Survivors in Mexico by Rebecca West

BOOK REVIEW - Five Stars
Survivors in Mexico by Rebecca West
This book is an overview of Mexico’s transition from Conquistador to revolutionary conversion. It is well-written and with insight. Some chapters are monumentally revealing such as Revolution or Trotsky.

Excerpts;
The word “revolutionary”? in its Mexican sense, which denotes any person who initiates against opposition any action or course of actions beneficial to his people.
Territories in the New World just discovered by Columbus, on condition that the natives were converted to Christianity. This was not the best of introductions to the Christian faith. Alexander Borgia was one of the popes whose election can be reasonably supposed to have surprised Christ. He was one of the greatest scoundrels who ever succeeded in dying in bed, and that a bed which had served too many other purposes. Today we despise the mitred bishops and the crowned kings who paid obeisance to Alexander VI for maintaining that it did not matter that he was a lecher and a murderer with incest on his conscience, he was nevertheless the elected pope.



Pancho Villa, a cattle-rustler and bandit and genuine populist, a blood-and-thunder Robin Hood. There was Zapata, a pure Indian, who cared nothing for the central government and simply wanted to reconstitute the vanished Indian social system; his armies ranged Mexico, seizing the land which had been alienated from the Indian villages and killing the usurpers and, when they had done that, dropped their arms and set about cultivating the fields without another thought for fighting, unless attempts were made to dispossess them. There was Obregon, the nearest to a modern man, a trained mechanic, who became a victorious general not by courage or cunning but by sheer efficiency, and when he had to write a constitution he produced something that would, on the whole, have been passed by the Labor Parties of most countries that had an effective Labor Party.