The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa: Martin Luis Guzman and the Politics of Life Writing

By Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Martin Luis Guzman was many things throughout his career in twentieth-century Mexico: a soldier in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, a journalist-in-exile, one of the most esteemed novelists and scholars of the revolutionary era, and an elder statesman and politician. In The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa, we see the famous author as he really was: a careful craftsman of his own image and legacy. His five-volume biography of Villa propelled him to the heights of Mexican cultural life, and thus began his true life's work. Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody shapes this study of Guzman through the lens of "life writing" and uncovers a tireless effort by Guzman to shape his public image.

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa places Guzman's work in a biographical context, shedding light on the immediate motivations behind his writing in a given moment and the subsequent ways in which he rewrote or repackaged the material. Despite his efforts to establish a definitive reading of his life and literature, Guzman was unable to control that interpretation as audiences became less tolerant of the glaring omissions in his self-portrait.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9780826520555

Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator for the Master in Translation Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar.

Book preview

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa

Martín Luis Guzmán and the Politics of Life Writing

Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Vanderbilt University Press

NASHVILLE

© 2016 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2016

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Book design by Dariel Mayer

Composition by Vanderbilt University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2014038117

LC classification number PQ7297.G85Z63 2015

Dewey class number 863—dc23

ISBN 978-0-8265-2053-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2055-5 (ebook)

A mi querida Yovanna

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue. First Glimpse of Guzmán

Introduction. The Eightieth Birthday, October 1967

Part One. The Push for Posterity

1. Autobiographical Acts within and beyond Apunte sobre una personalidad

2. Controlled Readings and Contested Memories in Academia

Part Two. Looking beyond Mexico

3. Autobiographical Authority in Crónicas de mi destierro, El águila y la serpiente, and La sombra del Caudillo

4. New Biographies

Part Three. Courting Cárdenas

5. Political Rhetoric and the Female Subject in Maestros rurales

6. Guzmán’s Citizenship and the Vindication of Pancho Villa

Conclusion. The Tlatelolco Massacre, October 1968

Appendix. Editorial History of the Obras completas as Compiled by Guzmán

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

There are many individuals and institutions whose financial, intellectual, and personal support have made this project possible and to whom I am eternally grateful. First, I would like to thank the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for their generous support. I am also grateful to the professors of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who have served as my teachers: Rolena Adorno, Roberto González Echevarría, Iván Fernández Peláez, Georgina Dopico-Black, Josefina Ludmer, Óscar Martín, María Rosa Menocal, Fernando Rosenberg, Lidia Santos, and Noël Valis. I also extend my thanks to María Crocetti, Sonia Valle, and all the lectors that I have had the privilege of working with in the Spanish language program. Finally, I would like to thank my advisor, Aníbal González Pérez, for his guidance in this project from start to finish.

While any academic’s work naturally draws on that of his or her peers, few have been as fortunate as I to have had such open and generous support from other scholars. When I arrived in Mexico City in the fall of 2008, I was an enthusiastic debutant in the work of Martín Luis Guzmán, and I left a member of a small but devoted tribe of guzmaniacos. I would like to thank Verónica Arellano, Fernando Curiel, Edith Negrín, and Rafael Olea Franco for taking the time to meet with me, discuss my project, and share their own insights. A very special thanks goes to José Roberto Gallegos Téllez Rojo, who spent years organizing the Martín Luis Guzmán Franco Archive at the Archivo Histórico de la UNAM and who has always been willing to help me track down the documents I needed—even now that I am half a world away in Qatar. Most of all, I am grateful to Susana Quintanilla, whose passion for Guzmán is contagious, and who has gone above and beyond in giving me free rein in her personal research archive.

Stateside, I would like to express my gratitude to Ben Fallaw. Without his in-depth historical research regarding Cárdenas’s reform efforts in Yucatán—not to mention his generosity in sending me a copy of Cárdenas Compromised—I would not have been able to write Chapter 5 of this book. I also wish to thank Max Parra, Adela Pineda Franco, and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado for their research in general and for taking the time help me with my project in particular. A special thanks goes to Sara Poot-Herrera and the entire UC Mexicanista group for being such a vibrant and supportive academic community.

I also want to thank the institutions that have allowed me to continue my research and writing over the past few years and the colleagues there who have supported me. First, at Williams College, I wish to thank Gene Bell-Villada and Leyla Rouhi, who have been my mentors for over decade, and Soledad Fox and Jennifer French, who have been mentors for almost as long. Second, I wish to thank Dr. Amal Al-Malki and Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer for allowing me to be part of Hamad bin Khalifa University’s Translation and Interpreting Institute, and Tarek Shamma and Sue-Ann Harding for being such wonderful colleagues and role models. Last, I wish to express my gratitude to Gina Sherriff, Janelle Gondar, Lauren Sanchez, Ania Wójtowicz, and my wife, Yovanna Cifuentes-Goodbody, for their assistance in preparing this manuscript during different stages of the project.

PROLOGUE

First Glimpse of Guzmán

On January 16, 1915, Mexico City was in chaos. The revolutionary faction that held the city, the Convention of Aguascalientes, had already broken with the Constitutionalist army, and now they had renounced their alliance with General Francisco Villa’s forces, too, and begun to abandon the capital. With military tribunals executing traitors within the city and the Constitutionalist army approaching from the south, military and government officials of all stripes began to flee. Francisco Villa sent a train to collect his own supporters, who crowded into the wagons and left for Aguascalientes a few days before the capital fell. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old bureaucrat who had left his university studies to join the revolution. His name was Martín Luis Guzmán.

Guzmán’s decision to rejoin Villa was a serious gamble. After all, he had aligned himself with the same convencionistas who had just betrayed the general. As he recounted years later in a memoir (or a novel, depending on who you ask and when you ask them), the young revolutionary was greeted by Villa with a warm embrace: I knew you wouldn’t desert me (383; I.360).¹ Over the next hour, as Villa finished his dinner, Guzmán spoke to him about all that had happened in Mexico City, trying to clear himself of any wrongdoing. After the general had assured his safety by offering him a position as his personal secretary, Guzmán asked for permission to travel to Chihuahua in search of his wife and children. Perhaps aware that this was a lie—You’re not going to desert me, are you? (386; I.362)—Villa granted him leave and even escorted him to the train station. As the train pulled out of Aguascalientes, carrying Guzmán toward his escape at the US-Mexico border, he proclaimed with a mix of wonder and worry, Mexico is so big! Fourteen hundred kilometers to the border! (386; I.363).²

Author, narrator, and protagonist of El águila y la serpiente—this is the Martín Luis Guzmán that I first encountered when I was an exchange student at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa. A professor recommended Guzmán’s book as introduction to Mexican literature, something I could work through slowly as I improved my Spanish. A decade later, I can say that no one book has more influenced my intellectual life. It was through Guzmán’s prose that I learned to read in Spanish. There are words and phrases that I use on a regular basis that still remind me of the moments in his novel where I first learned them. More important, Guzmán’s mix of humor and drama, the evocative descriptions of revolutionary Mexico and its protagonists, immersed me in a literary world so rich that it became the focus of my academic career.

As I began to study the author of the El águila y la serpiente in depth, I learned that Guzmán was one of the most important figures in Mexican intellectual life of the twentieth century. First, the book that I so loved was a foundational work of modern Mexican letters, one of the canonical novels of the revolution. Similar praise was due to his postrevolutionary political thriller La sombra del Caudillo, which was a forerunner of the dictatorship novels of the Latin American Boom. As a journalist, he had written for, directed, and founded newspapers in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He was even responsible for one of Mexico City’s first radio stations. As a cultural figure, he had served as a member of the Mexican Academy of Language, president of the Mexico City Ballet, and director of the National Commission for Free Textbooks (CONALITEG). As a politician, he had been a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, a senator of the republic, and an ambassador to the United Nations. He had even served as an advisor to Spanish president Manuel Azaña while living in exile. Finally, as an entrepreneur, he had founded several publishing houses in Mexico, as well as a chain of bookstores that exists to this day. Yet, for all of Guzmán’s accomplishments and fame, I noticed that literary critics were much more likely to focus on other members of his generation—José Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes especially. While the mark of these two intellectual giants on twentieth-century Latin American thought is undeniable, it did not seem to completely explain the relative lack of writing on Guzmán.

A few years after returning from Xalapa, I remarked to someone at a reception that I had chosen to focus my research on Martín Luis Guzmán. He quickly answered, "I love El águila y la serpiente. It’s a shame the author was such a fascist." This was my first confrontation with another Guzmán, one whose reputation increasingly tarnished the legacy of the author I was studying. It was the same Guzmán who was seen as a pro-regime writer for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the one who unwaveringly supported that party in the wake of its brutal repression of the student movement in 1968. It was the man whose strictness and sense of self-worth were often impossible to deal with, the one whose actions had been so unpardonable that a generation of scholars largely refused to discuss his work in depth.

These are the two versions of Guzmán, the canonical and the forgotten, that have come to form the foundation of this present study. Of course, I also encountered many other versions—among them, a young man more interested in his girlfriend than intellectual pursuits, a militant atheist, and a loving but intimidatingly strict grandfather. However, any scholar that studies Guzmán will eventually find him- or herself dealing primarily with this binary, the celebrated and the infamous. In my own attempts to understand this two-sided legacy, I realized that my task was not to give preference to one over the other, redeeming or impugning the author once and for all. Rather, I have chosen to start by acknowledging the coexistence of these two figures. From that starting point, I have arrived at the conclusion that it is important to study Guzmán first and foremost because his work and his legacy are emblematic of a generation. The author was one of a small group of young intellectuals who lived through the Mexican Revolution and helped shape the state that followed; individuals who attempted to balance their ideals, political realities, and personal ambitions—all while benefitting from the prosperity of postrevolutionary Mexico. Second, Guzmán’s efforts to shape his own reputation, using his literary production to different ends during different moments of his life, reveal the strategies through which identity constantly changes. His ultimate inability to completely control his reputation speaks to the fact that identity is, among other things, a negotiation between the subject and the surrounding world. For that reason, this is a book about the legacy that Guzmán envisioned for himself as well as the limits of that vision.

Recently, a colleague reviewed my manuscript and told me to clarify Guzmán’s aims. Is he pursuing literary consecration, political influence, or success as a cultural entrepreneur? The answer is all three, and often at the same time. And it is the interplay between all of them—present both within the author’s works and within the artistic, political, and economic context into which he deployed them—that have led me to focus on Guzmán as a biographer and autobiographer. What I have tried to show is how all these goals shape and are shaped by the author’s efforts to capture individuals in prose—that is, in the complex interactions that occur between life writing and life itself.

INTRODUCTION

The Eightieth Birthday, October 1967

When Martín Luis Guzmán reached his eightieth birthday, the most prominent members of Mexico’s intellectual community celebrated both the author himself and the magnitude of his literary legacy. At a luncheon in his honor, poet and diplomat José Gorostiza toasted him as a master of narrative on a par with a foundational figure in Mexican letters, sixteenth-century chronicler and conquistador Bernal Díaz de Castillo (La felicidad 11). At another event, novelist José Revueltas stated unequivocally that it is no exaggeration to say that all modern Mexican narrative prose is descended from the work of Martín Luis Guzmán (22). While these speakers lauded him for his past accomplishments, Guzmán himself seemed more focused on his present and future. Regardless of the months or years he had left, he was determined to live them as a young man (Discurso . . . aniversario 25). He then expressed his affinity for Mexico’s younger generation, whose increasing political protests and student strikes had recently brought about the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) by the Mexican army. He and his contemporaries needed to be open-minded, the author said, maintaining a malleable spirit when trying to understand what the younger generation is doing (24). Even when he alluded to his death, describing it as an inevitable fall from my saddle (25), it was in the context of a legacy that would be carried forward precisely by Mexico’s youth: a horse waiting expectantly for the next rider to gallop into the future.

What Guzmán did not mention in his remarks was that alongside this life narrative—the illustrious past, the celebratory present, and the enduring future of his oeuvre—there existed another, more material side to his literary success. In his study of the weekly news magazine Tiempo, Semanario de la Vida y la Verdad (where Guzmán was both the founder and editor-in-chief), critic Gabriel Zaid notes that Guzmán’s own books dominate the magazine’s best-seller list for the month of October 1967 (39–40). Zaid also shows that, in the weeks preceding and following the author’s birthday, nearly all the titles appearing on the list were published by Guzmán’s own Empresas Editoriales and that, moreover, the data on which these figures were based come from his own chain of bookstores, the Librerías de Cristal (142). In light of these facts, Guzmán’s eightieth birthday was not simply a literary event but a campaign of self-promotion that the author oversaw on every level. The various celebrations of him as an artist were covered by his magazine, his magazine advertised his works, and his works were sold in his bookstores. In short, his legacy as evaluated in October of 1967 was not simply the result of his literary production but also his extraliterary efforts to cultivate a place for himself within the pantheon of Mexican letters.

One fact that falls outside the scope of Zaid’s study is that this degree of vertical integration in the making of Guzmán’s literary profile is not unique to his eightieth birthday. On the contrary, the 1950s and 1960s were a period of intense editorial activity for the author. His Empresas Editoriales and Compañía General de Ediciones released nine titles by him as well as a biography of him. The majority of these texts had been published previously in newspapers and magazines, or in other editions during the 1920s and 1930s, but they now appeared within the context of a different life narrative. For example, the back cover of a 1960 edition of Filadelfia: Paraíso de conspiradores (originally published in 1931) declared, "No author in Mexico has surpassed the technical and emotional mastery of Martín Luis Guzmán . . . from El águila y la serpiente to Memorias de Pancho Villa." In fact, many of the books that Guzmán republished during this period include this same peritext. Though it appears to be merely the sort of exaggerated praise required of a back-cover blurb, the sweeping nature of the statement is noteworthy because the historical circumstances of these two works could not be more disparate. Guzmán wrote El águila y la serpiente while living in exile in the late 1920s, as an outspoken critic of President Plutarco Elías Calles. Memorias de Pancho Villa came ten years later, when the author had returned to Mexico with the overt support of President Lázaro Cárdenas. In short, the sentence unifies anti- and pro-regime works under a single narrative that places the author at the center of Mexican literature.

This book is a study of such gestures, from blurbs to birthday celebrations: it details the strategies used by Guzmán to forge his disparate works into a coherent literary legacy, the inconsistencies that he glossed over along the way, and the character and the limits of his renovated life narrative. On the one hand, it examines Guzmán’s texts as objects: how they circulated, how the author framed them, and, more important, how he used them as capital to advance in political and cultural circles at different points in his life. On the other hand, because the great majority of Guzmán’s writing is biographical and autobiographical, it looks at the texts themselves: the construction of the author’s authority as a first-person narrator when speaking about his own life and the strategies he uses when capturing the lives of others. In short, this is a book about biography and autobiography in the strictest sense, but also in a much broader appreciation of the two terms—that is, the many modes in which lives are portrayed, deployed, and reconfigured. What is more, Guzmán’s own life and writings, indelibly marked by the civil war that broke out in Mexico in 1910, provide a window into the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution: the creation of an official history that legitimated one-party rule in the country for much of the twentieth century.

The label that encompasses the biographical, autobiographical, and framing texts that form the nucleus of this book is life writing. In order to understand Guzmán’s successful use of these texts in such diverse ways during different moments of his life, it is necessary to first work through the academic discussion from which that term has emerged, and then place Guzmán’s work in its historical and literary context. The use of the term life writing emerged from the challenges of feminist critics, who not only critiqued the male-identified conception of self underlying traditional biography and autobiography but also revealed how these two genres could serve as a space for alternative constructions of the subject. This revision not only pushes the boundaries of both genres but also shows how this type of writing can be used for the affirmation and inclusion of marginalized groups. Most important for the purposes of this study, it reveals how a writer deploys identity in a given text as a tool, tailored to the needs of the moment. This was the case not only for Guzmán but all Mexican authors writing in the 1920s about the violence and political unrest in Mexico of the previous decade. As the government began to turn these recent conflicts into the unified idea of the Revolution that would form the base of its legitimacy, an author’s literary decisions had serious political implications. What sets Guzmán apart is that, over the course of his life, he managed to use the same texts to deploy different versions of himself, shaping and reshaping them as political circumstances changed. And although the shape of Mexican literature as it emerged from this period afforded him the flexibility to reinvent himself from 1936 on, passing from a dissident to a regime writer, his ability to change and shape his legacy did reach its limit, and his political decisions largely undid that legacy only one year after the celebrations of his eightieth birthday.

Pushing the Boundaries of Life Writing

As mentioned, this book is a study of biography and autobiography, and for most twenty-first-century readers the distinction between the two is clear and unproblematic. So why fold them into a single term like life writing? The reason is that this term provides conceptual advantages that are key to understanding moments such as Guzmán’s eightieth birthday, which combine literary production and self-promotion in the pursuit of a larger narrative. These advantages, in turn, are the product of the challenges that literary critics have made to traditional notions of biography and autobiography. Historically speaking, the word biography dates to the late seventeenth century, an English permutation of a Greek term that had been