The Death of Artemio Cruz Summary

Had Diaz been more genteel, perhaps, the peasantry (which was deprived and repressed) and middle class never would have fought on the same side. As it was, of course, later on the revolution the bourgeoisie's gentility kept the peasantry as materially oppress as it had ever been. plainly the symbol of a customary revolution retained power with erstwhile cross-class allies great enough for the better educated and financed to entrench themselves in the post-revolutionary Mexican power structure.

Why this is a betrayal that Artemio personifies is that the victorious drive back against Diaz presented the revolutionaries with clear choices in the way the goals of the revolution would be carried out. In part, the choices stemmed from the fact that, as Hart notes, disparate societal classes, "the peasantry, industrial and urban workers, pequena burguesia, and provincial elites--manifested distinct revolutionary objectives during the struggle. Their visions include violently contradictory goals as well as reconcilable aces" (Hart 2). The "multiclass" rebellion, if successful, would inevitably produce a new order that would be confronted with competing goals from its inception. The fact that Artemio, ambitious as he is, sees more opportunity in allying himself with the material-results-oriented bourgeoisie, shows that he was, after all, interested less in "pure" revolution than in staking a claim for personalized revolutionary goals. He becomes a

Artemio is affected by Bernal's courage in the face of death, and he remembers the accuracy of Bernal's predictions about the fate of the revolution and in consequence, of Mexico. But as de Guzman points out, this sordid story explains the corruption which overtakes Artemio's emotional liaison with decency: "The fortunes of war make the whole betrayal plausible and excusable, still the subconscious knows what sort of scoundrel unmatchable is, and this memory add[s] to the self-loathing with which he now sees himself and which he projects onto his family" (de Guzman 114).

Bernal has seen the cross-class unity of the anti-Diaz forces degenerate into factionalism; it augurs ill for Mexico, for it implies that the rattling persons whose fates depended on the success of the revolution will betray it and Mexico alike. Artemio is one of the betrayers, merely he, too, has witnessed the post-revolutionary clash of ideals and expediency because he has appropriated expediency as his entire way of being. There is a nexus of the invention and of history in Artemio's actions that is elaborated by Hart.

The most successful revolutionary faction wins, of course, with an attitude of programmatic deceit. True.enough, the old oligarchy sprang from decaying Spanish aristocrats who shew power and wealth in the New World; that was one kind of corruption. The new oligarchy, of which Don Artemio is a nouveau riche and nouveau bourgeois representative, springs from the deliberate, self-serving corruption of an ideal that served its purpose and declined as a collect point for the masses of Mexico. This is expressed by Catalina's brother Gonzalo Bernal, an intellectual whom Artemio betrays as a revolutionary of an opposing faction in the infighting that occurs between the revolutionists themselves. Villa's men shoot Bernal in exchange for Artemio's relation them of Bernal's mission. Bernal is shot, and Artemio is spared; he kills the officer who shot Bernal in a quasi-revenge, but he is not th
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