Review: Barry Yourgrau on Nellie Campobello

A tenacious young woman takes hold of history and makes it her own

First edition of Cartucho; Nellie and Gloria Campobello, circa 1932

The extraordinary woman born Francisca Moya Luna, who became Nellie Campobello, stands alone as a significant—increasingly significant—female chronicler, scorned at first, of the Mexican Revolution, that overwhelmingly male literary territory. As an opening chapter in a fabled larger career, her slim volume, Cartucho (Cartridge): Tales of the Struggle in the North, appeared initially in 1931, about a decade after the war came to an end. It is an album of fifty-two vignettes—many a few hundred words long, a couple that also feature corridos (ballads)—drawn freely from Nellie’s autobiographical daily world of violence as a child in Parral, Chihuahua, a small town in Mexico’s north, the heartland, so cruelly contested, of the revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa. (Villa would eventually be assassinated in Parral.)

The Revolution’s blood-soaked delirium between neighbors and cousins left over a million slaughtered from a population of 15 million. And slender Cartucho is one of the most unrelentingly brutal of books. Its savageries, though, are rendered in the voice of a child, with a child’s directness and startling, innocent candor and curiosity, giving a unique naïve force to the horrors being recorded. Over seventy years later, Cartucho would inspire Juan Pablo Villalobos’s (darkly comic and brutal) novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, narrated by the very young son of a Mexican narco-baron. Nellie was ten years old when the Revolution began in 1910, in late adolescence by its end. But she keeps a remembered young girl’s perspective throughout Cartucho.

“That night,” this young girl declares at one point, unashamed, “I went to sleep dreaming they would shoot someone else and hoping it would be next to my house.”

A hope not in vain.