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Reflections on the Mexican Revolution
By Anita Brenner
BARRIOZONA
PART ONE
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.
Copyright © 2009 Hispanic Institute of Social Issues
Grassroots Journalism
www.barriozona.com
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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.