Sujeto Local

If the overall design o f Vasconcelos’s memoirs links him strongly to the nineteenth-century tradition in spite o f his protestations, he was undoubtedly also affected in the composition o f at least parts o f his memoirs by the narrative developm ents o f the novels o f the Revolution. Many o f these ‘novels’ bear a close resemblance to the travel-chronicle: they narrate barely fictionalised episodes o f the Revolution and they structure this around the travels o f the revolutionaries, on foot, on horseback, or on trains. The two best examples o f this are Mariano A zuela’s Los d e abajo (1916, but not made famous until 1924 by Francisco Monterde) and Martin Luis Guzman’s E lâ g u ila y laserpiente (1928).25

Guzman’s first reaction to the Revolution was exile in the United States: textually this resulted in A orillas d el Hudson (1920), a series o f philosophical reflections and political commentaries, rather than the travel-chronicle that one might expect. His novel El âguilay laserpiente, however, is more clearly related to the travel-chronicle in its hom odiegetic narratorial position and in its specific focus on travel: chapter titles are ‘Camino de Sonora’, ‘Andanzas de un rebelde’, and ‘Viajes revolucionarios’. Schooled in the costumbrista

tradition, Guzman set out to depict ‘cuadros’ o f the protagonists o f the Revolution, in particular the leaders. To do this he realised that he needed what Dominguez Michael has 22 The first signs o f modernismo in his style appear in his ‘snapshots hondurenos’ at the end o f El

proconsulado (pp. 1047-53).

23 Quoted in Dominguez Michael’s ‘Diccionario de Octavio Paz’, Vuelta, 259 (June 1998), 68. 24 See Dominguez Michael’s Tiros en el concierto: literatura mexicana del siglo V (Era, 1997), p. 56. 25 In fact these novels were possibly influenced by Alvaro Obregon’s early revolutionary travel-chronicle,

Ocho mil kilometros en campana: relacion de las acciones de annas, efectuadas en mas de veinte estados de

termed ‘una suerte de palco m ovil’ from which to observe the movements o f his characters:

"El â g u ila y la serpiente es una vertiginosa narracion donde la revoluciôn es una com edia humana en m ovim iento que se va aduenando de inmensos espacios donde geografia y personalidad configuran una nueva época’ .26

This merger of geography and personality does not imply Romantic-style description o f natural landscapes coloured by personal feeling, but rather that the protagonists o f the Revolution come to stand in for landscape. The description o f a journey in E l â g u ila y la serpiente consists o f a social diary o f who was on the train and what state the train was in, rather than any observations o f the natural dimensions o f the route. Where landscape is described, it very occasionally has a symbolic function (El Popocatepetl, Iztaccihuatl, and el A jusco all cast shadows o f power), but by and large it is sim ply strategic: the topographical features o f the terrain which the leader and his men must negotiate to get from one position to another. Azuela’s text makes more use o f symbolism and metaphor in its depiction o f landscape, but again these ‘cuadros y escenas de la R evoluciôn actual’27 tend to portray the landscape o f humanity rather than that o f nature.

No doubt as a consequence o f the success o f these novels, in the 1930s, 40s and 50s a huge number o f ‘novels o f the Revolution’ o f varying nature and quality were published. O f particular relevance to the history o f the travel-chronicle are the texts written by a number o f the military commanders and statesmen who played an active role in the Revolution and who decided to pen their memoirs in the format of novels, autobiographies and/or travel-chronicles in the years that follow ed. Travel-chronicles were written, for exam ple, by Francisco L. Urquizo {M éxico-Tlaxcalantongo: M ayo de 1920 (1943), and laterRamônBeteta(C<3/?î/noa7teca/anfongo (1961)). These texts, like Guzman’s, focus more on the human landscape than the natural. They are generally considered solid, although not brilliant, journalistic narratives o f the Revolution. Their main focus is the balance o f power rather than the experience of the man in the street. Urquizo, in particular, was a military strategist who had little time for the evocation o f atmospheres and the description of landscapes. None o f these revolutionary travel-chronicles has any time for intertextual reference to the ‘tradition’ o f travel-chronicles in Mexico: the contingencies o f Revolution, it is felt, make overt literary consciousness obsolete.28

All four volumes o f V asconcelos’s autobiography were written in the 1930s, w ell after the events described in them. Nevertheless, V asconcelos alters styles as he writes to better convey the epoch. The first volume describing his childhood during the Porflriato is more clearly related to the nineteenth-century tradition. In his narration o f his role in the Revolution in La Tormenta, he shifts gear to offer a text which is similar in impetus to these narratives o f the Revolution: the pace quickens; travel data becom es more strategic; description is more o f a social than natural order, or gives way entirely to narrative action. Even his enduring concern w ith good food and com fortable beds is part o f his

26 Antologia de la narrativa mexicana. I, 44.

27 Front cover o f first edition published in El Paso in 1916.

28 Guzmdn also published some fully-fledged travel-chronicles later in his career {Crdnicas de mi destierro

revolutionary survival strategy 129 Only when exiled from the fray does he turn his attention to leisure pursuits, aided and abetted by the Reinach travel guide.

The concern to narrate travel in M exico in detail, with an eye for emotive evocation, social commentary and topics o f touristic interest and national pride (colonial cities) returns in El desastre and El Proconsulado where he relates his experiences as Secretary for Education and ill-fated presidential candidate. Towards the end o f this last volum e V asconcelos, exiled once again in Europe, decides to make the best o f it and give in to his penchant for fine art by touring Italy, France and Spain with his Guide Bleu proudly in hand. (He fully endorsed cultural tourism, just as long as it was not taking place in M exico...)

F ollow in g on directly from the accounts o f the R evolution by statesm en such as V asconcelos are the accounts o f the travels o f statesmen in the post-Revolutionary period by contracted travelling companions; texts which read rather like the chronicles o f royal tours o f previous centuries. This is where the rot sets in in terms o f the literary quality of the travel-chronicle: these texts tend to be sycophantic and trivial. A classic example is A lfonso Taracena’s Viajando con Vasconcelos (B otas, 1938) where the great man is described repeatedly as so approachable, so human, yet so great that he can drop his trousers in front o f the humble Taracena ‘con naturalidad, platicando siempre’ (p. 26 and p. 32).30 Other examples are Pedro J. Almada, 99 dias en jir a con el Présidente Cardenas

( 1943);3i Agustm Y anez, Proyeccion Universal de México: cronica del viaje realizadopor el Présidente de M éxico Lie. Adolfo Lopez M ateos a India, Japon, Indonesia y Pilipinas, el ano 1962 (1963); and Javier Lopez Moreno, D ialogo con el sur del mundo (1975), on tour with Luis Echeveiria. The value o f these texts seems to be as a personal memento for the statesman in question rather than as news or literature.32

29 See Luis Antonio Marentes, ‘Narrativizing the Storm: José Vasconcelos and the Writing o f the Mexican Revolution’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University o f Texas at Austin, 1994), p. 75.

30 This may be countered by Vito A lessio Robles’s M is andanzas con nuestro Ulises - published in the same year and by the same publisher as Taracena’s account - which airs his differences with Vasconcelos. 31 The journalist Elvira Vargas covered the same tour as Almada in the company o f Cdrdenas in a much more stimulating manner in her Por las rutas del Sureste ([1937?]).

32 Other ‘official’ travel-chronicles o f dubious literary quality were commissioned by various Mexican institutions with a view to illustrating their work. The best examples are Pablo C. de Gante’s La ruta de

Occidente (Departamento Autônomo de Prensa y Publicidad, 1939), promoting the newly inaugurated road

from M exico City to Morelia; and M. Peyrot G.’s Un viaje a Baja California, with the Mexican Navy, on a mission to establish the wealth and potential of the area (Litorales, 1968).

There are also accounts of journeys to international events written by M exico’s selected representatives: Salvador N ovo’s international travel-chronicles fall under this rubric, as do Fernando Benitez’s and some of Jorge Ibargiiengoitia’s (see later sections in this chapter). These narratives tend to be o f journeys to countries such as the USSR and the People’s Republic o f China on account of their political insularity with respect to the non-Communist world and hence o f the news-worthiness of such trips in Mexico. Examples of journeys to the USSR are: José Revueltas’s trip as a representative o f the Partido Mexicano Comunista at the VII International Communist Congress (1935) and the VI International Communist Youth Congress, published as ‘Notas de un viaje a la URSS’ in Merida’s Diario del Sureste in 1938; José

Mancisidor’s ‘Ciento veinte dfas’ (1937) covering his trip as part of a committee sent to celebrate the International Day of the Proletariat in 1936; Jesus Romero Flores’s account of the same event in Un

mexicano en la Union Soviética (1979); and René A vü és's Las estrellasrojas (1967), an account of a visit

sponsored by the Instituto de Intercambio Cultural Mexicano Ruso. These accounts are generally well- written. Others, mentioned later in this chapter, are of more dubious value.

However, Mauri cio Magdaleno - one of V asconcelos’s supporters in his bid for presidency - wrote a number o f independent, literary travel-chronicles, collected as Tierra y viento

(1948, written 1936-1946): these offer a more balanced view o f M exico than V asconcelos does, valuing colonial cities as w ell as Indian villages. Magdaleno travels in search o f the essence o f M exico which he finds distilled in colonial cities such as Oaxaca - V asconcelos’s birthplace -, and in symbols such as the cactus and the taciturn Indian conditioned by his austere habitat. He also displays an ironic consciousness of M exico as an incipient tourist destination. In his later collection o f essays, Agua bajo el puente (1968, written in the 1950s and 60s), M agdaleno turns to a more intertextual kind o f high cultural travel- chronicle, visiting the poet Lopez Velarde’s hometown and the setting for Azuela’s Los de abajo. The intention is to provide a literary guide to the provinces - frequently to the sites of the Revolution - for an educated tourist.33