The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magrn

...The notebooks go from October 22 to November 20, 1922, but intertwined are episodes from Flores Magon's childhood, his dealings with revolutionary leaders, photo opportunities with artists and politicos like the novelist Mariano Azuela, even premonitions of his own strange death from suffocation (a murder...

...In Day's own words in the introduction, The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon is "a novel of philosophical violence...

...17 July 1992: 27 analyzing this controversial anarchist whose vision had a frightening echo, Day is able to penetrate the superficial layers of history and investigate the labyrinthine paths of Mexico's collective soul...

...The semitheological rebellion broke out in 1926, just four years after the death, in a Kansas cell, of Ricardo Flores Magon, a famous ideologue who helped shape antireligious sentiment in Mexico and whose anarchism was embraced at one point or another by many of the uneducated freedom-fighters in the revolution, among them Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa...

...The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon, a mosaic dealing with Mexican folklore, a novel about the futility of war, is required reading for those attracted to Greeneland or fascinated with Mexico—a land where people oscillate between earthly power and celestial glory...

...Douglas Day has turned this footnote, this Antichrist, into a metaphor of vision and blindness...

...He is in prison in the United States, where he was considered a "dangerous agitator" and was taken as a political prisoner without the possibility for extradition...

...A most important outlet was Regeneration, a journal sympathetic to liberals that became a symbol of resurgent anticlericalism and helped provide inspiration, years later, for a revolt of armed peasants shouting "Viva Cristo Reyl"—Long live Christ the King—in Jalisco, Michoacan, and other neighboring states in the south...

...and to discuss how Mexicans were (and still are) perceived in stereotypes—outlaws, drunkards, lazy workers—on this side of the Rio Grande...

...In this narrative, the two interests coalesce...

...Clearly, this narrative device has a dual objective: to analyze the complexities of the protagonist's life in flashbacks...

...Perhaps the most remarkable piece of fiction about the period is Graham Greene's classic The Power and the Glory, about a disoriented, alcoholic priest in the southern state of Chiapas...

...Flores Magon is allowed to tell his own story as death nears...

...BETTE S. WEIDMAN teaches at Queens College ILAN STAVANS, a Mexican essayist, is writing a book on Hispanic culture in the U.S...

...In R. BRUCE DOUGLASS is associate professor in the department of government at Georgetown University...

...Both are literary examinations from the viewpoint of a foreigner—that is, the campesino struggle as perceived from afar and in English...

...Martyrs will come and go, but Mexico is likely to remain the same...

...The result is intriguing and ought to be seen as a sequel of sorts to Carlos Fuentes's Old Gringo, the 1985 novel about the mysterious death of Ambrose Bierce across the Rio Grande...

...Raised by a progressive father in a profoundly Catholic environment, his education proved to be explosive: in his eyes, the country's widespread poverty was a result of state corruption and the church's postponement of justice to the afterlife...

...Flores Magon, born in 1884, was a heavy-set and heavy-smoking journalist who made love to Emma Goldman and was a close friend of the celebrated satirist Jose Guadalupe Posada...

...Flores Magon' s hatred for religion and his anticlericalism blinded him to the deep collective eschatology—a mixture of Christianity and Aztec theology—Mexicans have embraced since Hernan Cortes...

...While alive he was pretty much detested by everyone, but once dead the Mexican government elevated him to the stature of hero...

...An avid reader of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, he promoted anarchic goals as a viable solution and published his feverish views in several magazines...

...As a result, Magon was glorified by his fellow politicians but alienated from his people...

...The award-winning biographer of Malcolm Lowry and the commonwealth professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Virginia, Day has been a devoted student of the Mexican Civil War as a case of futile armed struggle and of Mexican folklore...

...Flores Magon was convinced that the thirty-fiveyear-long Porfirio Diaz dictatorship had to be overthrown if things were to change, and he thought Catholicism was the worst source of such evil...

...While the protagonist, a mortal of wit and intelligence, is unable to foretell the future, close to his end he indirectly announces the 1926 Cristero rebellion and describes his country as frustrated and incapable of keeping hope alive...

...And indeed, one ought to remember that one by one, each of the Commonweal revolution's leaders was assassinated...

...not even one survived, and Mexico was left to be governed by mediocrity...

...The novel shows how graceful men like Zapata, and complicated men like Flores Magon, wanted something better for Mexico, but the odds were against them: Catholicism isn't eradicable and the struggle to combat corruption and individual ambition is doomed...

...Ilan Stavans he 1910 Mexican Revolution was followed by a religious aftershock: an anticlerical movement known as La Cristiada or theCristero Rebellion that was tolerated, perhaps promoted by President Plutarco Elias Calles, to destroy the massive support of Catholicism among the poor, and to deepen the abyss between church and state...

...And much like the ideologues of the Russian Revolution, today he is just a footnote in history...

...His story is told, with sparks of poetic freedom, by Douglas Day in his second novel, The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon...

...A crusader for social justice, Flores Magon was seen by some supporters of the clergy as the Antichrist...