SOURCE: Duffey, J. Patrick. “A War of Words: Orality and Literacy in Mariano Azuela's Los de Abajo.” Romance Notes 38, no. 2 (winter 1998): 173-78.

In the following essay, Duffey uses Azuela's Los de Abajo as a text that illustrates the conflict between oral and literate cultures, represented in the book via Demetrio Macías and his men on the one hand, and by Luis Cervantes and Alberto Solís on the other.

According to Walter J. Ong's seminal 1982 work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, there are at least nine characteristics that distinguish the mentality of an oral culture from that of a literate one. My aim is to show the presence of both non-literate and literate cultures in Mexican author Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo (1915). The two cultures clash throughout the novel because of their conflicting characteristics. Los de abajo reveals not only the social, economic, and...