[In the following essay, Luckey provides a brief overview of Azuela's life and works.]

When Dr. Mariano Azuela died in Mexico City on March 1, 1952, Spanish America lost one of its most considerable novelists of this century. Dr. Azuela is the author of a universally recognized masterpiece, Los de abajo, which has probably been more widely read both in translation and in the original than any other Spanish American work of our time; he is responsible for the growth of an entirely new sub-genre in literature, the novel of the Mexican Revolution; and he has left, in some twenty novels, the most revealing profile in existence of the common people of Mexico in his time.

Los de abajo is simply a heartfelt story of the sweep of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 across the lives of the simple men who formed the various armed bands. Its protagonist is not a man, but The Men—the men who rode the horses, who wore the crossed bandoleers and carried rifles and revolvers, who fought, looted, loved, sang, and suffered—the cannon fodder. It has no thesis and no conclusion, but it has a raison d'être: a man's burning necessity to express a glorious and tragic event in the life of his people. It hardly has a plan, being really a series of dramatic tableaux; but this “plan” is perhaps the best of all in its correspondence to the episodic and uncertain movement of the thing itself—the Revolution. It has no nurtured style; it is direct, rude, brutal—most appropriately.

Los de abajo is without direct literary ancestor but not, of course, without antecedent. The prime factor in enabling Azuela to write this novel and his other marvelously sure profiles of Mexican life is undoubtedly his intimate acquaintance with that life in its three fundamental areas of country and small town, provincial capital, and Mexico City—and with the national cataclysm which was the Revolution. He was born and reared in the vicinity of the little town of Lagos de Moreno (in northeastern Jalisco state). He grew up under the spell of the tales of his grandfather, who had operated a mule train in that area; he was surrounded by the aura and aroma of the commodities of his father's general store and tavern: brown sugar, tequila, and calico prints. For his preparatory school and his medical studies Azuela went to Guadalajara—“mi Guadalajara dulce, romántica y apasionada,” as he phrases it: band concerts in the square, wonderful shop windows, strange types to be followed about the streets, café life, and Italian opera. He passed his examinations and received his degree in 1899, then went back to Lagos, where he married and began to practice medicine—the Revolution found him there in 1910. He had been under suspicion by Díaz officials because of certain writings and because of his open opposition to the corruptness of the régime. With the triumph of the Madero movement in 1911 he held minor political offices in his home district; but he soon gave them up, convinced that the state authorities under whom he worked were opportunists. During the reactionary Huerta domination of 1913-1914 Azuela lived under strict and nerve-racking surveillance. In 1914 he joined the Villa group of General Julián Medina (who was one of the foreground figures in the picture Azuela was soon to draw of The Men in Revolution) as chief of the medical service. He left his family in Lagos and accompanied the Medina band in marches and countermarches, moving north through Chihuahua with a contingent of wounded after the crushing defeat of Villa at Celaya in April 1915. He was finally forced across the border to El Paso, along with other Villa men, in October 1915.

On the heartbreaking retreat Azuela wrote his story. He read it to a group of compatriots in El Paso, and published it there as a serial in the Spanish-language daily El Paso del Norte in the last three months of 1915. Early in 1916 the same newspaper published a thousand copies of the novel. Six of the thousand were sold; Azuela left the rest in bookstores and early in 1916 returned to Mexico. He never learned what happened to the other 994 copies, and neither has anybody else; only one copy of this edition is known certainly to exist.

Los de abajo has been explained as a case of automatic writing. It is hardly that, although there is no doubt that it was written under very strong compulsion. It was definitely and deliberately planned; parts of it, particularly characters, lay in gestation for months. We know from Azuela himself that he made observations, thought specifically about characters and situations, and made abundant notes before he actually started writing the novel. He began to write it during the retreat north, sold it to El Paso del Norte (for a sum which, according to various reports, was somewhere between ＄12 and ＄30) with the short third part still unwritten, finished the writing in the newspaper office itself, and saw his work printed. It was published again in 1917 in Tampico, in a small edition, and in Mexico City in 1920; but nobody paid much attention to it. The critics of the time preferred to accept only established values. Then in December 1924, in consequence of a public debate as to why Mexican literature had gone to seed, Los de abajo was “discovered.” It was immediately printed by the large Mexico City daily El Universal in its weekly supplement. In the next few years it was published again and again in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Chile; and beginning in 1928 it was translated into French, English, German, Japanese, Yugoslav, Portuguese, and Czech.

In Mexico Los de abajo started writers to thinking along new lines. This soon resulted in the flowering of a new literary development known as “the novel of the Mexican Revolution,” which became a major influence in the intellectual life of the country. In the dozen years beginning with 1928 the other main figures of this group—Martín Luis Guzmán, Rafael F. Muñoz, Gregorio López y Fuentes, José Rubén Romero, Nellie Campobello—published their novels and stories.

In writing, Azuela was self-taught. He read a great deal in Guadalajara in his student days—mostly nineteenth-century French writers, and mostly the Realists and Naturalists. (His early works show this influence; his first considerable work, María Luisa, shows little else.) In Lagos, after finishing medical school, he joined a group of young intellectuals who were as bored and disillusioned as Azuela himself was with the life of the small town. They met every two weeks to eat together, to talk, and to read their compositions aloud. Their Maecenas was the well-to-do lawyer Antonio Moreno y Oviedo, in whose garden the group met. The very successful Juegos Florales of 1903, in Lagos, were their doing; and they published four volumes of their work at various intervals. This activity kept Azuela interested in writing. It would probably have made of him a mediocre writer, if other influences had not begun to work; witness Sin amor (published in 1912 but probably written before 1906), a lifeless thesis novel. Fortunately fate intervened.

Azuela had already begun to think about the problems of Mexico—political “bossism,” social and economic domination of peon by landowner, religious bigotry and intolerance. This we know from short stories written in the first years of the century and from the first three full-length novels. His concern is shown somewhat weakly in Sin amor, becomes much stronger in Los fracasados (1908), and constitutes a real affirmation in Mala yerba (1909). Then broke the storm of the Revolution. Azuela saw in a very short time quite a bit of gun-waving, proclaiming of loyalties, and political chicanery. Nauseated by the insincerity about him, he wrote a novel—a hard, nasty little novel about a cynical and spineless turncoat—Andrés Pérez, maderista (1911). This raucous cry of protest is not pleasant reading and it is technically imperfect, but it has punch. It showed Azuela the possibilities of a kind of writing quite different from that of the pleasant garden of the Moreno house in Lagos. It made possible Los de abajo.

There is one novel between Andrés Pérez and Los de abajo. It is Los caciques, written in Lagos in 1914 under the Huerta domination and published in 1917, after Azuela had returned to Mexico from his brief exile. Azuela's most “Revolutionary” novel (in the sense of exalting the Revolution), in technique it is intermediate between the earlier novels and the masterpiece; it is far removed from the haphazardness of Andrés Pérez but lacks the epic sweep of Los de abajo.

Las moscas (1918) is essentially a series of movie shots of the Reyes Téllez family of Culiacán in their pathetic and ridiculous gyrations about the authorities on a certain military train. It completes the triptych which includes Los caciques and Los de abajo, forming with them a unified picture of the violent phase of the Revolution. For a wider view, beginning with the antecedents of the Revolution and ending with a kind of appraisal of the social changes it wrought, one should begin with Mala yerba and end with one of the later novels such as Avanzada (1940). Mala yerba brings into relief the economic and social degradation which existed throughout Mexico, during Díaz days, on the large rural estates; Azuela was one of very few who, seeing the injustice, dared to protest. Avanzada strikes a trial balance, dealing with both pessimism and optimism in large quantities. Other novels fill out the picture even more; we should mention Las tribulaciones de una familia decente (1918), San Gabriel de Valdivias (1938), and Nueva burguesía (1914).

The fact of the matter is, of course, that the designation of Azuela as “the novelist of the Mexican Revolution” does him only partial justice. Whoever reads his novels sees that his themes are broad. Actually, questions of a sociological and economic nature, and problems of human conduct, attract him much more than the specialized matter of the Revolution. This is strongly evident in his later novels, down to Sendas perdidas (1949), his last. His long writing career has some anomalies, most obviously his mock flirtation with the estridentista school in 1923-1932. In the long run, however, Azuela follows a consistent pattern. He is Man thinking about Mexico. His own emotions are often involved, and he is always aware of the high mission of the writer; yet he writes always as the novelist, and almost always as the objective manipulator of tools, working something out.

Azuela was oriented as was no other writer of our time in the life-complex of the Mexican people; and his receptiveness and his highly personal combination of literary resources give a great deal of his work an artistic status which promises permanence.