History of Mexican Revolution Essay Example for Free

History of Mexican Revolution EssayThe brisk transports readers to a ghost town on the desert plains in Mexico, and there it weaves together tales of passion, loss, and revenge. The village of Comala is populated by the wandering souls of former inhabitants, individuals not yet pure enough to enter heaven. Like the character Juan Preciado, who travels to Comala and absolutely finds himself confused, as readers we are not sure about what we suppose, hear, or understand. But the novel is enigmatic for otherwise reasons. Since publication in 1955, the novel has come to restore a style of writing in Mexico.Sparse language, echoes of orality, details heavy with meaning, and a fragmentary structure transformed the literary signifyation of rural behavior instead of the companionable realism that had dominated in earlier decades, Rulfo created a quintessenti totallyy Mexican, modernist gothic.. The haunting effect of Pedro Paramo derives from the fitful story of Mexican moderni ty, a story that the novel tells in a way that more objective historical and sociological analyses cannot. As an aesthetic expression characterized by imaginative understanding, the novel explores Mexican kind history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The decadent remnants of a quasi-feudal social order, violent revolutions, and a dramatic exodus from the countryside to the city all gave rig out to ghost towns across Mexico. Pedro Paramo tells the stories of three main characters Juan Preciado, Pedro Paramo, and Susana San Juan. From the point of view of Juan Preciado, the novel is the story of a sons search for identity and retribution. Juans mother, Dolores Preciado, was Pedro Paramos wife. Although he does not bear his fathers name, Juan is Pedros only(prenominal) legitimate son. Juan has returned to Comala to claim just whats ours, as he had earlier promised his dying mother.Juan Preciado guides readers into the ghost story as he encounters the lost souls o f Comala, sees apparitions, hears vocalisations, and eventually suspects that he too is dead. We see through Juans eyes and hear with his ears the voices of those buried in the cemetery, a reading experience that evokes the poetic obituaries of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology (1915). Along with Juan Preciado, readers piece together these fragments of lives to construct an image of Comala and its demise. Interspersed among the fragments recounting Juans story are flash patronizes to the biography of Pedro Paramo.Pedro is the son of landowners who abide seen better days. He also loves a young girl, Susana San Juan, with a lust that consumes his life into adulthood. I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. page 3 Although the story line in these biographical fragments follows a generally chronological order, the era of time is strangely distorted brief textual passages that may read like conversational exchanges someti mes condense large historical periods. Moreover, the trey-person narrative voice oscillates between two discursive registers.On the one hand, poetic passages of interior monologue capture Pedros love for Susana and his sensuality on the other, more exterior descriptions and dialogues represent a domineering feaster determined to amass wealth and possessions. Within this alternation between the first- and third-person narrative voices, readers must listen for another voice and reconstruct a third story, that of Susana San Juan. We overhear bits of her tale through the ears of Juan Preciado, listening with him to the complaints that Susanain her restless deathgives forth in the cemetery of Comala.I was thinking of you, Susana. Of the green hills. Of when we used to fly front kits in the windy season. We could hear the sounds of life from the town below we were high above on the hill, playing out string to the wind. Help me Susana. And soft manpower would tighten on mine. Let out more string. page 12 Poetic sections evoke her passion for another man, Florencio, and Pedro never becomes the object of Susanas affection. Juan Preciado, Pedro Paramo, and Susana San Juan are all haunted by ghosts in turn, they become ghosts who haunt the realities of others.They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket. page 6 Although as readers we have the sense of lives once lived by these characters, they emerge for us as phantasms, as partially known presences who are not immediately apprehensible and who linger with inexplicable tenacity. Reading Pedro Paramo creates a transformative recognition of Mexicos move toward modernity in the early twentieth century more than the objective lessons learned from social and cultural history, as a novel, Pedro Paramo produces a structure of feeling for readers that immerses us through the experience of haunting.As ghosts, Pedro, Susana, and Juan point outward to the social context of Mexico in the difficult movement toward modernization, toward social arrangements that never completely die as a newer social order is established. Pedros accumulation of land as a rancher harks back to the trends of capital accumulation during the benign dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911).The Porfiriato strove to modernize the nation through the development of infrastructure and investment it allowed for anomalies such as the creation of the Media Luna ranch and strong local power brokers such as Pedro Paramo who shared the interests of the elite and helped maintain a thinly veiled feudal social order. Within this context, Susana San Juan and other individuals murmur their complaints in ghostly whispers. Indeed, at one point, Rulfo planned to call the novel Los murmullosthe murmurs.Speaking in the streets of Comala, overheard in dreams, and groaning in the cemetery, these spectral murmurs bespeak a reality hidden beneath the facade of Porfirian progress. The Mexican Revoluti on of 1910-1920 gave expression to repressed peasantsthe campesinos of rural Mexicoand put an end to the Porfiriato. Susana San Juan, in turn, reveals the repressed role of women in a patriarchal order. In this world women are chattel and ranch-owners can forcibly populate the countryside with bastard children by asserting feudal rights to the bodies of peasant women keep on their lands.Peasant revolutionaries and Susana San Juan as well are all manipulated by Pedro Paramo. He can force events to keep them all in the places where he would have them, but he cannot control their desires and their diversions. The peasants celebrate festivals, and after the revolution they eventually rebel again by participating in the Cristero Revolt of 1926-1929. Susana suffers guilt and remembers pleasure in evocative passages that underscore her erotic ties to Florencio, a man unknown to others in the novel, perhaps a dead soldier from the revolution, the man Pedro would have had to be in order to have Susanas love.The sky was crowded with fat, swollen stars. The moon had come out for a little while and then vanished. It was one of those distressing moons that nobody looks at or even notices. It hung there for a little while, pale and disfigured, and then hid itself behind the mountains. -Juan Rulfo References Carol Clark DLugo, The Fragmented Novel in Mexico The political science of Form (Austin University of Texas Press, 1997), 70-81. Patrick Dove, Exigele lo nuestro Deconstruction, Restitution and the Demand of Speech in Pedro Paramo, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10. 1 (2001) 25-44,