SOURCE: Englekirk, John E. “The ‘Discovery’ of Los de Abajo.” Hispania 18, no. 1 (February 1935): 53-62.

In the following essay, Englekirk recounts the literary developments leading up to the publication of Azuela's Los de Abajo, calling it a formidable contribution to Spanish-American literature.

The novel plays a relatively unimportant rôle in the development of Spanish-American letters of the nineteenth century. Patriotic verse and combative prose were the inevitable products of the long struggle for independence, first from Spain and later from local tyranny. Oppression, revolt, and exile—such was the normal stream of life in those turbulent, chaotic days, and few were the literati who found the place and the peace to commune serenely with the muse. With the possible exceptions of Isaac's María and Mera's Cumandá, both of which borrowed heavily from their European predecessors of over a generation before, the more laudable prose works of the...