Pacificos: Accounts from the everyday citizen

Los Pacificos

Emily Blackford and Stephanie Smith

            Most often when reading stories of the Mexican Revolution, one would find the documents from the perspective of soldiers, political leaders, or third party outsiders. Often overlooked are the citizens of Mexico, the ones who were the most heavily affected by this violent revolution. Pacificos refers to the people who were not involved in the revolution but paid dearly for it. The following documents are accounts, both fictional and nonfictional, of the everyday trials experienced throughout the revolution. In López Y Fuentes’ El Indio, is a fictional account of the Mexican Indians’ experience armed intruder. Batalla’s My Village during the Revolution, is a nonfictional document accounting three separate Mexicans’ experiences during the revolution including violence, robbery, and mass paranoia. Henry’s the Death of Frank Henry, which talks about violences between the Zapatistas and Carrancistas and how the Zapatistas looted the village. Gaván’s Escaping the Revolution, tells a tale of a family escaping Mexico and the revolution and making their way to freedom in America.

Though a work of fiction, El Indio is a powerful narrative on the situation before, during and after the Mexican Revolution. The village chronicled in the novel faces a band of armed men who overthrow the current authorities and kill the military leaders. The Indians seemed indifferent to these people, guided by a personal liking or by fear of consequences. The Indians were required to give these soldiers fodder and tortillas as a sort of tax levied against the village. Though surely frightening, their experience details far less violence than many other faced.

In the case of several native Mexicans, the violence inflicted upon them by the Revolutionaries amounted to a far greater scale. In My Village during the Revolution, three different Mexican natives recount their experiences during the Revolution. Manuel Massieu discusses the violence that appeared and left suddenly and without warning. Often, hunger was linked to these arrivals and departures. With hunger widespread throughout the community, many members became suspicious of those who seemed to be more prosperous than them, often rioting against them and attacking them violently. Antonio Casas describes the Constitutionalists who would come and ransack their village. In return, the soldiers would give them shining paper money that was useless. Nefi Acosta and María Martínez described the anxiety amongst the people, living daily in fear of being tortured or killed by one of the factions.

This next narrative recounts the death of Frank Henry from the view of one of his family members. This sad tale tells of Frank Henry of San Miguel, a place Frank had always hoped to leave. The Zapatistas made this impossible, they took all the animals that were able to carry a human. The camp did however find a slight liberation from the Carrancistas, who ran the Zapatistas out of the camp. These Carrancistas told grand stories about the successes of their armed forces, bringing a small hope to the camp’s residents. Not long after, a Spaniard warned the residents that the Carrancistas were saddling up to leave the camp, much to everyone’s dismay. After the Carrancistas had left, a small band of Zapatistas invaded the camp and started looting houses. As the drunk and gun-heavy Zapatistas approached Frank’s house, he stood outside to meet them in a valiant effort to save his home. Frank was shot and killed immediately. His house was then looted and left, leaving Frank Henry’s family with an empty home and his dead body at the front.

In this final narrative Escaping the Revolution, Gaván tells the tale of a family hoping not to be another victim of the revolution; their only way to achieve this is to leave Mexico behind them. This penniless and poverty-stricken family was forced to rent out one of their rooms just to make ends meet. After living like this for so long, the family decided they could not bare it a single moment longer and decided to flee from revolutionary Mexico. They made their way to a federal train taking citizen passengers to Juaréz. Along the way the train was machine-gunned and stopped frequently to fight off revolutionary forces. At every stop, the train lost two to three freight cars, sometimes bearing passengers. Even worse, the train had exhausted all provisions and along the way, vital bridges had been burnt forcing passengers to help build makeshift bridges in order to pass. Through all the struggles of the journey, the family managed to make it to Juarez before making their way to the American station of Santa Fe and their eventual freedom.