There is only one book that truly makes sense to be the first entry in our month-long celebration of Revolutionary Mexican art and cinema, and that is “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution”; Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs.

Written mid-way through Mexico’s Revolutionary decade in 1915, the novel tells the story of a peasant named Macías who runs afoul with his town’s landlord and must flee into the mountains with the Federales on his trail. There, he meets a crew of fellow outlaws and they band together to fight in the emerging Revolution.

However, as the war develops, the psyches of the men begin to shatter in the midst of bloodshed, betrayal, opportunism, and their own misguided treachery as they find themselves committing the same acts of sin that they were fighting to banish.

Author Mariano Azuela experienced the horrors and triumphs first-hand as a medic in the army of Pancho Villa. The time spent with the peasant rank of rebels greatly informed his writing and sympathies for his native land’s downtrodden outcasts.

WRITE BRAIN TV is proud to present this landmark meditation on the complexities of insurgency.