Week 3: "Cartucho" (Campobello)

 Hello everyone! I hope everyone had a good weekend and enjoyed reading the books for this week. I read Cartucho this week because the description given said that it was stories from the Mexican Revolution but from the perspective of a woman. This is what drew me in to choosing this book in the first place, and overall I found it a really fascinating read. 

I found that the collection of short stories really kept me on my toes while reading, as sometimes the stories would connect with each other linearly and sometimes the timelines would be jumbled. At the beginning I thought that Campobello was just starting off with a small story about each individual character in the book in the section titled “Men of the North”. As I read on I discovered that the rest of the book would be filled with these short snippets of memories and stories from the men at war. 

I think hearing these very violent and graphic stories from the perspective of a child was kind of mind boggling to me. I feel like most people try to shelter children from the violence and destruction of war, and keep their involvement in it to a minimum. Reading these stories from her perspective as a child made me think about how much of an impact it must have had on her and many other children in Mexico at the time. 

I think some of the stories being out of place in the book really made me reflect on the concept of memory. I’m sure Campobello did this on purpose to reiterate the fogginess of memory and that this is how she documented and remembered this tragic time in her life. The lecture talked about the fragmentation of memory and I think that Campobello meant for this to be a vital aspect of her book and to remind us that these are meant to be memories, not a history lesson.

Some of the stories were brutally violent and graphic in depiction, which did make me have to stop reading at some points. I found the story about the man who the Villa would not execute by gunfire and made him run alongside their men until he died of exhaustion to be really intense. Then a couple stories later hearing about one of her mothers friends who wanted to buy the green pants and the shiny buckles on them. The back and forth between the intense material such as the executions and fighting to the humor and happy memories was also something that reminded me of the personal aspect of this book. This book deals with a lot of death, and remembering that it is from the perspective of the child adds a complete other layer of sadness to this book. Since it was from the perspective of the child we really had no bias on politics, ethics, or morals. It was plainly just the horrible stories and then Campobello would just move on. We were never swayed to think one way or the other, as the child most likely never understood the intensity of the world around her at the time.