Free Redeemers by Enrique Krauze Page A

(now entitled to the capital R it would retain for the rest of the century), Huerta was defeated and fled into exile in July 1914. But the anti-Huerta alliance dissolved into rival alliances and the fiercest battles of the Mexican Revolution were yet to be fought. The agrarian revolutionaries under Emiliano Zapata (from the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City) and the much more modern army (though heavily dependent on cavalry) of hardened frontiersmen from the north under the former bandit Pancho Villa faced off against forces whose leaders had more middle-class roots and values, first led by Venustiano Carranza and later by Álvaro Obregón and his subordinate generals from the border state of Sonora (like Obregón himself).
    The various groupings were defined by the names of their leaders. Zapatistas, Villistas, Carrancistas, Obregonistas. The loyalties and origins of the common soldiers cannot be automatically and rigidly defined, but at this massive stage of confrontation within the Mexican Revolution, Zapata and Villa—both unlettered men of the people—represented (in their different modes) aspects of social revolution. (Intellectuals were drawn to side with and sometimes to advise the various leaders, those influenced by anarchist ideas often to Zapata, the more socialist to Villa.)
    But with the ultimate victors still undecided, the new state of things was beginning to be defined and legitimized from an unexpected source—the cultural originality of the Mexican Revolution, the specific nature of the amalgam of old and new that was already coming into being. The civil war between the revolutionaries had already turned intense by 1915. When the new Mexican Constitution was drafted, in 1917, the faction headed by Venustiano Carranza was well on its way to victory. The constitution shows the effects and includes the perspectives of a broad gamut of ideological currents (agrarianism, labor unionism, nationalism, socialism, more extremist and anticlerical “Jacobinism,” and the embryonic corporate emphasis of the future Mexican state). All these trends were a modification—and often a correction—of the nineteenth-century liberal perspective. But in cultural terms, the Revolution was born and nourished, like the maguey plant, by the soil of Mexico. It sought its true face not outside and ahead, but within and facing toward its past. And the awakening first took shape precisely in that violent year of 1915.
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    II
    The material isolation of Mexico during World War I and the constant pressure of its own raging civil war had, perhaps paradoxically, encouraged a process of concentration and introspection that many experienced as a “discovery of Mexico.” The intellectual Manuel Gómez Morin, who was a student at the time, remembers (with affection) the year 1915:
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    . . . with optimistic stupor we took account of unsuspected truths. Mexico existed. Mexico as a country, with capacities, with aspiration, with life, with its own problems . . . And the Indians, and the mestizos and the creoles, they were living realities, men with every human attribute. The Indian was no mere substance fit for war or work, nor was the creole, nor was the mestizo . . . Mexico existed and the Mexicans!
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    During the years of war, hundreds of thousands of people, men and women, old and young, abandoned their plots of land, the haciendas they worked on or the “tiny fatherlands” of their villages, willingly or against their will, and traveled by train through their country on a kind of revolutionary tourism, at once frightening and hallucinatory. Like a giant encampment or an endless pilgrimage, making the Revolution or fleeing from it, the Mexican people entered the foreground of history. Artists began to mingle with the people and absorb their passions and their conflicts. It was natural that this migration should be intensely reflected in their art.
    At the ground