Government by B. Traven

The Porfiriato’s culture of corruption

B. Traven was a German-born author who wrote mostly fiction set in Mexico and Central America. His novel Government, published in 1931, is one of a series of six books known as the Jungle Novels. Depending on which list you’re looking at, this is either the first or second book in that series (both Government and The Carreta were published in 1931). The Jungle Novels take place in the state of Chiapas in Southern Mexico in the years just prior to the Mexican Revolution. This period is known as the Porfiriato because Mexico was governed by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911. During his reign, Díaz invited foreign corporations to exploit Mexico’s resources for his own financial gain. He and an oligarchy of favored landowners and industrialists enjoyed immense wealth, while the majority of the country’s population struggled for survival as illiterate peasants and laborers. Traven’s Jungle Novels deal directly with this social and economic environment.

Under Díaz’s regime, as depicted in the novel Government, a system of trickle-down patronage determined the granting of government positions. Government offices at all levels were reserved for Spaniards, Mestizos, or Ladinos—essentially the “whiter” population of Mexico as opposed to the Native Mexicans or Indians (the term Traven uses), who were treated little better than beasts of burden. In this novel, Don Gabriel is granted a minor role as secretario of an Indian village, basically the federal government’s appointed mayor. His job is to keep the Natives in line and keep rebellions in check to ensure that farms in the region remain profitable. Because such government jobs pay very little, it is understood that the functionaries appointed to such positions will generate wealth for themselves through various schemes of corruption or graft, including arbitrary taxes, fines, and fees, the taking of bribes, and the monopolization of certain goods, in particular alcohol. The drawback to such a seemingly lucrative position, however, is that if the secretario pushes his Indians too far, he may find himself beheaded by a machete. At first, Don Gabriel is somewhat reluctant and very ignorant of such unethical techniques of income generation, but by the end of the book he is wheeling and dealing in Indian lives as if they were cattle.

In this novel, Traven uses the word “montería” a lot, and he doesn’t define it for the reader. This is a logging camp in the tropical jungle where hardwoods like mahogany were extracted for export. In other regions of Mexico, mines were the primary scene of slave labor, but in Southern Mexico and the Yucatan it was the monterías. The labor was grueling and the living conditions extremely harsh. Technically, of course, it wasn’t slave labor, because slavery was nominally illegal under the Porfiriato. However, a system of indentured servitude was common and basically amounted to slavery for many Indians, who had no power, no rights, and little or no chance of ever earning their way out of debt peonage.

Traven lived in Mexico for much of his adult life and spent considerable time in Chiapas from 1924 to 1931. Despite being born in Germany and writing in the German language, Traven is one of the best writers of fiction about Mexico for English-language readers. If Mexican writers wrote critical novels of this sort, they haven’t made it into translation. Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain, although set after the Revolution, is the closest I can think of to Traven’s work as far as considering the plight of the Mexican Indians. Mariano Azuela’s Los de Abajo is in a similar ballpark, but more about the Revolution itself and not the conditions that inspired it.

One surprising thing about Traven’s Government is how well it has stood up to the passage of time. The book is still very relevant to our political climate today. In recent years, the United States has drifted farther from democracy, and government officials at the highest level commit blatantly corrupt acts of self-enriching graft. Occasionally you’ll hear critics saying, “This certain politician [who shall remain unnamed] wants to be the next Hitler or Mussolini.” No, that’s not quite accurate. What he really wants to be is the next Porfirio Díaz, and Traven’s Government gives us a pretty good idea of what that might be like.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories by B. Traven

Ten well-drawn tales of Mexico

The information we have on author B. Traven’s life is sketchy. The name is a pseudonym, and he deliberately kept his real identity a secret. Journalists and literary scholars have connected him to prior aliases, but I don’t think his actual birth name has ever been ascertained with certainly. He was born in Germany and emigrated to Mexico in 1924. Traven wrote all of his literary works in the German language, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories, a collection of Traven’s short fiction, was published in 1966 by the American publisher Hill and Wang. Some of the volume’s ten stories had been previously published in a German-language collection entitled Der Busch, published in 1928. One story, “The Cattle Drive” is an excerpt from Traven’s debut novel The Cotton-Pickers (1926). As is typical of Traven’s work, all of the stories in this volume take place in Mexico.

Two of the stories included here are longer and more substantial than the other eight. In “The Night Visitor,” an American farmer in Mexico loses himself in his neighbor’s extensive library and becomes obsessed with pre-Columbian Mexican history. “Macario” has the feeling of an old Mexican folktale that Traven has adapted for modern readers through some O. Henry-esque storytelling. The title character, a poor, overworked woodchopper, has one great desire in life: to eat a roasted turkey all by himself. This humorous story takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. In both these selections, Traven inserts some supernatural elements that create a Twilight Zone effect. He doesn’t overdo it, however, to the point where these tales venture into the horror or fantasy genres. Of the book’s shorter entries, the aforementioned “The Cattle Drive” and the comical “When the Priest Is Not at Home” are both very vividly rendered and engaging stories.

The American writer whom Traven most calls to mind, stylistically and philosophically, is Jack London. London spent a few years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush and was able to parlay that experience into half a career’s worth of novels and stories. He brought the Klondike alive for armchair readers who would never venture there. Traven does the same for Mexico. Both writers depict their chosen settings in a naturalistically realist style but draw romantic touches from regional folklore and legends. London was a socialist; Traven an anarchist. Both often feature proletarian themes and critiques of capitalism in their fiction. Later in his career, London did travel to Mexico and wrote one excellent story set there, entitled “The Mexican.” Traven, however, is the best writer of fiction about Mexico who’s not actually Mexican. Katherine Anne Porter might be his only real competition in English-language literature.

Traven’s writing on Mexico is more than just typical tourist fare. He really makes an effort to understand and interpret the culture, mindset, and spirit of the Mexican people, including the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. As a Mexicophile myself, I appreciate that Traven gives Mexico the same attention and consideration that countless other authors have given to Paris or London. Traven’s work sometimes resembles the writings of the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo, whose landmark collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, was published in 1953. In general, the stories here in The Night Visitor are more lighthearted than Rulfo’s, but they share a similar grittily authentic, sometimes eerie atmosphere and a respect for the Mexican peasant, the Indian, and the working man. For an American reader, it is surprising that it takes a German author to reveal Mexico to the non-Latino. These enchanting stories make one wonder why more authors from the U.S. haven’t ventured south of the border for literary inspiration.

Stories in this collection

The Night Visitor

Effective Medicine

Assembly Line

The Cattle Drive

When the Priest Is Not at Home

Midnight Call

A New God Was Born

Friendship

Conversion of Some Indians

Macario

Aslan Norval by B. Traven

Late-career oddity

B. Traven, real name unknown, was a German author who emigrated to Mexico but continued to write in the German language. He was mostly active during the 1920s and ‘30s, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or Latin America. After not publishing much of anything during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Traven’s final novel, Aslan Norval, was published in 1960. He died in 1969. Aslan Norval is not only a couple decades removed from Traven’s better-known works but also quite different in style and subject matter. This novel is set in the United States, mostly New York, and features a Korean War veteran as its protagonist.

In the opening chapter, Clement Beckford, the veteran in question, is hit by a car. Although not seriously injured, he is rushed to the hospital and forced to undergo medical examinations so the hospital can rake in some insurance dollars. Luckily for Beckford, the motorist who struck him is a beautiful billionairess who wants to make up for his inconvenience and minimal pain and suffering. This woman, named Aslan Norval, invites him to lunch and inquires into his situation. Since returning from the war, Beckford is down on his luck. He can’t find a decent job or get a useful education. He tells her that what he’d really like to do is hydrological engineering—the construction of dams and canals. Within a few days, he finds that the wealthy woman has established a new company in his chosen field and installed him as president. She then reveals her grand plan to build a canal across the United States, thus circumventing the need for the Panama Canal, which is inconveniently located in a foreign nation. Rather than reveling in the generosity of his benefactress, Beckford can’t help but think that she has an ulterior motive. Either she wants to have an affair with him, he surmises, or she wants to set him up as a patsy in some fraud scheme.

Traven always emphasizes anarchist, leftist, and socialist themes in his work, and Aslan Norval is no exception. In this late-career offering, however, his political message is less pointed and more scattershot. In the opening chapters, he manages to satirize and/or complain about the insurance industry, for-profit hospitals, ambulance-chasing lawyers, veterans’ benefits, and higher education. Later he turns his attention to the Panama Canal project, Congressional corruption, defense spending, foreign aid, the arms race, the space race, and Cold War paranoia. His critical darts are dispersed all over the board, so he never really hits the bullseye with any of them. His sense of humor also seems to have suffered with the passing of time. Slapstick and sarcasm are distributed in a haphazard, willy-nilly fashion. The result is something that reads less like classic Traven and more like one of Upton Sinclair’s lesser efforts.

Despite the odd humor, there is somewhat of an odd film noir atmosphere to this book, with Aslan Norval as the femme fatale. At first, Traven seems to want you to root for Beckford and Norval, but he then has them both behave in unethical ways that makes you like them less. There are a couple of “love” scenes in this book that are rather creepy and off-putting. Overall, the plot is not well constructed, dragging in some portions while fleeting in others. Aslan Norval almost reads like a novel that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. You wonder why Traven chose to waste the second-to-last chapter dwelling on a pointless romantic subplot instead of building the canal story towards a conclusion. Then he wraps up everything way too quickly and unsatisfactorily in the final chapter. In general, I really like Traven’s writing, so this book was not a worthless read for me, but it certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as those Latin American novels (The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Bridge in the Jungle) that he wrote in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The White Rose by B. Traven

Home sweet hacienda 

The German author who went by the pen name of B. Traven (real name unknown, or at least unconfirmed) made a career out of writing fiction set in Mexico and Latin America. In novels such as The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven painted socially and politically realistic images of life in Mexico in the years immediately following the Revolution. His works often express his anarchist views by criticizing American imperialism and the capitalist exploitation of resources and people. In his novel The White Rose, Traven continues to explore these themes. The White Rose was originally published in Germany in 1929 and wasn’t published in English translation until 1979.

In the state of Veracruz, Mexico, near the state capital of Jalapa, lies la Rosa Blanca, the White Rose, a beautiful hacienda run according to generations-old Mexican traditions. The owner of this fertile land is neither a Spanish colonist nor a White opportunist, but a man of Indian (Native Mexican) heritage, Jacinto Yañez, who presides over the land that was his father’s, his grandfather’s, his great grandfather’s, and so on. Several multi-generational families live on and work the lands of Rosa Blanca, all of them likely related to Jacinto by blood. He presides over this extended family like a benevolent godfather, and though the work is hard and modern comforts are few, the people are happy. The Condor Oil Company, an American firm, has bought up all the surrounding land to drill for oil. They want Rosa Blanca in order to fill the empty hole in their lucrative dominion. No matter how much money they offer Jacinto, however, he refuses to sell, insisting that though by law he may be the official owner of the hacienda, it is his moral obligation to steward the land and pass it along to his descendants. This refusal to play ball really sticks in Condor’s craw, and they are not used to taking no for an answer.

The first two chapters of the book, in which la Rosa Blanca and its inhabitants are introduced, immediately draws you into the pleasant life of this hacienda. Traven really understands Mexican culture and is able to capture the philosophy and mindset of a Mexican perspective. No other White author writes about Mexico with the same insightfulness and authenticity as Traven (and unfortunately, too few Mexican authors have been translated into English). He has obviously spent some time in that country, not just as a tourist but as a drifting laborer, not just in cities but in rural areas as well, among both capitalists and peasants, and his experiences inform his fiction. When this novel is set in Mexico, it’s a superb five-star read.

The problem is, most of the story doesn’t take place in Mexico, but in San Francisco. Traven devotes more chapters to the American capitalists and their oil company than he does to the Mexican farmers or their hacienda. The bulk of the book is a character study of Mr. Collins, the president of Condor Oil. At least four or five chapters are solely devoted to his extramarital affairs (Traven seems to imply, maybe not intentionally, that capitalism and its excesses are the fault of womankind). There are also a few dry chapters on stock market manipulation. These portions of the book are more predictable and less enlightening than Traven’s perspective on Mexico. They read more like an average Upton Sinclair novel than a Traven book.

All that said, I am a big fan of Traven’s writing, both as a Mexicophile and as a lover of realist literature. I am usually quite impressed by his work and have yet to be truly disappointed. The White Rose is not as excellent as The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or The Bridge in the Jungle, but it is still a very good novel. Traven deserves commendation for this eye-opening indictment of the injustices of economic imperialism in Latin America at a time when few European or American writers were concerned with such matters.

The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven

Life and death in a tropical village

I only discovered B. Traven about a year ago. Since then, I’ve read four of his novels, and three out of the four have been superb. The Bridge in the Jungle is the best one yet. It was first published in German in 1928, then in English translation in 1939. Traven was born in Germany and worked as a sailor for a while before settling in Mexico in the 1920s. It is unclear how long he lived there, but almost all of his books take place in Mexico. The Bridge in the Jungle is set in an unspecified location in Central America, though that term may be used vaguely enough here to encompass Chiapas in Southern Mexico, where Traven was known to have spent some time. Traven published a series of a half a dozen novels known as his Jungle series. Confusingly, however, The Bridge in the Jungle is not part of that series, but rather a precursor to it.

The novel is narrated by an American drifter who is once referred to by the name of Gales. (Traven readers will recognize Gerald or Gerard Gales, the name Traven commonly applied to his protagonists, though his Gales books don’t necessarily constitute a series.) This narrator visits his fellow American friend Sleigh, who lives in the middle of the jungle with his Indian wife and a few head of cattle. A bridge built by an oil company crosses a river there. Next to the bridge is a water pumping station owned by the railroad. Gathered around the bridge is a poor and tiny riverside village comprised of a few squalid huts and ramshackle houses, including Sleigh’s.

Gales and Sleigh attend a party that’s being held in the village near the pump station. It’s an impromptu dance held in someone’s front yard. Villagers of all ages attend, bringing food or musical instruments or whatever else they can contribute. At first, it takes a while for this party to get off the ground. The promised musicians are no-shows, and Gales and Sleigh are clearly disappointed. For a while, it seems like this is what the book is going to be about: a bummer of a party in the middle of nowhere. The occasion is disrupted, however, when an unforeseen crisis befalls one of the families of the village. The nature of this catastrophe is best left unsaid here, to avoid spoiling too much of the plot. What the novel relates, however, is how the entire population of the village accepts the stricken family’s troubles as their own and comes to their aid and support.

This is not a feel-good story, however. It is a vivid immersion into the reality of life among the rural poor in a developing country. I’ve traveled enough in Mexico to appreciate the gritty realism of Traven’s depictions of that country. While I may be merely a dilettante tourist, he was the real deal who lived the life of the drifters about whom he wrote (see also The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). The village depicted in The Bridge in the Jungle is no doubt based on a community among which Traven lived for some time, and his vivid recollections bring this world to life. He doesn’t just describe the trappings of these people’s environment but also lets the reader in on their thought processes and philosophy of life. Here, as in all of his books, Traven includes some pro-socialist, anti-imperialist comments, but such social criticism plays a minor role in a story that is much more personal than political.

While reading The Bridge in the Jungle, I couldn’t help wondering how a writer like Hemingway is immortalized with a Nobel Prize while Traven is allowed to fade into obscurity. This novel is more powerful than anything I’ve read by Hemingway and at least as profound as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, without all the annoying stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Traven’s writing delivers the unvarnished realism of a John Steinbeck or Jack London but without any of their literary pretensions. The more I read of his work, the more impressed I am by the perceptive naturalism and plainspoken style of his storytelling.

The Death Ship by B. Traven

A proletarian seaman’s worst-case scenario

The German author who called himself B. Traven is best known for his book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His novel The Death Ship was published in 1926. The narrator is Gerard Gales, a name that Traven often uses for the protagonists of his novels, but this character doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the Gerald Gales of Traven’s first novel The Cotton-Pickers. This Gales is from Wisconsin, by way of New Orleans, but spends much of the book assuming other nationalities, ultimately adopting the name Pippip and claiming he’s from Egypt.

Gales, an experienced sailor, has found himself comfortable employment on a fine merchant vessel, The Tuscaloosa. After spending a night ashore in Antwerp, however, the ship departs without him, leaving Gales stranded in Belgium. The Belgian police don’t want him there, so they sneak him into Holland. The Dutch don’t want him either, so he is smuggled off somewhere else. He is bounced around Europe from country to country, the victim of exclusionary immigration laws. Gales applies to various consulates in an attempt to acquire the proper papers, but his requests are denied when he comes up against impossible bureaucratic regulations. This goes on for a third of the book, before the “death ship” even shows up. Without any proper papers, Gales is forced to sign on to a shady and decrepit vessel, the Yorikke, on which he is given the lowliest post on the ship, that of “coal drag.” What could be worse than the job of a stoker, who shovels coal into a scalding boiler for hours on end? The coal drag, who serves as the stokers’ underling.

One very likely reason why Traven never achieved widespread recognition is that his writings have an unapologetically anarchistic and socialistic bent. In The Death Ship, Traven exposes and satirizes two main issues of importance to the working class. One is the bureaucratic growth of governments in the early twentieth century, as manifested in their byzantine and draconian immigration laws. The second is the exploitation of labor on ocean vessels. The crewmen in Traven’s novel are unable to acquire passports or proper sailor’s papers, making them men without a nation. This in turn makes them fodder for white slavery, since men without a nation are essentially men without rights. The captive sailors on the world’s “death ships” are forced to perform the most grueling and dangerous work on board their vessels, which Traven details in his vivid descriptions of the hard labor undertaken by the stokers and coal drags on the Yorikke.

The main fault of the novel is that it’s unnecessarily long, and as a result, far too repetitive. The reader learns way more than anyone would want to know about shoveling coal into a boiler, and how many passport horror stories does one need to hear to get the point? On the other hand, much like the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair, the fact that someone has documented the horrors faced by laborers of this period does have historical value. Another problem is inconsistency of tone. Does Traven intend this to be a comedy or a horror story? The first half of the book is clearly satirical. Every sentence is a punchline that either exaggerates ridiculous immigration laws or paints the Yorikke as the god-awfulest tub on the seven seas. The latter half of the novel, however, is more melancholy and realistic in its depiction of the exploitation of the sailors.

Traven’s writing calls to mind that of Jack London, who was a probable influence on his work. London is better at telling an adventure story, but Traven, writing a few decades later, is better at the kind of brutal socialist realism that London aspired to. Though The Death Ship isn’t as impressive as The Cotton-Pickers or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s radical and ballsy writing is always a refreshing change of pace from the mainstream literary canon.
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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

Riveting and realistic adventure novel

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the second novel by B. Traven, a German author who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The novel was first published in German in 1927, then published in English translation in 1935. This is by far Traven’s most famous book, due largely to the 1949 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards. The movie is quite faithful to Traven’s novel, so if you’ve already seen that film, don’t expect any plot surprises here. Nevertheless, the book is every bit as riveting as the movie, thanks to Traven’s skillful and suspenseful writing. Even though the novel was published over two decades before the film adaptation, Traven’s dialogue remarkably reads as if it were written for Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. If you haven’t seen the movie, how lucky you are that you get to experience this story for the first time in its original form.

The story opens in Tampico on the Gulf Coast. Traven introduces us to the white underbelly of this Mexican city—an assortment of unemployed gringo drifters who wander from town to town, looking for work with oil companies, mining companies, and other resource extraction industries (almost all of which, in the 1920s, would have been owned by American and European corporations). Two such drifters, Dobbs and Curtin, meet while looking for work. When spending the night in a fleabag flophouse, they meet an old prospector named Howard who regales them with stories of a lost gold mine. Sick of the grind of dead-end short term jobs of back-breaking labor for low pay, Dobbs and Curtin decide they want to try their hand at gold-hunting, and they invite Howard to be their partner and mentor. The three venture into the mountains of the Sierra Madre where they have some luck finding a promising dig site. As Howard points out, however, finding the gold is easier than getting it out of the ground and carrying it somewhere safe.

Adventure novels were ubiquitous in the early 20th century, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the few that rises to the level of great literature. The story is very realistic and deliberately unromanticized. Only in three flashback stories-within-the-story does the narrative venture into something approaching folklore and legend. Traven’s depiction of Mexico bears the mark of someone who has been there and lived this drifter’s life. This is no tourist’s outsider vision of the romantic tropics. The Mexicans in the book are illustrated with the same perspicacity as the leading trio of American characters. Going back to Jack London and beyond, so many thousands of stories have been written about what gold does to a man’s mind and morals that the premise has become cliché. None of those stories, however, are as psychologically authentic as what Traven presents here. His characters think and behave like real flawed human beings, not storybook heroes and villains. With his intelligent insights into human nature and his realistic depiction of life-and-death drama, Traven’s novel reads as if it could have been written by one of the great naturalist novelists like Frank Norris or Emile Zola.

Traven often expresses socialistic, anarchistic, and atheistic views in his writings. Here such ideas are toned down a bit from the more overt statements and satire in his debut novel The Cotton-Pickers. Nevertheless, Traven still manages to work some anti-capitalist, anti-church, and anti-imperialist sentiments into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You won’t find much of that expressed in the Bogart film, which is another good reason to read Traven’s original text. Judging by what I’ve read in this novel and in The Cotton-Pickers, Traven is a writer who was way ahead of his time, both in terms of the blunt frothrightness of his realism and the fearlessness with which he deviates from the conservative mainstream literature of his time. Both of Traven’s first two novels are excellent, and I look forward to following his literary career further.
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The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

An American drifter in post-Revolutionary Mexico

B. Traven was a German writer who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The name is a pseudonym. The exact identity of the writer has never been verified, but there are a few educated guesses. Traven’s debut novel, The Cotton-Pickers, was originally published in 1925 in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It first appeared in book form the following year under the title of The Wobbly, but subsequent editions have used the original title of The Cotton-Pickers.

Gerald Gales is an American drifter wandering through Mexico. He gets a tip that a farmer named Mr. Shine is looking for cotton pickers. Seeking work, Gales sets out to find the farm in the vicinity of an obscure place called Ixtlixochicuauhtepec. At a train station, he meets up with five other drifters looking for the same Mr. Shine. The six wandering laborers decide to team up and travel together to find Shine’s farm, where they then sign on to pick his cotton.

The novel takes place shortly following the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Since that momentous regime change, the Mexican workers supposedly have more rights, but the employers still exploit them and treat them very much like peons. Here, all the employers seem to be White Europeans or Americans, while the laborers are mostly people of color: Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Blacks, Asians (though Gales is White). The Cotton-Pickers is first and foremost a novel about labor. Traven depicts the squalid conditions under which the cotton pickers live and work. Mr. Shine tries to pay them as little as possible, but the workers find ways of fighting for their rights and attaining small victories. This story, however, is not told in the depressing style of a muckraking exposé. Rather, it’s more of a comedy infused with a persistent gallows humor. The cotton pickers work like mules, but they also have fun and enjoy their lives as vagabonds. Traven doesn’t really push any socialist agenda, but he does point out the absurdities and abuses of capitalism and colonialism. Beyond Shine’s farm, the narrative also follows Gales as he moves on to other jobs, sometimes accompanied by a cotton-picking friend or two.

I had heard the name B. Traven before, but this is my first time reading his work. He is best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the basis for the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film. I really enjoyed this book. Rarely does it occur that I “discover” an author and immediately think I want to read everything this person wrote, but such is the case with Traven. (I also love Mexico, so that probably has something to do with it.) Traven’s closest equivalent might be John Steinbeck, as seen in labor novels like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. Traven, however, comes across with fewer pretensions of literary dignity and more of a down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness. His prose often has the feel of pulp fiction, with occasional touches of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. For a book from the 1920s, The Cotton-Pickers is remarkably forthright and uninhibited. In one memorable passage, Traven describes a whorehouse in Tampico and captures its raunchy reality without ever saying anything obscene.

The term “Wobbly” was a nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Neither Gales nor anyone else in the book is a member of the IWW, but Gale reminds someone of a Wobbly in that wherever he goes, labor trouble follows. That’s not explained until the final page of the book. The Cotton-Pickers is a much better title. Gales is a recurring character in several of Traven’s books. I look forward to following his Mexican wanderings in subsequent novels.
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