This dissertation examines various texts that were published in Mexican newspapers during the Revolution (1910-1917) and attempts to determine to what extent the authors of those texts combined journalism with literary creativity as they wrote about the Revolution. The main argument is that many of the texts that appeared in newspapers during the 1910s and covered topics related to the Revolution displayed language, style, and structural elements similar to those found in the official literary narratives of the Mexican Revolution that emerged in the 1920s. The argument is founded on the understanding that sociopolitical and ideological changes in Mexican society, as well as the desire for a new national literature, led intellectuals to re-classify some of the texts that appeared in newspapers in the 1910s from journalism to literary works and adopted their stylistic and thematic elements for the new literature. This is evident in Mariano Azuela’s novel, Los de Abajo and Ricardo Flores Magón’s well-known short stories “Dos revolucionarios” and “El apóstol.”
The theoretical framework of this study is informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, and Juan Carlos Parazuelos that contend that the value of a narrative changes continuously in response to changes in the society that creates it. Furthermore, the study utilizes Anibal Gonzalez’ notion that there is a gray area between literary narrative and journalism and, therefore, narratives that fall inside the borders of journalism and literature can be classified as one or another or both depending how they interact with social elites, governments, and political affiliations.
Finally, this study maintains that journalism, in combination with artistic expression, provided the foundations upon which the later narrative of the Revolution began its development. It was in the realm of journalism that the authors first applied the elements of brevity, direct speech, expressive, yet concise language, episodic narration, and emphasis on action over description and characterization that characterize the literature of the Mexican Revolution.