Cartucho and My Mother's Hands

<p>Nellie Campobello a prominent Mexican writer and novelist of the Revolution played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera Orozco and others. Her two novellas <i>Cartucho</i> (first published in 1931) and <i>My Mother's Hands</i> (first published as <i>Las manos de Mamá</i> in 1938) are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family show not only the stark realism of <i>Cartucho</i> but also the tender lyricism of <i>My Mother's Hands</i>. They are noteworthy too as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.</p>