The Wind that Swept Mexico by Anita Brenner

THERE WAS A LIFT, a stirring feel in Mexico in the early '20's, when the last chief had made his arrangements with Obregón, and each agrarian cradled his gun in some safe place, like the roof thatch. It was new, it was a spring world where fear was skewered.

Young people saw their lives ahead through open doors. There was a sense of strength released: much work to do, everything at the beginning, leeway for anyone to make his way as independently in peace as in guerrilla fighting. There would be room for all to be useful with dignity, learn, build, be free. The inequalities, the injustices, the helpless poverties of the past could now no longer be accepted; they would be destroyed irreverently. Poets wrote lyrics about high-tension cables. Peasants hung necklaces of flowers on tractors and invented Indian nicknames for steam shovels. Songs like this nursed the hush of the village evenings: