Two Novels of Mexico

Two Novels of Mexico: The Flies / The Bosses by Mariano Azuela translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson brings the founding novelist of the Mexican Revolution back to the scenes that forged his art: panic, opportunism, and moral reckoning in a society unmade by war. Written by a physician who served in Pancho Villa’s army and later chronicled its collapse, these paired novellas distill Azuela’s incomparable witness. The Flies captures, with staccato velocity and dark humor, a single night of flight from Mexico City as politicians, ex-federals, and hangers-on scramble into a hospital car, rehearsing alibis and switching loyalties as Obregón’s troops approach. The Bosses turns somber and incandescent, anatomizing caciquismo—the entrenched rule of merchant-landlord “bosses”—through the Del Llano clan’s predations and the fragile idealism of small-town victims whose lives are shattered in the wake of Madero’s murder and Huerta’s reaction. Together, the novellas map the Revolution’s moral topography: not battlefield heroics, but the everyday bargains, betrayals, and moments of courage that determine who survives and at what cost.

Simpson’s agile translation revives Azuela’s tonal range—telegraphic banter, caustic caricature, and lyrical tenderness—while clarifying the political and historical stakes for contemporary readers. In The Flies, opportunists cycle through regimes—Díaz, Madero, Huerta, Villa, Carranza—with comic ferocity; in The Bosses, Azuela’s most moving creation, the solitary intellectual Rodríguez, confronts a town owned by its parasites, and a love story flickers against encroaching catastrophe. Long overshadowed by The Underdogs, these “novels of Mexico” reward renewed attention as precise social documents and audacious works of art. They speak to enduring questions—how civic fear corrodes character, how local power deforms justice, how revolutions are lived from below—making this volume essential for readers of Latin American literature, history, and anyone seeking the human textures behind political upheaval.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.