The Diezmo

27 Jul 05

The Diezmo, by Rick Bass, is remarkable if not perfect. It manages to feel both fresh and current as well as like a classic fable that has been handed down through the generations.

In the 1830s and 1840s and not yet a state, Texas fought hard, bloody battles to win and maintain its independence from Mexico and become a sovereign nation. Mexico was unwilling to accept its loss of Texas, and in 1842 Mexican forces raided San Antonio. In response, Texan president Sam Houston ordered a militia composed mostly of civilians to patrol the border along the Rio Grande. “Wild for glory” and hungry for revenge, the militia crossed the border, marched in to the town of Mier and slaughtered soldiers and civilians alike before they were forced into surrender.

The Mier Expedition, as it came to be known, is the historically accurate event that sets the Diezmo into motion. The story takes the form of a memoir told by a fictional narrator named James Alexander 50 years after the fact. As an indecisive teenager that joins the militia with his friend, James Shepard, and eager to test his manhood, the narrator gets swept up in the adrenaline of the expedition, becoming drunk with blood lust.

After their surrender at Mier, the group is marched south through Mexico to an uncertain fate. They are alternately imprisoned and put to work. As their spirit is gradually worn out, alliances shift within the group. Leaders emerge and an escape plans are plotted. When some do escape, they forget to bring water with them and are forced to drink animal blood and urine to last another day under the blistering Mexican sun with hundreds of miles to go to get back to Texas.

Upon their recapture, Mexican General Santa Anna sentences them to the Diezmo, in which a pot is filled with white and black beans in a ratio of 10 to 1 and each man is forced to draw a single one. Those who draw a “black bean of death” must line up to be executed by firing squad. The survivors are forced to labor and are sentenced to the harshest prison camp in all of Mexico, where they become pawns in negotiations between Texas, Mexico and the USA that end up deciding the fate of Texas.

This book, beautifully dusty and sepia toned in its language, has sequences that masterfully evoke the brutality and stupidity of war, putting the reader right in the middle of it. It wraps the reader in the emotions that the characters are going through, questioning why they got themselves into that mess in the first place as well as what the right thing to do next might be. My only criticism of the book is that it ultimately feels anticlimactic. One hopes that the survivors make one successful last-ditch effort to escape, but ultimately it is not to be…

As one reads this book, particularly now, one cannot help but draw parallels between the events in the book and those that are going on in Iraq right now, making the experience that much more powerful.

(rating)Rating: (rating_4)4/5