Reflections upon four literary and historical texts on the Mexican Revolution

Abstract

In the light of Michel de Certeau’s theoretical assumptions, four written texts about the Mexican Revolution and its historical agent, Francisco Villa, are discussed in this article. These works constitute the basis to reflect on two phenomena of history and literature writing: the techniques used by both disciplines to reconstruct the past, as well as the perspectives from which the Revolution discourse was observed and reproduced. Contrastive analysis is used to conclude that literature resolved symbolic aspects that historical discourse did not. What it did, however, was to provide a community in conflict with a face and sense.