March to the Monteria (Jungle Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the third in a series of books written by Traven. They are usually called the Jungle Novels. In the first book; Government, there is a detailed explanation of the social and economic structure under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. We see how Indian peon work on farms as serfs, always in dept to the large land owners. In some ways the first book reminded me of the books of Victor Hugo where he combines social science with novel.
In the second book; The Carreta, a young man makes his living traveling the roads of Mexico with an ox drawn cart full of goods owned by his master.
This third novel in the series is actually better than the first two in some ways. In the first novel, Traven gives a tremedous amount of social commentary, which is good, but the characters lack the cohesion and depth of a novel. In the second novel, a romance between Andres and a young runaway Indian girl becomes a marriage, but they experience one challenge after another in a system that is rigged against them.
In this third novel, Celso, a young Indian man who has assumed his father's debts and has gone to work in the mahogony plantations of Southern Mexico, must survive under the cruelest and most brutal of conditions. Celso is a more heroic character than characters in the first two novels. He is heroic in assuming his father's debts. He has a critical consciousness that allows him to make judgements about the system in which he is trapped. He begins to try to figure a way out of the system instead of resigning his fate to daily back breaking toil and death. The reader dearly wants him to escape. Therefore the reader becomes more emotionally involved in his struggel to escape from the man-destroying experiences of the Monteria, the mahogany plantations. Celso has a sense of justice and injustice that allows him to look beyond his personal circumstance and at the circumstances that entrap his people.

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