The heroic armed resistance of a handful of religiously inspired serranos to the Porfirian military at Tomochic in 1892 has long been a staple of Mexican lore, best remembered in the novel generally thought to have been written by one of the military’s participants, Heriberto Frías. Oxford University Press now offers the first English translation of the novel, an excellent one by Barbara Jamison, as part of its Library of Latin America. Antonio Saborit, professor of history at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, adds an informative introduction in which he traces the provenance of the book and places it within the literary genre of its time.
The general outline of the Tomochic uprising is well known. The village of some three hundred people in the Chihuahuan sierra, riven by long-standing personal rivalries and pressured by the demands of modernization, split apart. Half of its populace...
