Essay: The Underdogs – Los de Abajo

Mariano Azuela was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, where his father owned a grocery store and a ranch. In 1892, he attended the University of Guadalajara to study medicine. He later returned to Lagos de Moreno to practice. Eight years later, he married Carmen Rivera and together, they had ten children. In the October of 1914,  he joined the band of Julián Medina, one of Pancho Villa’s generals, as his medicinal officer. At this time, he began writing Los de Abajo. He published The Underdogs in the newspaper El Paseo del Norte on October 37, 1915. And on December 5, 1915 its published as a paperback. He later goes on to write many other novels until he dies of heart failure on March 1, 1952.
The Underdogs, or Los de Abajo, is a book that takes place in the early 1900s during the Mexican Revolution. The protagonist of the novel is named Demetrio Macías, who is a poor farmer that lives with his family in a little village, Limón, Mexico. He is a tall man who wears a white shirt and pants, with a broad mexican hat and leather sandals. He leads a group of in rebellion against the federal forces of Victoriano Huerta. He is famous of his excellent marksmanship and leadership skills. Demetrio and his men travel far distances as they loot and destroy villages. They rape countless women and hang many men.
The book begins when Demetrio is forced to run away after the local cacique, or leader, sends soldiers to his house because of a misunderstanding, leaving his young family behind. He later joins a band of rebels who fight against the government, called the Federales. In one confrontation, he is shot in the leg and gains high fever. They retreat to a nearby town to recover. There, a woman named Camilla treats Demetrio’s wounds. She is in love with another rebel, Luis Cervantes, who doesn’t feel the same way. He is a proud medical student who abandoned the Federales for the rebels. Demetrio, however, loves Camilla and they eventually become lovers.
Demetrio rises through the rebels’ ranks through a series of victories, and eventaully becomes a genereal. But shortly after, his luck all but abandons him as his men are compelled into a retreat after their defeat at Aguascalientes. As the book advances, the rebels’ morales progressively deterioates as they murder, rape, and pillage, emulating the government they hated so much. At the start, Demetrio fights to change his country, but by the end he isn’t sure why he continues to fight and compares himself to a pebble he tosses into a canyon. As the revolution comes to an end, Luis flees to the United States for refuge. Most of the remaining rebels, Demetrio’s friends and soldiers, have already died. The public has become hostile towards the rebels, seeing them as mauraders and trespassers rather than the heroes they started out as. Demetrio returns to his home in Limón, unable to explain himself to his wife. Although the revoluiton is close to an end, the Federales want retribuiton from the rebels. They hunt down the last of their strongholds and the book ends as Demetrio dies alone and outnumbered. He is surrounded by an army as he takes his last aim at a soldier.
Azuela successfully integrated real history into his novel, The Underdogs, which is considered to be a classic account of the Mexican Revolution. When he joined the band of Julián Medina, he lived through this time, experiencing everything himself firsthand. This novel is his own account with all of his impressions and beliefs. Azuela contributed much to the comprehensive understanding of the Mexican Revolution.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, or simply Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian writer who greatly valued social change. He was born March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. In 1990, he ran for president of Peru, but lost the campaign. Twenty years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of strucutres of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” In 1993, he wrote the book, Death in the Andes, the same year he became a citizen of Spain. A year after, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize and continued to write novels about Peru (Briticannica).
Death in the Andes, is a mystery novel about Corporal Lituma, a civil guard from Piura, a big city on the Peruvian coast. He is sent to Naccos, a small village in the Andes, in order to protect the town from guerilla attacks. The population is mostly construction workers, who are building a highway. Everyone mostly speaks Quechua, but Lituma only speaks Spanish, so Carreño, who grew up in the region, translates for him. When three men disappear, Lituma and his only subordinate, Tomás Carreño, become engrossed with the case. As they begin to investigate, Lituma starts to think they were murdered, but the villagers refuse to help.
The three men included Pedro Tinoco, a mute who worked for Lituma and Carreño, Casimiro Huarcaya, a wandering albino, and Demetrio Chanca, the foreman of the construction CREW. At first, Lituma suspects the Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian Communist Party, who constantly attack the other communities around Naccos. They have visciously  murdered several outlanders before, such as a young couple visiting from France.  Likely, the Senderos are guilty because each men could easily be seen as an outsider. Furthermore, each had confrontations with the guerillas prior to thier disapperances. Lituma discovers that the highway foreman’s actual name was Don Medardo Llantac and that he was a governor from another Andean village before he had escaped with his wife to Naccos in refuge from a Sendero attack.
As the book progresses, a different plotline emergers. As Lituma becomes more homesick, Tomás Carreño begins to tell him stoires about his whimsical love affair with Mercedes Trelles, a pretty prosititue from Piura. The story begins when Carreño killed Hog, a gangster he worked for as a bodygaurd, becasue he was beating Mercedes. He falls deeply in love with her, but she was disinterested, even resnetful. By murduring Hog, he had put them both in danger. They run away together across Peru and have several adventures.
Eventually, Lituma moves onto his next suspect in the investigation: the barkeeper, Dionisio and his wife, Adriana. Dionisio was the leader of a modern cult of maenads, who in ancient times, practiced human sacrifices. He also encourages the workers to get drunk and dance. His wife reads fortunes and is considered a witch. The Greek mythology is entagled with serrucho superstitions, such as pishtacos, vampires who suck fat from their victims, or apus, ancient spirtis of the mountains, who were pacified by human sacrifices before starting any enterprises, like a temple or a new road.
In the end, Lituma’s endeavors are fruitless, and he conjectures that Dionisio and Adriana are somehow resposible for the mens’ disappearneces. He remembers that the Senderos haven’t attacked Naccos directly and it seems that the men weren’t victims of another Sendero attack but a local ritual.
Mario Vargas Llosa successfully integrated real history into his novel, Death in the Andes. While it is a contemporary educated the reader about Peru’s ancient culture and the paramountcy of human sacrifice. Also, he incorporated things like the Shining Path into the novel, which really is a communist party in Peru. Lastly, his description of mountain people was very realistic. It was an accurate representation of Peru’s rural villages, who are cut off from the rest of the world.