Revolution in Mexico: Death is Incidental

Death is incidental to men in the throes of revolution. One may argue the causes, the promises, the fulfillments of revolution, but one can never deny the numberless, unwritten personal tragedies that accompany it wherever it goes.
This book intimately describes four such tragedies — of Jesus, who asked only to spend his life in the service of his master, Don Fernando; of that small landowner himself, who wanted nothing of the revolution and tried in vain to stay aloof from it; of the peon Juan, reared in the tradition of the church, who later fought against it; and of Padre Dominguez, a priest caught up in the revolution as it swept through the beautiful mountain town of San Miguel de Allende in the great central plateau of Mexico. Yet this story might have happened anywhere that revolution has visited. It could have occurred when Rome was young and men fought and gave their lives for a republic; it could have happened yesterday during the American Revolution, or the French; or it could have been born in the dawn of today in cold Slavic Russia, or this very noon in warmer Latin Madrid. It is a story that illuminates momentarily the long Mexican revolution as a flash of lightning might reveal a forest in the midst of a night of storm.
Heath Bowman is the writer and Stirling Dickinson the illustrator, who has received so much critical praise for his striking block prints.
This story is a natural progression from the authors' other books, which are personal accounts of their own travels. Based on true happenings in San Miguel de Allende, it is the product of their second sojourn of several months in the historically important and beautiful mountain town of San Miguel. Named after one of the propounders of Mexico's independence from Spain, Don Ignacio Allende, and situated within a few kilometers of the spot where that declaration was first enunciated — the Sanctuary of Atotonilco, where part of the story is laid — the town was formerly the home of wealthy colonial landholders, hacendados, a fact which explains the beauty of its churches and convents. Stirling Dickinson has built a home upon the mountainside to which he will return to continue his painting of landscapes.