Manuel Puig Casauranc, promised to publish any novel that avoided
“decoración amanerada” and presented a realistic portrait of Mexican
life, no matter how harsh it might have been (Monsiváis, “Notas
sobre la cultura mexicana” 1446). But the government’s influence
over literature gradually became more direct. By 1929, the year of
Vasconcelos’ failed presidential campaign, the Mexican intellectual was
faced with the choice of “aligning himself with the government or working
in isolation” (Franco 72). One of the most important revisions of
revolutionary history was the government’s denial of the factional character
of the Revolution, and its insistence that all the heroes of the national
struggle were fighting for the same causes (Benjamin 151).
In the 1930s, new modes of promoting the revolutionary
novel were created. For example, the newspaper El Nacional
sponsored a competition for the best revolutionary novel in 1930.
In 1935 the Premio Nacional de Literatura was established (and first awarded
to the journalist Gregorio López y Fuentes for his indigenous novel
El
indio, 1935). The post-revolutionary government also began to
assume more responsibility for public observations of Mexican history in
the early 1930s, especially those that commemorated the Revolution, organizing
everything from veladas (state ceremonies to honor fallen heroes) to national
holidays (Benjamin 107-11). The 1930s saw the apogee of the revolutionary
novel and the appearance of new genres such as the socialist, cristero
and the aforementioned indigenous novel. This decade also saw more
deliberate attempts by writers to provide social commentary (Brushwood
218; Coronado 83; Portal 299).
The indigenous novel examines the plight of the Indian during or in
the wake of the Revolution; for this reason, it has often been viewed as
a subgenre of the revolutionary novel. The return to the Indian question
was, of course, motivated largely by politics: in light of the cultural
nationalism initiated in the 1920s, Mexican intellectuals could no longer
ignore the hardships and exploitation that the indigenous population continued
to endure even after the great Revolution (see González 312-13).
Due to the crucial participation of the native population during the decade
of armed struggle, there was also a general sense that something was owed
the Indian. If agrarian reform and sustained programs of public education
were not to be provided, social criticism would have to suffice.
Native peoples (and slaves) are often portrayed in literature as among
the most credulous; hence, millennial imagery finds a fortuitous vehicle
for characterization in the indigenous novel.
Magdaleno completed El resplandor in the
spring of 1936, when enthusiasm for the revolutionary novel and its testimonial
realism was beginning to wane among writers and critics. The emerging
generation of writers wished to develop alternative methods of expressing
the reality of post-revolutionary Mexico. Ermilo Abreu Gómez
noted the increasing stagnation of revolutionary literature in an article
published in El Nacional in 1937, asserting that it was seemingly
impossible to find in any given Mexican writer literary talent and revolutionary
integrity: “…es fácil descubrir al escritor que, siendo de
calidad, se muestra extraño a los problemas del espíritu
nacional…es frecuente troparse con el escritor de ídole revolucionaria
que ignora el abece [the A, B, C’s] de la literatura” (7).
Perhaps more than any other novel of its time, El resplandor represented
an attempt to resolve this dilemma.
Prior to the publication of El resplandor,
Mauricio Magdaleno had been respected but relatively unknown as a novelist.
Previous novels such as Mapimi 37 (1927) and Campo Celis
(1935) earned favorable reviews, but Magdaleno never attained the popularity
enjoyed by other novelists of the same era, such as Martín Luis
Guzmán and Gregorio López y Fuentes. Magdaleno was
better known as a dramatist in the early 1930s, having collaborated with
Juan Bustillo Oro in the socially-minded Teatro de Ahora, and later with
Narciso Bassols, the Secretary of Public Education (Castro Leal 39).
Although it would not be entirely accurate to say that Magdaleno was an
intellectual writing on behalf of the government, his high-level connections,
the many appointments to government posts, and the nationalistic tenor
of Teatro revolucionario mexicano (1932), his acclaimed series of
dramas, do suggest an author who showed little inclination to ever produce
a text that was critical of the post-revolutionary regime.
Yet Magdaleno had also been an active supporter
of José Vasconcelos’ failed presidential campaign of 1929.
Like Bassols and many other intellectuals of the era, Magdaleno was well-versed
in Marxism and sought to implement socialist programs in Mexico. Years
later, he bitterly attributed capitalistic motives to the intrigues and
electoral rigging of which the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (the forebear
of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) had been accused during
the election of 1929 (Palabras perdidas 214). In 1932, when
many of his colleagues who had supported Vasconcelos were chased into exile,
Magdaleno was awarded a grant to study in Madrid. There the novelist
met Miguel de Unamuno and Ramón del Valle Inclán, the eccentric
writer who had written Tirano Banderas (1925), a novel of much imagination
and structural intricacy depicting a revolution against an archetypal Latin
American dictator. Upon his return to Mexico, Magdaleno was appointed
to a position in the Ministry of Treasury and Public Credit, where he worked
with Agustín Yáñez, a member of the Contemporáneos
literary group (Paúl Arranz 50).
Soon afterwards, at the request of his friend and
patron Bassols, Magdaleno served as a rural instructor in Mexe, Hidalgo
State, a community with a large population of Otomí Indians.
In the course of his duties the novelist interviewed elders in the community,
noting their manner of speech as well as their profound distrust of outsiders
(Paúl Arranz 24-25). In this arid region, Magdaleno discovered
that the Mexican pueblo (especially the indigenous population) was still
awaiting the benefits of the Revolution although the revolutionaries were
already celebrating its purported achievements. Magdaleno was keenly
aware of the contradictions of the post-revolutionary State and its programs,
and viewed the novel of the Mexican Revolution as a medium for denouncing
them. Reflecting this potential for the genre, Magdaleno wrote that
the revolutionary novel ideally presented “la llamarada de la hora en que
la revolución se adueña del destino de México y por
ella atraviesa, aullando su hambre milenaria de justicia, el pueblo” (“Alrededor
de la novela moderna” 3). Magdaleno’s pessimism toward the Revolution
and its record of achievement in the late 1930s was the genesis of El resplandor.
The novel depicts not only how the Revolution did little to satisfy the
pueblo and their millennial hunger for justice, but that revolutionary
promises were often empty gestures or lies.
Panoramic in its historical perspective, El resplandor
portrays a community of Otomí Indians living in a fictional pueblo
called San Andrés de la Cal, located in central Hidalgo State.
According to some anthropologists, the Otomíes are the oldest indigenous
group still living in Mexico (Granberg 57). Through his sophisticated
use of flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness techniques, Magdaleno traces
the history of these Indians from the colonial era through the Porfiriato
and the Revolution . Most of the Otomí history is presented
in the first section of the novel, “San Andrés de la Cal.”
The second and third parts, “Saturnino Herrera” and “Los condenados”, focus
on incidents of the late 1920s or early 1930s, although it is impossible
to determine the time of the action with any precision . The novel
concludes pessimistically, suggesting that history will repeat itself and
that the indigenous people will continue to be exploited by whites and
mestizos.
The Otomíes of San Andrés place their hopes for change
on the messianic figure of Saturnino Herrera, a mestizo born at the beginning
of the Revolution of 1910 (El resplandor 105). Following the
death of his father Olegario, Saturnino identifies completely with the
Otomíes who raise him and give him the nickname “Coyotito”.
However, as a result of a government program designed to help the Indians,
Saturnino is taken from San Andrés and educated in Pachuca, the
state capital . Lugarda, the matriarch of the Otomí community,
predicts that providing the eleven-year-old boy such an education will
change his soul, making him like “todos los de fuera” (El resplandor
183).
No one, however, seems to believe or even recall this prediction until
the last few chapters of the novel. The Otomíes, who consider
Saturnino one of their own, view his imminent return as nothing less than
their salvation.
The population of San Andrés exists as a
pool of cheap labor for a hacienda called La Brisa, established by one
of the original conquistadors who arrived in Mexico with Hernán
Cortés. For four centuries the Otomíes worked like
slaves at La Brisa, invariably having their crops of corn and pulque taken
from them at harvest and sold. At the same time, the Indians of San
Andrés have to fight with the neighboring Indians of San Felipe
Tepetate for water rights. Over the past century, the land has grown
increasingly barren, with less and less rainfall and the ubiquitous lime
(cal) gradually consuming the arable parcels of land (El resplandor
100). Diseases such as measles, typhus and influenza claim the lives
of countless Otomíes who, for their apparent passivity, are also
known as tlacuaches (possums). In a nightmarish passage, Magdaleno
describes the Indian families sleeping together almost incestuously on
the dirt floors of their huts among their livestock (El resplandor
106-7).
To counterbalance their extreme deprivation, the
Otomíes elaborate several millennial beliefs, each with its own
portents and significance. Scott identifies such beliefs as “hidden
transcripts” and posits that they are not merely “abstract exercises” or
fantasies for subordinate groups, but deeply embedded “ritual practices”
which have often “provided the ideological basis of many revolts” (80).
One of the recurring millennial beliefs in San Andrés is the anticipated
flowering of a barren precipice called the Piedra del Diablo (El resplandor
100).
Early in the novel, Lugarda solemnly remarks that if the Piedra del Diablo
ever blooms, it will signal “el advenimiento de la Edad de Oro para este
mundo” (El resplandor 117). The flowering of the Piedra del
Diablo eventually comes to signify a time when everyone will have enough
to eat and Saturnino (not coincidentally) will be governor (El resplandor
177).
The Indians also anticipate the return of a revolutionary
named Marcial Cavazos (an actual historical figure) who once passed through
the region attempting to recruit soldiers. The Otomíes do
not associate Cavazos with the Revolution, but only remember his promise
to bring the “indios amolados” food if they would follow him into battle
(El resplandor 84-85). As with the most famous examples of
the social bandit archetype, Cavazos was rumored to be alive—and planning
his return—despite credible reports of his demise. However, exemplifying
Magdaleno’s nuanced and realistic portrait of the Otomíes, they
no longer believe in Cavazos’ return; by the time of Saturnino’s ascendancy,
“el recuerdo de Cavazos se perdió en una tolvanera de desencanto”
(El resplandor 84-86). Saturnino, the local boy who becomes
political boss, comes to replace Cavazos as the long-awaited redeemer of
the Indians.
The Otomíes also dream of constructing a
dam on the Río Pintado. Such a construction would irrigate
the La Brisa and the surrounding lands, permitting the regular cultivation
of crops as well as resolving the eternal conflict with San Felipe Tepetate
over water. The dam constitutes a particularly tantalizing vision
in this barren land because don Alberto, an ambitious former hacendado,
left one partially constructed (El resplandor 114-15). Unlike
the legend of Cavazos, the dam is both palpable and a shared source of
millennial fervor because both the Indians and the revolutionaries believe
in it. Demonstrating his political astuteness, Saturnino continually
invokes the dam as an integral part of his program to improve the quality
of life in San Andrés (El resplandor 232-33, 347, 359, etc.).
But, as with nearly everything else, the Indians and the revolutionaries
are not really of the same mind: the revolutionaries only want to
complete the project for financial gain; on the other hand, the Otomíes
envision the dam as a definitive means of ending their history of deprivation
and suffering. The Indians seek to control the water, wash away the
lime and completely reverse their sad history with the construction of
the dam. Sadly, a disagreement between Murphy, the gringo engineer,
and Felipe Rendón, Saturnino’s cruel manager at La Brisa, causes
the former to resign, leaving the project as unfinished as it was when
don Alberto died (El resplandor 365) .
It is into this rich millennial tradition that Saturnino
Herrera—literally and figuratively a product of the Revolution—will return,
with his promises to deliver the Indians from their centuries of oppression
and injustice. Even as a child, Lugarda predicted that Saturnino
would one day rule the land of the tlacuaches (El resplandor 119).
Years later, after the shopkeeper don Melquiades informs the Indians of
Saturnino’s return and his intention to campaign for governor, Magdaleno
reveals the hopes of the Otomíes in a passage depicting the rumors
circulating throughout San Andrés: “Saturnino… el Coyotito…
que vuelve… ya viene… padrecito de los pobres… […] que viene a remediar
a los indios… […] va a ser gobernador… se cumplió lo que dijo Lugarda…
el redentor de los tlacuaches… […]” (El resplandor 113). The
whites are also aware of the messianic power that the mestizo candidate
maintains over the Indians and poor campesinos. Don Anselmo, a conservative
businessman from Pachuca, remarks that all the Indians of San Andrés
await Saturnino’s return “como si fuera el Mesías” (El resplandor
110-11). The pedantic poet Vate Pedroza , who serves on Saturnino’s
election committee, remarks sarcastically that there’s nothing more lucrative
than playing apostle to the poor (El resplandor 196). Saturnino
often takes advantage of the millennial conceptions that he inspires by
promising the Otomíes that, “¡De aquí para adelante
ya no habrá explotación ni injusticia!” (El resplandor
191). At times, when the opportunity presents itself, Saturnino also
claims to have supernatural powers. For example, at the end of his
return visit to San Andrés a mysterious “puntito blanco” suddenly
appears in the sky, quickly developing into black thunderclouds and a torrential
rain that soaks the parched earth. As Saturnino drives away in his
Dodge, he tells the rejoicing Indians “les traje agua” (El resplandor
246). When the storm ends, an enormous rainbow “cobijó” (sheltered,
protected) the pueblo of San Andrés (El resplandor 247).
Yet even if Saturnino were an honest man, the expectations
that the Indians have for him could never be fulfilled. Rather than
a candidate for state governor, Saturnino assumes the proportions of a
messiah dispensing miracles; the Indians simply do not appreciate him as
a secular figure. In this regard, the absence of the Church—often
the primary source of millennial belief among subordinated people—is significant
in El resplandor. Magdaleno consistently portrays the clergy as indifferent
to the Indians’ mistreatment and suffering. The departure of Padre
Ramírez at the very beginning of the novel produces much hopelessness
and anguish among the Indians (El resplandor 62-67). However
Padre Ramírez and his services are hardly mentioned for the remainder
of the novel, confirming what an observer of Otomíes reported in
1940: “…the Indians found that they could get along just as well—and
much more cheaply—without white men in robes” (Downing 278). In another
flashback, Magdaleno shows Padre Chávez, the priest of San Andrés
during the Porfiriato, advising don Gonzalo that the Indians are Mexico’s
disgrace and that the best way to deal with them is with an iron fist (El
resplandor 150-51). This flashback suggests that indifference
on the part of the clergy has been the standard practice in San Andrés.
In sum, the absence of a sympathetic priest advocating on behalf of the
Indians may be a factor toward the messianic cult that forms around Saturnino
Herrera.
Apart from the millennial beliefs and the adulation
for Saturnino, Magdaleno does not provide many details in regard to the
religious practices of the Otomíes. Judging from clues sprinkled
throughout the novel—and especially in the dialogue of Lugarda, Bonifacio
and the shaman Nieves el Colorado—it would appear that they have a syncretistic
religion of catholic and pre-Columbian elements. The evolution of
the Indians’ manner of identifying Saturnino exemplifies both the obscurity
and the syncretistic nature of their faith. For example, the Otomíes
often invoke “diosito” in times of crisis. At the height of Saturnino’s
popularity, “diosito” is sometimes used interchangeably with “Coyotito”,
the candidate’s boyhood nickname and a figure known throughout Native American
folk and religious traditions as the trickster god (Scott 162-66).
However, by the end of the novel, the Indians contemptuously refer to him
as “don Saturnino” or “amo”, the usual title for the hacendado of La Brisa
(El resplandor 397-98). Following the brutal massacre of several
Indians, Nieves el Colorado calls Saturnino the “Coyote dañero”
and “demonio” (El resplandor 389-90). Because of the sudden
and tragic manner in which the Indians’ faith is revealed to be misguided,
“Quien era soñado como mesías se ha transformado en diablo”
is an accurate general assessment of the novel (Paúl Arranz 38).
While Saturnino assumes messianic proportions, it
is important to note that the Revolution itself has no millennial significance
for the Otomíes. Following the great national struggle, they
find themselves toiling under the same hacienda system that existed during
the colonial era. Apart from a brief flashback depicting the death
of don Gonzalo, the last hacendado of the Fuentes family to rule La Brisa
(El resplandor 147-49), the Revolution brings with it decidedly
underwhelming results. In the beginning, after the initial reports
of revolutionary violence, the affluent porfiristas of the region nervously
predict “el bolcheviquismo… las ideas del diablo…el castigo del cielo…
el Apocalipsis… el fin de todo” (El resplandor 110). In an
excerpt from a grandiose speech given by Pedroza, the poet blames institutions
such as “el porfirismo” and “la Iglesia” for subjugating the Indians.
Later, perhaps alluding to the Revolution and its warring factions, Pedroza
mentions a “reptil inmundo de las siete cabezas” (El resplandor 192).
This is a direct reference to the Beast of Revelation from the Bible:
“And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the
sea, having seven heads and ten horns…” (Rev. 13: 1-3).
With these references, Magdaleno heightens the drama
surrounding the coming of the Revolution only to show that the actual results
of the social upheaval were minimal as far as the Otomíes of San
Andrés were concerned. By exaggerating the apocalyptic aspects
of the Revolution to this degree, Magdaleno increases the ironic effect
when, on the day that the Revolution was suppose to arrive and restructure
the social milieu in San Andrés, the narrator observes that nothing
had changed on the face of the planet (El resplandor 145).
Graciana, an old woman who cares for Olegario after he is seriously wounded,
expresses the irrelevance of the Revolution and its political implications
when she tells him, “Que salió don Porfirio y que ahora viene Madero…¡Lo
único que sabemos los pobres es que las bolas nos quitan lo poquito
que tenemos para comer!” (El resplandor 162). Another character
remarks that after the Revolution “la vida era más dura que nunca”
(El resplandor 250). In this manner the novel draws the somber
conclusion that the traditional social structure—rather than being replaced—simply
becomes more deceptive and oppressive for the Indian. As suggested
earlier, this conclusion represents a most incisive criticism of the post-revolutionary
State because it implies that the Revolution—from which the new leadership
derived their moral and political authority—was never a revolution at all.
To their credit the Otomíes never put much
faith in the Revolution; however, they do make the fatal mistake of believing
in a personification of the Revolution that was raised as one of their
own. Throughout El resplandor, the Indians and poor campesinos
consistently use the more vernacular, pre-Revolutionary term for an insurrection,
a “bola”, rather than “revolución.” The fact that the word
“revolución” is never on the lips of the Indians shows that they
are completely oblivious to the social upheaval and its presumed benefits.
Furthermore, it is not uncommon for subordinated groups, such as slaves
and members of untouchable castes, to develop their own vocabulary and
signification in order to express their particular perspective and dissent
more freely (Scott 152-54) . Only the affluent whites and the revolutionaries
themselves speak of the “gran Revolución” and sing its praises.
Don Anselmo and don Melquiades, both members of the petit bourgeois, actually
refer to Luis Cabrera’s influential interpretation of the political struggle,
“La Revolución es la Revolución”, published in the newspaper
El Tiempo during the summer of 1911 (El resplandor 108). After
the massacre carried out by Felipe Rendón’s brother—an incident
that dispels any confidence the Indians ever had in the revolutionaries—don
Melquiades defends the idea of encouraging their children to attend the
school they have only recently constructed, explaining sanctimoniously
“No estamos bajo la dictadura… La Revolución tiene contraídos
graves compromisos con el proletariado del campo” (El resplandor
415). After so much disillusionment and cruelty, it appears that
only the revolutionaries are still deluded by the false promises of the
social movement that put them in power.
In El resplandor, Magdaleno challenges the
official interpretation of the Revolution—a national cataclysm that lead
to an era of modernity and social reform—by depicting an indigenous community
living under a seemingly endless cycle of injustice and exploitation.
The depiction of this cycle subverts the deterministic and conclusive nature
of millennial conceptions by replacing a linear model of time with eternity
(Parkinson Zamora 17) . Where there is no end time, there can be
no revolution. Saturnino Herrera’s evolution from a leader sympathetic
toward the Indians into a manipulative political boss will be repeated
when, shortly after changing the name of San Andrés to Villa Herrera,
he orders a child called Benito to be educated in Pachuca just as he was
(El resplandor 431). Readers have every reason to believe
that Benito—very likely Saturnino’s illegitimate son—will grow up to exploit
the people who raised him just as Coyotito did a generation earlier.
The novel concludes with the grim suggestion that idealized visions for
the future may continue to override and perpetuate the harsh realities
of the past and present in this indigenous community.
Works cited
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Contemporary Mexican History, 1910-1989.
Trans. Luis Alberto Fierro. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1993.
Benjamin, Thomas. La Revolución: Mexico’s Great
Revolution as Memory, Myth, and
History. Austin: U of Texas P,
2000.
Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief
in Modern American
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994
[1992].
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