Nellie Campobello's las manos de mama

Nellie Campobello, muchas veces mencionada y pocas veces estudiada,1 is invariably included among novelists of the Mexican Revolution, although she is generally accorded a secondary position next to writers such as Mariano Azuela, Martin Luis Guzman, Jose Ruben Romero, or Jose Vasconcelos. Less prolific as a writer, Campobello was also less involved in the literary life of Mexico in the decades of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. The fact is that writing was not her primary vocation. Joined by her sister Gloria, Campobello spent most of her time and energy expressing herself and her concern for Mexican culture as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher of dance. When she wrote, it was a private act of self-explora tion, a public act of justice, or both. Campobello's best-known works, Cartucho (1931), Las manos de mama (1937), and Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco Villa (1940), have in common her characteristically forthright description of life dur ing the Mexican Revolution. Writing was her way of telling the truth of life as she knew it, and, given the distorted picture of the revolution she saw painted by politicians after the fact, the need to testify became, in her case, a moral imperative: [...] yo tenia que escribir, decir verdades en el mundo de mentiras en que vivia.2 Like Martin Luis Guzman, her friend and supporter, she felt that the revolution had been betrayed and

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