The Battle of Tomochic_The Battle of Tomochic Memoirs of a Second Lieutenant

by Heriberto Frías

  Campos continued:

  Despite the discrepancies visible to criticism’s wise eye, the novel of Tomochic, though disorderly and written in the bivouac, in the marches, and in moments stolen from guard duty, displays an intense truthfulness, a radiant clarity, and a quick unfolding of events. It exhibits a clairvoyant grasp of the heroic act judged as rebellion, single details are wisely studied to personify character, and apt brush strokes draw the landscape. Its psychological analysis is achieved with brevity and synthesis, with creativity, truth, and reality.32

  But Frías’s name didn’t appear on the cover of Tomochic until 1899 in the Maucci edition of Barcelona. Finally, thanks to this book, the identification of its author came to a clear, satisfying resolution.

  Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote that the number of reprintings a book goes through is the novelist’s gauge of literary success. Did the Maucci edition of Tomochic have that significance for Frías? Or, in the darkest hours, what did it mean to this unusual Mexican writer? In reality, we can hardly say. In 1893, when Joaquín Clausell’s El Demócrata was born and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano died, copies of the first edition of Clemencia were still available, printed thirteen years earlier.33 Nevertheless, the seven years between the military campaign and the Spanish edition of the account of Tomochic was a long span of time for the state as well as for vulnerable Citizen Frías. Perhaps by the end of the century this massacre appeared to be another barely intelligible fact in the slow decade leading to the modern world of the twentieth century.

  During those years, Frías dedicated himself full-time to journalism in the capital. As far as we know, he earned his daily bread from the skimpy benefits obtained from the coffers of the Díaz-backed press writing articles on whatever came his way.

  Frías had already assumed the venal vitalist diversions of the press, making its volunteerist bitter tone his own. He lived the fabulous promise of the rotary printing press and the severe punishments of serving the charter imposed by the government on the bold brotherhood of the pen. Frías took the raucous, artistic, self-destructive path, but despite his literary pretensions, week after week he cranked out stories, legends, and Mexican military episodes. Frías tried to rescue national stories and events from oblivion, first in El Combate, beginning in May 1897, and then in Rafael Reyes Spíndola’s El Imparcial beginning in September of the same year. He did it as well as he could in the beggared style that the poorly paid journalism of the day earned, intoxicated by the fumes of morphine and his serious, sentimental, declamatory, incurable nationalism. The fuel for Frías’s fervid passion for his country’s history lasted until 1898. His immediate work consisted in putting together a portfolio of these odds and ends, which he then transformed into strange new titles, acknowledging them as his.

  Maybe it was the Maucci Brothers edition of Tomochic that sent Frías back to the mountains, to the unnamable hamlet. In January 1900, the stylish, incendiary Revista Moderna printed a previously unpublished story by Frías, “Los perros de Tomochic,” which was subsequently added as a chapter to the next edition of the novel. Later, in Frías’s lifetime, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano included the story in his 1924 Antología de cuentos mexicanos.34

  The year 1900 was a good one for Frías. Maucci brought out his Leyendas históricas mexicanas, a compendium of his columns from the journalistic enterprises of Emilio García and Reyes Spíndola. Enjoying absolute freedom since the War Council’s resolution of August 1893, Frías sued for a discharge from military service to the 3rd Infantry Battalion around the middle of November 1901. On orders from Porfirio Díaz, according to a communication from Bernardo Reyes, Secretary of War and Navy, to the captain of said battalion, Martín Luis Guzmán, Lieutenant Frías remained a commissioned officer in the infantry department of the war and navy ministry. He worked there until the beginning of February 1903.35

  The identity of Tomochic’s author resurfaced with the publication of the first edition of Francisco I. Madero’s declaration on La sucesión presidencial de 1910, where in commenting on the proof of absolute power in Mexico he mentions the events of Guerrero, Chihuahua. Without mentioning him by name, he cites the brave, honorable officer who narrated the military campaign against the civilian population. What edition was Madero referring to? The Rio Grande City one? The Spanish one? A collection from El Demócrata? Madero probably didn’t read the novel, nor was he familiar with the Spanish edition. He must have passed over the Texas edition and the first national edition as well, put out in 1906 by Valdés publishers for El Correo de la Tarde in Mazatlán, Sinaloa. This is the only explanation for the manner in which Madero wrote to Frías on Wednesday, February 24, 1909:

  Honorable Sir,

  I have just received your gracious fifteenth installment which I have read with great emotion because of its eloquent poetry.

  I already knew that you were the officer involved in the Tomochic affair. And if I didn’t say anything more, it was because I hadn’t known that you had also been on the point of being condemned to death.

  If I bring out another edition, as is very probable, then I will be very careful about making that fact known.36

  Madero kept his word. The subsequent editions of La sucesión presidencial de 1910 did Frías no injustice. In the meantime the author became a shadow of himself. He was the owner of a speaking mask that one day spoke under the name of Heriberto Frías.

  Notes

  1. The theses of two graduates of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, David López Peimbert (“Tomóchic,” 1963) and José María Lujan (“Relato de un incidente,” 1965) undoubtedly contributed to the renewed interest in the events in Tomochic, although the main stimulus was in large part due to the edition prepared by James W. Brown, Tomóchic (Mexico: Porrúa, 1968). Together they attracted new readers, new research, and readings of the main literature. Examples include: Aguirre, Lauro. Peleando en Tomóchic (El Paso, 1896); Almada, Francisco R. La rebelión de Tomochi (Chihuahua: Sociedad Chihuahense de Estudios Históricos, 1938); Chávez, Josè Carlos, Peleando en Tomochi (Ciudad Juárez: Imprenta Moderna, 1955); Chávez Calderón, Plácido, La defensa de Tomóchic (Mexico: Jus, 1964). Paul J. Vanderwood, who dedicated a few pages to the matter in Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), took up the theme again in “None but the Justice of God; Tomóchic, 1891–1892” in Jaime O. Rodríguez (ed.) Patterns of Contention in Mexican History (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1992). Some more recent studies are Pozo Marrero, Acalia, Dos movimientos populares en el noroeste de Chihuahua (Universidad Iberoamericana, 1991); Osorio, Rubén, Cruz Chávez: Los tomoches en armas (Chihuahua: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1991); Tomóchic en llamas (CNCA: Mexico, 1995); Illades Aguilar, Liliana, La rebelión de Tomóchic (Mexico, 1993); Vargas Valdés Jesús (ed.) Tomóchic: La revolución adellantada (Ciudad Juárez, 1994); Saborit, Antonio, Los doblados de Tomóchic. Un episodio de historia y literatura (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1994). Vanderwood again took up the theme in The Power of God and the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1998).

  2. For the details of Heriberto Frías’s military career, see Saborit, Los doblados de Tomóchic, pp. 55–74, 88–107, 137–148, and 165–169.

  3. “Juicio de una alemán sobre La débacle. Opinión de Le Figaro,” El Universal, October 26, 1892.

  4. “Las obras de Zola,” El Universal, November 22, 1892.

  5. Sr. Mateos is writing a drama that will be called Sedan: A stimulus. Zola writes La débacle and Mateos calls him a tecolote in his play, “Un poco de claro oscuro,” Mexico Gráfico, August 14, 1892.

  6. Ángel Pola, “How Pedro Castera wrote Carmen,” El Partido Liberal, January 15, 1893.

  7. “Sedán,” El Universal, January 7, 1893.

  8. Mathilde Reyes, “Joaquín Clausell, pintor, periodista y luchador incansable de la no-reelección.” Querétero, May 1990. This article is based on a
piece by Gabriel González Mier, a friend and contemporary of Clausell, although the author did not divulge her sources.

  9. Information on the anti-reelection demonstrations comes from “La manifestación antirreeleccionista de los estudiantes,” Diario del Hogar (April 8, 1893), and the quotation on the Gabriel González Mier episode and the rest of the biographical information come from “Centenario del nacimiento de la libertad en Francia, 1793–1893—Mexico. Centenario de la libertad de pensamiento en el mundo moderno. Joaquín Clausell.” Diario del Hogar, June 25, 1893.

  10. “El Demócrata,” El Monitor Republicano, February 1, 1893.

  11. “Las diez plagas de México,” El Demócrata, February 14, 1893.

  12. “La campaña de Tomóchic … Soon to appear in the columns of El Demócrata,” El Demócrata, February 2, 1893.

  13. “Tomóchic! Episodios de campaña (Relación escrita por un testigo presencial),” El Demócrata, March 14, 1893.

  14. “Episodios de la campaña de Tomóchic,” El Monitor Repyblicano, March 12, 1893.

  15. Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional. Dirección General de Archivo e Historia, Archivo de Cancelados, Frías Alcocer, Heriberto (henceforward SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH)XI/111/9-144457), f. 19.

  16. José Emilio Pacheco, Poesía Modernista: Una antología general (Mexico: SEP/UNAM, 1982) pp. 5–6. See also his prologue to Marcel Schwob, Vidas imaginarias. La cruzada de los ni?os (Mexico: Porrúa, Colección Sepan Cuantos 603, 1991).

  17. SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH, XI/111/9-14457, f. 4.

  18. Concepción Lombardo de Miramón, Memorias. Prologue and some notes by Felipe Teixidor, 2nd edition (Mexico, Editorial Porrúa, 1989), pp. 33–34.

  19. Frias’s aptitude test and his civil and military conduct are found in SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH, XI/111/9-14457, ff. 23–80.

  20. Rubén M. Campos, “La literatura realista mexicana 111. Tomóchic, Naufragio, El último duelo de Heriberto Frías,” El Nacional, April 18, 1897, pp. 2–3; SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH, X1/111/9-144457, f. 12; in f. 110, the letter according to which Sublieutenant Frías—accused of assault—was remanded in the custody of the prison judge from Thursday, July 2, 1891.

  21. SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH, 1X/111/9-14457, f. 175.

  22. “Revistas literarias de México (1821–1867),” José Luis Martínez (ed.), Escritos de literatura y arte, volume 1 of Obras completas (Mexico: SEP, 1988).

  23. Amado Nervo, “10 de mayo de 1898,” Obras completas 1, p. 792.

  24. See the prefatory notes by Clementina Díaz y de Ovando in Juan A. Mateos, El Sol de Mayo. Memorias de la Intervención (Mexico: Porrúa, Colección Sepan cuantos 197), p. xi.

  25. José Juan Tablada, “La feria de la vida,” Lecturas Mexicanas 22, Tercera Serie (Mexico: CNCA, 1991), p. 148.

  26. “El Desastre,” in Diario del Hogar, August 4, 1893. In this note the journal announced the end of the second part and the beginning of the third in the magazine section, as well as advertising the publication of the complete work in three volumes at a price of 50 centavos. However, the Diario del Hogar suspended the publication of Zola’s novel on January 31, 1894, on page 166 of the third part.

  27. “Tomóchic y Temósachic,” El Monitor Republicano, May 23, 1893.

  28. Fernand Braudel, “History and Environment,” The Identity of France, volume 1, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 31.

  29. “En libertad,” Diario del Hogar, August 1, 1894.

  30. “Naufragio. Novela del autor de Tomóchic. Costumbres mexicanas,” El Demócrata, June 21, 1895, to November 7, 1895.

  31. Rubén M. Campos, “La literatura realista mexicana,” El Nacional, April 4, 1897.

  32. Rubén M. Campos, “La literatura realista mexicana 111. Tomóchic, Naufragio, El úlltimo duelo,” El Nacional, April 18, 1897.

  33. Advertisements in Diario del Hogar, July 1893.

  34. Heriberto Frías, “Los perros de Tomóchic.” Revista Moderna, January 1900.

  35. SDN/DGAH/AC/FAH, X1/111/9-14457, ff. 138, 139, 141, 144, and 147.

  36. Francisco I. Madero. Archive of don Francisco I. Madero 2, Epistolario (1900–1909), eds Agustín Yáez and Catalina Sierra (Mexico: Ediciones de la Secretaría de Hacienda, 1963), p. 325.

  THE BATTLE OF TOMOCHIC

  CHAPTER 1

  Truth and Falsehood

  Amolten sun beat down on the decaying plaza, inducing a deathlike peace in the furnace of the day.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Miguel Mercado, a young second lieutenant with the 9th Battalion, stood at the far end of a side street leading into the desolate square and squinted at the city gates to his left. He wore a uniform of light cotton twill, and his shoes were white with dust; a kerchief was draped down over his shoulders to ward off the scorching sun.

  Directly in front of him stood the ancient fortress walls. More than anything, they struck Miguel as gloomy and sad. To his right, the uneven profile of the squat church steeple was outlined against an azure sky. A few houses with sparkling white facades rose up alongside the small, neglected church.

  At the center of the deserted plaza was a square bench surrounded by a garden of eight to ten skeletal trees whose scrawny branches sought the sky. Some garden! Holding his baby-smooth, sunburned face rigid, Miguel contemplated the desolate plaza, the only one in Guerrero City, with an air of wrath and ennui.

  “And they call this a city,” muttered Miguel.

  Half dead with hunger, the second lieutenant set out looking for an inn or a shop. With each strutting stride, his saber rattled as rhythmically as clinking coins in its sheath. Passing through the shady archway of the town gates, Mercado caught sight of a few ramshackle shops with shelves stacked with glistening, multihued bottles.

  The second lieutenant went in the double doors of a spacious shop swarming with weathered, long-haired men dressed in white shirts, coarse cloth pants, and antelope-hide boots. When he asked for a shot of tequila, it was silently set before him along with a glass of water.

  “Say, friend, where can I find an inn?” said Miguel to a man who drained his tequila in a single gulp. The giant of a man with rumpled hair and a matted beard shrugged and turned away.

  “Couldn’t say,” the man replied contemptuously, swigging back a glass of sotol.

  Miguel could hardly contain his sense of outrage. Since their arrival in Chihuahua, he and every other officer had been treated to the same combination of brutish contempt and arrogance.

  The man’s boorishness enraged Miguel. After eating nothing but flour tortillas and roasted beef for six days, he was looking forward to broth, beans, chili—the plainest of meals. Today he’d had nothing to eat except a thick flour tortilla for breakfast. There was nothing for him to do but drink up. Trembling with a ferocious thirst, he drained his tequila in one gulp.

  The sound of spurs clanking against flagstones and the familiar metallic rattling of a saber made him turn around. There was Gerardo, a boyish, good-natured lieutenant from general staff, whom he’d known in Mexico City. Framed by his cap and the protective white kerchief tucked into his black hussar’s jacket, Gerardo’s face was broad, with high color. He sported white pants and stiff riding boots, and he was so short his saber almost dragged behind him on the ground. Recognizing Miguel, Gerardo approached and called out joyously:

  “Hey, Mercado. I didn’t think I’d meet you here!” The two embraced affectionately, slapping each other heartily on the back as though knocking off the dust of the road.

  “What are you having, brother? What will it be?”

  “Nothing more to drink, but can we eat something around here?”

  “I’m headed for the inn. But first you and I are going to drink a couple of tequilas. Two tall ones, Don Pedro!”

  Talking a mile a minute, Gerardo enthusiastically waylaid the officer from the 9th Battalion, who was growing more irritated by the moment. “You must know this already! I’m over at general staff with General Rangel. Now we’re going to get to show what we’re made of. You’ll see how we thrash those To
mochic devils. They’re a brave bunch of men. That can’t be denied. I swear I thought they were all bluster at first. But they are brave, and quick as deer. One moment they’re here, and the next they’re way over on the mountaintop. ‘Glory to God and death to the soldiers,’ and then pow … damn, and they don’t even take aim. One glimpse and they’ll shoot you dead. I swear that for every empty cartridge there’s a dead man. Just imagine the state I was in when they put the general and me to the test. Here’s to your health, brother.”

  “Here’s to yours.” Still overwrought, Miguel ordered another round. Grudgingly he gave in to the consolation afforded by the vile Chihuahua tequila.

  Miguel leaned on the damp, dirty countertop as the little lieutenant’s booming voice carried over the jokes and general revelry of the other officers as he recalled his many misadventures. He felt his cares melt away.

  Then Miguel listened to the following account, as told by Gerardo, without comment:

  On September 29, 1892, General Rangel attempted to attack the town of Tomochic. General Ramírez had already been wounded in the fray and Major Prieto and Lieutenant Manzano had been killed. Amid the confusion of the defeat, when General Rangel went in search of refuge, his horse was killed. Then some Tomochic fighters approached him, disarmed and then insulted him by whacking him on the ass.

  “We don’t fight little boys. Go back home to your mama,” they told him, and left him swooning with fear.

  Mercado smiled at the irreverent tale. He knew that even though it was based on the facts of the defeat, it could be considered slanderous.

  Miguel retorted, “They say you all took a real beating on September 2.”

  “They’re lying! What beating? What happened was they shot my horse. The bullet came out of the blue. I fell on the mountainside and hit my head, and was left for dead. It’s a miracle that I’m alive to tell it.”