José Revueltas: who was the Mexican writer who was imprisoned twice in the Marias Islands

When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) began his administration, he announced several changes in some parts of Mexico, such as the Marias Islands, a place that served as a prison for more than 100 years, but which AMLO ordered it to become a center for arts, culture and knowledge of the environment.

In mid-2021, López Obrador shared photographs with the progress of the construction of the 'Walls of Water-José Revueltas' Environmental Education Center, in Islas Marías, which will open to the public in three months, said López Obrador.

And the fact is that the Marías Islands hosted one of the most feared and isolated prisons in Mexico. It was opened in the middle of Porfiriato, in 1905, and closed in 2019. Renowned personalities, such as the writer and political activist José Revueltas, passed during its cells, and in total, the time it functioned as a prison, it housed about 45,000 prisoners.

José Revueltas was a writer and activist who was twice in this prison. This Thursday, April 14, marks the 46th anniversary of his death. With his work, he stood out as one of the most important figures in artistic creation in the country.

He was born on November 20, 1914 in the municipality of Santiago Papasquiaro, in Durango. However, when he was six years old, his family decided to move to Mexico City. When his father died, when he was Revueltas very young, he left school and self-taught himself at the National Library.

At the age of 13 he joined the organization Socorro Rojo International, so he began his political activism at a very young age. Shortly after joining the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), in 1930, he was imprisoned for political propaganda. It was the first time he entered the Marias Islands. In November 1932, it was his second admission to that prison.

His experience in prison nurtured his literary work, managing to capture his impressions of what prisoners suffer in confinement. This period corresponds to the novel of The Water Walls, published in 1941.

Revueltas was a dissident of the Mexican political system in all its aspects, including the left. He founded the Leninist league of Spartacus and was later expelled. “We could say that José Revueltas did not see in Marxism as a faith, but as an instrument of social liberation,” says the Ministry of Culture (Seculta) in a text published in 2014.

The year of 1943 was an intense time in the writer's biography, as his novel The Human Mourning was awarded the National Prize for Literature. In the same year he was expelled from the PCM when he clashed with the leadership of Dionisio Encinas, a situation resulting from the expulsion of Hernán Laborde and Valentín Campa.

According to the Electronic Encyclopedia of Mexican Philosophy, created by the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), after its departure from the Mexican Communist Party, Revueltas directed its efforts to the construction of a socialist force that would unify the different voices of such political thought.

In this mission, the author related more intensely with Vicente Lombardo Toledano. According to a passage quoted by the educational institution, the objective of this new organization was to help build the working-class party.

“My criterion was as follows. The PP (People's Party) was going to be born, and that was very good, like the party of the great petty-bourgeois masses, whose role is so important, and in Mexico decisive, within the general tactics and strategies of the proletariat. Marxists would then have the mission, within the PP, to function as an organized fraction that would represent the interests of the working class, laying the foundations so that, in the not too distant future, a genuine Marxist-Leninist party could be created (through the unity of the Marxist faction with other groups, even the most aware militants of the PCM) who would have its strongest ally in the party of the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasant classes into which the People's Party would necessarily become, conceived the way I prefigured it,” said the renowned writer in his memoirs published in volume II of the posthumous book The Evocations required.

In 1967 he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for his literary career. Octavio Paz said of him that he was “one of the best writers of my generation and one of the purest men in Mexico.”

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