The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year conflict (about 1910 to about 1920) that ended in the creation of the modern Mexican government, which is based on the Constitution of Mexico. It was more of a series of regional conflicts than a single, centralized war, but was nevertheless destructive, costing about two million people their lives. Although there were various factions and leaders, history seems to have settled on an oversimplification (as always) that Pancho Villa led the Constitutionalist side against the old government, led by Venustiano Carranza. The old government had been in power for decades, ruled since 1876 by a single president, who maintained power in part by simply throwing any rivals in jail.
A lot of what we know now about the Mexican Revolution is because of Nellie Campobello, who was born November 7, 1900 in Durango. She wrote Cartucho, a memoir about her experiences in Northern Mexico as the struggle was occurring all around her. She wrote the book in three sections; Men of the North, The Executed, and Under Fire, and the book is full of scenes of everyday life and individual personalities. There is a soldier who plays with children, another who sang Campobello’s little sister to sleep, and women who step up to support their families and villages in time of war. It’s all remembered, and includes some fictionalized scenes, possibly because Campobello didn’t write it until about ten years after the conflict, in 1931.
After the Revolution, Campobello moved to Mexico City and published poetry as well as becoming a ballerina and ballet teacher. She founded the Mexico City Ballet, and knew all of the literary and artistic leaders of Mexican culture from the 1920s through the 1980s. She was director of the Escuela Nacional de Danza until 1984.
Then in 1985 she abruptly disappeared. She was in her 80s, and she, along with her collection of paintings by famous artists including Orozco and Diego Revera, and other belongings, simply went missing. Suspicion centered around Claudio Fuentes and his wife, who worked for Campobello as caretakers (mostly of her home; she was perfectly healthy). But no hard evidence was ever found. Fuentes himself sometimes said, between 1985 and 1998, that he was in contact with Campobello, but again there was no evidence. Finally in 1998 a death certificate was discovered in the small village of Progreso do Obregón indicating that Campobello had died of heart failure in 1986, and was buried in an unmarked grave there. The death certificate included Fuentes’ signature as a witness. The details are still a mystery, but Fuentes and his wife probably kidnapped Campobello and convinced her to sign her possessions and money over to them. She had never married, and had no heirs. As one critic said at the time, Campobello’s final chapter was like “a story the author herself may have written.”
