What is a country to do when the other political side comes to power after much time in opposition and proves to be just as bad as who they replaced. Perhaps the healthiest thing to do is admit it, and in Mexico after the 1910 revolution that is what Mexican author Mariano Azuela did with his novel, “Los de Abajo” which means the underdogs. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp is from the period around their Olympics when there was an optimism that the country was finally emerging as an important place. Part of that emerging is presenting figures in the local arts that a wider audience doesn’t know but perhaps should. Mr. Azuela main literary works center around the Mexican civil war of the 1910s that he was a part of. Notice on the stamp he is displayed as a distinguished older gentleman rather than a younger hothead. By the 1970s, it was less important what he wrote but instead the fact that one of us was indeed writing.
Todays stamp is issue A301, a 40 Centavo stamp issued by Mexico on April 26th, 1974. It was a single stamp issue honoring author and physician Mariano Azuela a little late for his birth century the previous year. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
Mariano Azuela was born the son of a successful rancher in Lagos de Moreno. He studied religion and local history under Father Augustin Riviera,( and married the Priest’s niece). He then shifted his studies to medicine. Mexico was nearing the end of the long rule of Porfirio Diaz and like most of the young and educated, he opposed Diaz. After the 1910 revolution the other side briefly came into power and Azuela served as a public health official. The country was breaking down into a long civil war and Azuela joined Pancho Villa’s force as a medic.
It was from this experience that Azuela wrote his most important novel “The Underdogs”. The lead character Macias has a misunderstanding with a wealthy landowner and Diaz’s Federales police come to arrest him. Not finding him they cruelly kill his beloved dog Dove. Now on the run, Macias builds a group of fellow angry misfits that have various grudges against the government. The interesting part is that the group becomes if anything more cruel than the hated dictator. Every night Macias changes what they are fighting for. One day it is to recreate the Aztec empire and the next it is to cruelly avenge some past slight. Meanwhile the long suffering Mexican peasants are preyed upon by both sides. The end of the book has Macias try to go home having lost most of his misfits only to be hunted down by his enemies for one final? gunfight. The Civil War in Mexico lasted 10 years and as in the book all the figures are left with a foul smell.
The book became famous and was soon translated and sold widely in the USA. The book influenced many later generations of left political Hispanic writers and is still an object of study in Hispanic studies departments.
Well my drink is empty and I am impressed that Mexico proved sophisticated enough to feature an author who told the real story instead of some lesser piece of glossing over. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.