Reflections on the Mexican Revolution

P A R T O N E
The most destructive of all tools of domination is also the sharpest flashing whip to awareness...

By Anita Brenner | Part Two

The Mexican Revolution was the first in this century of revolutions; Mexicans the first people in this era
to break through, tear apart the old constricting structures, and literally pull themselves up by the
roots, to make a more just, humane, and rational society. This was the revolutionary civil war of 1910—
1924, coinciding in historic trend with the Russian experience of 1917, that triggered eruptions now
countless throughout our world.

There is a frayed philosophical idea according to which revolutions occur when "the people" live under
conditions of great and increasing hardship; and a more modern but also skin-deep notion that
revolutions are made by agitators and propaganda. But the facts of this century of revolution throw
into clear relief another and much more decisive element: the consciousness that sets people moving
against the status quo; the realization that one doesn't have to accept oppression or humiliation, that
there is an alternative. And that this alternative is within one's reach.

Such consciousness is like the dawn of selfhood in adolescence: and it reaches countries, peoples,
tribes, races via many of the same mechanisms. Most evidently and strikingly, via the comparison of
one's own self or situation with whoever is apparently further along.

In Mexico, the railroads, the telegraph, the newspapers, the influx of American capital, and the rising
number of people moving back and forth brought an increasing (almost day-to-day) comparison
between life for the people in the United States and life here. This was the gunpowder and the match.
The dynamite was comparisons within the same compound: between the houses, privileges, and
freedoms of the foreign high echelon personnel, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shanties and
dregs that were the usual share of the peon in mining, oil, and other giant extractive operations. But
the high-voltage current that blew up the works was the brutal and insolent disparity between the
money and position granted the native technician or professional man — the man of brains and
cultivation — vis-a-vis his foreign counterpart. This devaluation on the basis of, not exactly color, not
exactly race, but the same thing really, cooked and rankled and set working the consciousness of
skilled men thoroughly aware of their own capacities. They and people like them were among the most
effective organizers of 1910-24

Position, acceptance, respect — every youngster demands these things of his family and society. And
these are needs which must be satisfied in order for him to attain the potency of a creative life,
deepest of all human needs anywhere and always. Dignity… treaties dialogued with dignity… the
dignity of national sovereignty… the dignity essential to human life — these are phrases like the beat of
a Greek chorus in Mexican international pronouncements and statements of policy, and they also occur
over and over in legislation and national political writing. They are the expression (still with overtones
of anguish, still with the blunt edge of anger) of multiplicities and centuries of humiliation.

And the most destructive of all tools of domination is also the sharpest flashing whip to awareness.
Given the magic of moment and means, humiliation is the stuff that gets transmuted into indestructible
resistance, into discovery and the union and love that grow into mighty creativity. It is the music of our
time, and all the arts now clamor in this channel. At the national — or tribal or racial — level, people
come together first in furious repudiation of the dominator, the aggressor and intruder, the insolent
boot of dictatorship, the clanking and reptilian puppeteer. It is easy in colonial countries, seized and
wrung for the raw materials and cheap labor they may unhappily have in abundance, to spot the
violators and converge beneath them; and therefore the revolutions (the revolution) of our time have
occurred first in such places.

But having come together to rebel and having in joyous fury toppled the predators, lock, stock, and
surrogate, the victorious folk, usually projected in their battle by wonderfully vital, relaxed, and
laughing, animal-accurate guerrillas (men raised by liberation to the nth power of masculinity ), now
enters a deeply dangerous and dread crisis. It is an agglomerate of troops and gangs and clubs and
factions, identified as us against the predators, against the authorities, which now has to make a
coherent and workable society, free of the wrongs in any neck-and-boot relationship. And it is faced
also with the immediate problems of wreckage — the fields in weeds, the communications systems torn,
epidemics flaring like forest fires in a drought, no regularity or normality of any kind; and no reserves.

A mystique, a creed, a faith, an ideal, a cause, a love — whatever spelling you put on it, it is all the
same — now must take living form. Us against, must become us for, else the whole experienced
beautiful instant of human brotherhood reverts into other names for the old relationships, with
authoritarian lust and greed tandem in the power saddle. Genius, humanity, and common sense, in that
order — the folk have got to project these into the center of the circus first.

Said the prophet Samuel to the children of Israel when they asked him for a king: "This will be the
manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for
his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him
captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his
harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your
daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and
your vineyards, and your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants… And he will
take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and
put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep; and ye shall be his servants..."

It is easy now in 1970, looking around the world at what each people-in-rebellion have been able to do
toward building their new world, to see where revolutions have been crushed or aborted into military
dictatorships, protecting all the old positions; and where, despite the power technocracies and police-
ocracies that in most countries-in-revolution have seized and ridden the power horse to their own
benefit, a revolutionary mystique has crystallized, the peoples have been smelted into an us for, a
specific creed with passion at its core. There the inner motor keeps moving them along toward the
objectives that everybody, including the power group, has to subscribe to and cannot reverse — the
original aim of a more just, humane, and sane society, with the dignity of each human being the crux of
the fight at every inch and leap ahead or back.

What made the difference? Why were some crushed, and others not? It is the same mysterious,
profound catalyst or grace that makes the difference in the crisis of teen age, as to whether a person
integrates or drifts and suffers formlessly in fear and conflict: identity. The same dignity of selfhood and
place in the world, and work to do in it, that Moses heard from the Burning Bush. All primitive and
ancient peoples knew it was a matter of life and death to find this at the critical moment of entering
upon the freedoms and tasks of becoming adult, and the most solemn of all solemn rites and
ceremonies, usually entailing rigorous training, were built up to channel each young person in his time
of crisis toward himself, the consciousness of his own soul.

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Read Part Two

A classical text that served as the introduction for the Idols Behind the Altars book published a few
decades ago brings echoes of a revolution that reaches its centennial in 2010.

Read Part Two