The Underdogs Sparknotes

The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela, is a 1915 novel on the Mexican revolution, which was still ongoing at the time of book’s publication. The novel follows a group of anti-government rebels under the leadership of the peasant Demetrio Macías during the early years of the revolution. The experiences, backgrounds and fates of Macías and the other characters parallel those of the various groups that composed the various pro-government and anti-government factions in Mexico throughout its revolution. Throughout the novel, Azuela tells the story of a country that is in truly dire straits. Mexico is a very lawless country and the people who live in it reflect that. The government forces, known as “Federales”, and the revolutionaries constantly use

It should be clear that the novel is not a particularly happy one, while the tone and interactions between the characters is usually very casual and even lighthearted at times; their actions tend to range from shortsighted cruelty to almost comical levels of evil. Few, if any, of the characters are portrayed as sympathetically. While Macías and a few of his companions have good reasons to be upset with the government, the atrocities that they commit during the revolution are rarely in pursuit of the noble goals of the revolution that they fight for. The book’s portrayal of Mexico and its people could easily be seen as critical or even bigoted if not for its author’s own personal experiences in the Mexican revolution. Instead, The Underdogs paints a truthful, if harsh, image of the Mexican revolution, and the people who were responsible for

Again, this is not a particularly positive book. Sometimes this is a result of their rather uncouth personalities, but their actions speak much more loudly about how repugnant they can be. It should be noted that this is not a story of corruption; characters show disconcerting behavior very early on in the book, when they still have relatively little power. When Luis Cervantes first defects, Macías decides to test his innocence by threatening to kill him and having one of his men rob a priest to steal his clothing so as to trick Luis into confessing if his defection is genuine . Macías is under no duress when he makes this decision, has no limit on the amount of time to think and could have made any number of other decisions but instead chooses immediately resort to crime to solve his problems. One of his later companions in the revolution, Towhead Margarito, is portrayed as criminally insane. He captures a random government solider with the intent of using him as a personal slave and tortures him by dragging him by a noose across a desert and eventually killing him by refusing to give him food or water . Azuela uses Macías and Margarito to show how many of the participants in the Mexican revolution where ultimately little more than bandits using the revolution for their own amusement. Even Luis Cervantes, who supposedly joined the revolution for purely ideological reasons, is shown to take