{J} 24: Travelogues of the Mexican Revolution
Part II of a Mexico travelogue series: From John Reed with Pancho Villa to Richard Halliburton at Chichen Itza
Hola ‘migos, this is the second part of a running series that recommends the best travelogues of Mexico throughout its history, from the conquest to the modern day. You can find part 1, along with my recommendations for my favorite Mexico contemporary travelogues, right here. We’ve spent a lot of time reading travelogues and about Mexican history lately, but soon we’ll be returning to our own travels and to writing our travel handbook to Mexico City. Thanks for reading, -s.
Across the border and into the war
The Mexican Revolution started in 1911.
It was bloody. It was fractious. It saw the United States occupy Veracruz. It saw Pancho Villa attack New Mexico—the last foreign attack on American soil.
It saw General John Pershing, who would later lend his name to a famous tank, cross the border into Mexico in pursuit of Villa— the first time the U.S. army used airplanes and convoy trucks in war fighting.
And throughout its duration, the revolution saw American investors become increasingly concerned: Not for the life and liberty of Mexican peasants (perish the thought!) but for the hundreds of millions of dollars they’d invested in Mexico’s mines and oil rigs and railroads.
That was the context in which the most famous war correspondent of his time, John Reed, crossed the border to follow the exploits of Pancho Villa. Insurgent Mexico would become an enduring document of the revolution—it is an absolutely stunning and poetic book—and his frontlines battle reporting did much to popularize Villa’s anti-government, pro-peasant crusade.
It’s hard to overstate the political turmoil that existed during this time—not just in Mexico, but also in the U.S., where the excesses of the Gilded Age were giving rise to a new form of socially conscious journalism. But as I started to write about why Reed’s reporting was so pivotal during this time—why his pro-socialist, pro-rebellion advocacy so rankled U.S. business interests during the Mexican Revolution—it suddenly occurred to me: shit, I’m gonna have to explain the Mexican Revolution.
Embarking on such an explanation goes way beyond our travelogue remit, but a cursory understanding of the events is helpful in understanding the writing of the era. So to borrow a line from cinema’s second greatest sword fighter: No, there is too much. Let me sum up. And given the overwhelming amount of detail you’ll please allow me do that summing up via the delightful concision of bullet points. If you’re not familiar with the revolution, I hope this will also serve as a crib notes primer:
In 1910 Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s president and de facto dictator, jailed his opponent, Francisco Madero. For thirty years, Díaz had supported American investment in Mexican industry. The U.S. and its investors profited greatly.
Unfortunately for Díaz and American industrialists, Madero escaped prison and inspired a rebellion against Díaz. Pancho Villa, a charismatic and brutal bandit in the north of Mexico, joined that rebellion.
Díaz abdicated in May 1911 and fled to Paris. Madero took the presidency.
Madero immediately faced the armed rebellion of Emiliano Zapata in Morelos, south of Mexico City where peasants, suppressed during Díaz’s presidency, demanded agrarian reform.
Madero was assassinated in a coup d’etat two years later, an event hastened by the involvement of the American ambassador, who considered Madero bad for U.S. interests.
Madero was succeeded by the man who presumably led that assassination, Victoriano Huerta. The U.S. refused to recognize Huerta.
Huerta then faced two simultaneous rebellions: one in the south (Zapata), and one in the north led by Venustiano Carranza, the governor of a northern state bordering Texas. Villa joined Carranza’s rebellion. The U.S. supplied arms to Villa and then occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from reaching Huerta.
Carranza’s forces, the Constitutionalist Army, defeated Huerta’s federalist forces in battle. Carranza becomes de facto head of state.
Villa then joined forces with Zapata and rebelled against Carranza.
Carranza controlled Mexico’s ports and, with better finances, defeated Villa.
Villa then attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in an attempt to goad the U.S. into invading Mexico
Pershing pursued Villa into Mexico, but stops short of capturing him. Today, when the U.S. makes noises about invading Mexico to battle narcotraficantes, this is the precedent for that action.
Carranza leads the creation of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and is elected president. He serves as president until 1920, when he is deposed and killed. Alvaro Obregón, formerly a general in Carranza’s army, is elected president in October 1920.
That’s the briefest of outlines, but it serves to inform two of the travelogues below: Reed’s Insurgent Mexico, and Into Mexico and Out!, a collection of reports by Lincoln Steffens, Reed’s mentor.
Reed, who would go on to support (and fight alongside) the Bolsheviks in Russia, supported Villa. He died in Moscow in 1920, one of only three American’s buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Steffens, who considered himself something of a power broker, supported Carranza. He went on to support the Soviets as well, but his role in both revolutions and in Progressive Era muckraking is largely forgotten today.
Taken together, both writers gave a full if not complete picture of how Mexicans experienced the revolutionary era—at least from the American point of view.
Many other writers traveled through Mexico during this period, and below we highlight two who had very different approaches to travel.
The vagabond writer Harry Franck took Mexico by rail and trail, exploring silver mines, towns, and Mexico City along his way to South America. Franck, too, is largely forgotten today, but he wrote clear-eyed and honest descriptions of the people he met. His writing doesn’t betray a deep sympathy for the Mexicans he met, but neither does he treat Mexico as simply an exotic land peopled with uncivilized natives.
Richard Halliburton, on the other hand, was a self-aggrandizing stunt writer who used Mexico as the backdrop for his made-for-the-silver-screen exploits. Halliburton was one of those inspired by the writing of John Lloyd Stephens, who discovered the Mayan civilization, as covered in the post previous. One of the most famous adventure writers of his day, his closest popular and modern analogue is probably Indiana Jones (but without, y’know, the concern for antiquities).
It’s hard to read these hundred year-old old travelogues and not be enamored of how one used to experience the country: burro trails, long and leaf-brushed hikes, terraced and overgrown pyramids, stony Mayan palaces in the most dramatic and inaccessible places, and hundreds of red-roofed villages where, as a guide to the economist Stuart Chase once told him, “no wheel has ever turned”.
But if it’s impossible to summarize Mexico as it exists in the world, it may be easier to summarize how Mexico has existed in the hearts, minds, and pens of the people who have traveled here. And for that, we recommend the four travelogues below.
-s.
📕 Insurgent Mexico
John Reed
1914
Insurgent Mexico is the forgotten first book of journalist John Reed, who is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World. But before he reported on the October Revolution, he covered the revolution in Mexico. Towards the end of 1913, Reed was sent to Mexico by Metropolitan, a popular magazine whose contributors included the leading muckrakers of the time. Then twenty-six, Reed followed the army of Pancho Villa for four months, and was there when Villa defeated Federal forces at Torreón and began their march towards Mexico City. Reed developed something of a friendship with Villa (though Reed denied this), eventually riding with him into battle, and became the revolutionary general’s staunchest supporter in the American press. The entire account is hauntingly poetic and sweeping in its romantic depictions of the Mexico’s savage northern deserts, and the scope of the narrative has often been compared favorably to the murals of Diego Rivera. (As an aside, it’s also worth noting that the satirist Ambrose Bierce, who at the age of 71 entered Mexico in the same year as Reed, famously disappeared after December 26th, the same day as John Reed met Villa.) Reed’s is one of the first travelogues I read after moving to Mexico, and I’ll always be haunted by some of its first lines as he looked across the border: “Toward evening, when the sun went down with the flare of a blast furnace, patrols of cavalry rode sharply across the skyline to the night outposts. And after dark, mysterious fires burned in the town.”
P.S. A biography, John Reed, the Making of a Revolutionary, is also freely available on Archive and provides a wonderful amount of context about the American writers who covered Mexico, their differing points of view, the socio-political issues of the day, and the tension between American capitalism and Mexican revolution.
Then my heart gave a jump. A man was coming silently up the valley. He had a green serape over one arm, and nothing on his head but a blood-clotted handkerchief. His bare legs were covered with blood from the espadas. He caught sight of me all of a sudden, and stood still; after a pause he beckoned. I went down to where he was; he never said a word, but led the way back down the valley. About a hundred yards farther he stopped and pointed. A dead horse sprawled in the sand, its stiff legs in the air; beside it lay a man, disemboweled by a knife or a sword—evidently a colorado, because his cartridge belt was almost full. The man with the green serape produced a wicked-looking dagger, still ruddy with blood, fell on his knees, and begin to dig among the espadas. I brought rocks. We cut a branch of mesquite and made a cleft cross out of it. And so we buried him.
📕 Tramping through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
Harry Franck
1916
Harry Franck, the vagabond’s vagabond. Another forgotten travel writer from the turn-of-the-century, Franck’s travels began in college when he bet a classmate he could travel around the world without money (which he subsequently did). His travels took him around the world many times over, and readers enjoyed his clear-eyed and sardonic point of view, which had more in common with the wry writing of Charles Flandrau (previous letter) than, say, the romanticism of Richard Halliburton. Unlike his muckraking contemporaries Reed and Steffens, Franck was more a traveler for traveling’s sake than he was a journalist. His 1916 book, Tramping Through Mexico, takes him on a circuitous train journey from Laredo to the silver mines outside of Guanajuato, where he worked the mine while describing the deplorable working conditions—again, not in a muckraking sense, but more from a sense of anthropological remove. After the mines, Franck spent time in Mexico City, which he described as “a great disappointment”, differing “not even in its smells from a Clark Street lodging house in Chicago”. The entire city, Franck wrote, “with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower east side New York turned Spanish in tongue.” So, not a fan! Which makes his book a rare-tempered entry in our list. I’d give it a read for two reasons: one, to appreciate the difference between Franck’s dispassionate and clear-eyed narrative versus the exaggerated romanticism of, say, Richard Halliburton (below), or the political writing of Reed and Steffens. And two, for his chapters on the silver mines. It was the extraction of silver, not gold, that powered Spain’s economic engine in the New World, and which led to such misery among the indigenous in Mexico (and beyond). Those mines continued to pay dividends after Independence, but more for American investors who didn’t have much concern for their workers’ welfar. Read Franck to be reminded of how—what’s the term—“fucked up” exploitative labor can be, and to get a better appreciation of how Spanish rule crippled Mexico’s development for centuries.
“By law a Mexican injured in the mine can not be treated on the spot, but must first be carried to Guanajuato—often dying on the way—to be examined by the police and then brought back to the mine hospital. Small hurts were of slight importance to the peons. During my first hour below, a muddy rock fell down the front of a laborer, scraping the skin off his nose, deeply scratching his chest and his thighs, and causing his toes to bleed, but he merely swore a few round oaths and continued his work. The hospital doctors asserted that the peon has not more than one fourth sensitiveness of civilized persons. Many a one allowed a finger to be amputated without a word, and as chloroform is expensive the surgeon often replaced it with a long draught of mescal or tequila, the native whiskies.”
📕 Into Mexico and Out!
Lincoln Steffens
1916
One of the original muckrakers (and mentor to John Reed), Lincoln Steffens wrote magazine and newspaper exposés, most frequently in McClure’s and The American Magazine, that reported on political corruption. From 1914 to 1915 he reported on the Mexican Revolution from Veracruz, where he interviewed Venustiano Carranza, the eventual president of Mexico who organized the Constitutional army first against the Victoriano Huerta (who had usurped the presidency) and then against the revolutionary forces of the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata in the south and, in the north, Pancho Villa (with whom John Reed was embedded). Yes, it was a very complicated time, and that—along with Steffens’ style of writing, which assumes a great deal of foreknowledge about Mexican affairs—makes Into Mexico and Out! difficult to recommend. And anyway, it’s not really a book, but rather a lengthy and nicely illustrated magazine article. If you’re interested in Steffens and the Mexican revolutionary era through the eyes of foreign journalists, I would suggest instead the academic articles “Lincoln Steffens and the Mexican Revolution” and “Three Radicals and a Revolution: Reed, London, and Steffens on Mexico”.
“If,” said a Mexican statesman to me at Eagle Pass last fall, “if you Americans would look across the border there and say that Mexico is a rich country and beautiful, and that you covet it; that we Mexicans are a weak people and you are strong; and that, therefore, you are going to come over and take Mexico—we could understand that. We would fight, and we would probably die, but we wouldn’t hate you so much.”
—Lincoln Steffens, Into Mexico and Out!
📕 New Worlds to Conquer
It is my sincere and abiding belief that, were Halliburton born a Millennial, he would today be the most-followed, most-subscribed, and likely most reviled travel YouTube vlogger. That’s how giddily naive and dramatic and stupidly adventurous he was, attempting feats so absurd and grandiose that it was probably little surprise when, in 1938, he disappeared while trying to pilot a Chinese junk across the Pacific. But almost a decade prior to that watery end, Halliburton “recreated” the march of Cortés, dramatically re-imagined blood sacrifices, summited Popocatépetl, and jumped headlong into the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza at midnight (twice), before sailing to Panama where he became the first person to swim the length of the Panama Canal, through fifty miles of barracuda- and alligator-filled waters, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Mexican Revolution was long over by the time Halliburton visited Mexico, and the controversies that animated that previous era (socialism vs. capitalism, indigenous labor vs. foreign business) were, for the moment at least, no longer front-page news in the States. And anyway, compared to his more journalistically minded predecessors who publicized the revolutionary cause in Mexico—especially Reed, Steffens, and Franck—Halliburton is nothing more than a publicist for himself. Besides: You can’t rightly call New Worlds to Conquer a proper Mexico travelogue, as the book is more about Halliburton’s imagination and derring-do than it is about the country or the people, both of which simply serve as convenient exotic backdrops. But that said, it’s absolutely one of the more entertaining books in this list. Think of it as a YouTube vlog from an handsome man sporting a fashionable mid-Atlantic accent. Recommended.
Nearer and nearer the edge … yearning to draw still nearer the great green serpent’s eye. I must go to the Rain God’s realm waiting far below … In my imagination I see the nacons lift up the bride … the warrior, resolute, is poised … and I know that when he leaps into the void that I’ll leap too. The music swells … the signal sun has spoken … the girl is flung far out into the pit … the warrior is leaping after her … I took one deep breath, hung for an instant on the brink, and then plunged, headlong, into the abyss.
📕 What is Julian’s?
Julian’s is a handbook for curious travelers written by Steve Bryant, who lives and works in Mexico City. Julian’s is named for his grandfather and the wordmark is designed in Frustro, a typeface inspired by the Pemrose Triangle, and which represents impossible objects—appropriate for Mexico City, which Salvador Dali once described as more surreal than his art. Come visit us soon, we’d love to meet you.