The tale of the Mexican labor organizer you never heard of—but should have

I'm in car with three other men, not counting the guy in the backseat who's tied up and bloody and about to die. I'm typing as fast as I can on my laptop, trying to make note of as much as I can before this part of the story ends. But the road is bumpyyyy;;' and i keep smashing all the kieyso8u23po/sdfp34032j4'j1-

I make a note of the stench of cheap weed filling the car. I make a note that the men smoke the joint to calm their nerves. But weed's only ever gotten me paranoid.

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There are no ordinary men in the car. Although they're complete opposites. The men in control of this part of the story are psychopaths. The man in the backseat who's tied up and bloody and about to die is our hero, a soon-to-be martyr. There are no ordinary men here.

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I make a note that we're somewhere on the side of the highway in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, in Mexico's Yucatán. It's night, but morning is coming soon. It's cool, but not cold. The pool of blood keeps our hero's smashed face warm.

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No one can tell I'm here, because I'm not. This isn't my story. I'm just the not-there-yet-imposing reviewer who went along for the ride, a ride riddled with poorly-paved roads, triumph and ultimately tragedy.

***

This is the story of Efraín Calderón Lara, the Yucateco independent union organizer and student activist from the 70s, better known as "Charras."

This is the story of Charras—Charras: a true novel of the assassination that roiled the Yucatán—as originally told by the acclaimed late Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala.

This is the story, translated by Cuban-American writer Christopher Louis Romaguera, and published June 17, 2025, by University of New Orleans Press.

The novel teems alive with a collection of more than a dozen points of views from its wide cast of characters, ranging from first, second and third person. In one instance you are Charras himself, arguing with his brother José, then you are Governor Carlos Loret de Mola overseeing Lieutenant Colonel José Felipe Gamboa, who in turn bureaucratically commands his underlings—the men I was driving with earlier—the Driver, the Old Man, and the Skinny Gunman who would end up pulling the trigger, then drunkenly, belligerently bragging about it. (Spoiler alert: there's a happy ending—former Gov. Loret de Mola dies in a car crash at the end.)

The overall murder of Charras—revisited throughout the book from different perspectives and moments in time—is one of the most brutal scenes I've ever read:

Voices far off in the distance. One bird starts to tear out my hair. My mouth hurts. My upper lip is so swollen it touches my nose. My gums have softened, and my mouth tastes like iron from my blood. My tongue is dry, like an infected piece of meat that the birds pick at. Most of my teeth move in my mouth. I feel pain: in my face, in my legs, in my ribs, in my balls, but especially my toenails: it rises from my toes to my shins. From there it goes through my thighs to my spine. I hear tiny explosions in my brain. Various birds on the branches inch closer and closer to me. I try to move, but with my hands tied behind my back, it’s hard. I must do something to prevent them from eating me whole, but I don’t have much strength. My body is cold even though I can feel my first ray of sunshine in a while. There is a noise. Someone is close. I feel air on my face. A bird squawks. I cannot move. I discern the maliciousness and hunger in the eyes of the bird that, in front of me, screams and flaps its wings, suspended in the air, level with my chest. The other birds, from the ground, start to pick at my legs. I remember the sweet taste of little coconuts covered with honey and sugar. Seeing that I can no longer defend myself, they jump to peck at my stomach. My insides start to spill out. Despite all of this, I can feel my heart continuing to beat. I climb a tree to look for some tamarind trees in front of the Casa Novelo hotel. A mistress looks at me. How barbaric, she says, and

But the novel isn't black-and-white trauma porn. Zavala didn't limit himself to a monochromatic color pallet, nope. He painted a massive, intricate masterpiece exploring the mind of psychopathic politicians, corrupt alcoholic cops and henchmen with pregnant wives and unpaid bills.

But Zavala offers no sympathy to the killers and their political bosses, because none is to be had of course. Yet he also has little sympathy for his readers. He forces us to occupy the anxious and vicious and tortured minds of the antagonists.

No one is spared, not me or you, not our hero, not his sister, not his girlfriend, not his brother, not the construction workers, not the truck drivers, not the shoemakers, and certainly not the mourning and raging university students—obligated by their love for Charras, their pride in their class and political ideologies, to incite rebellion and vengeance, even if a little bit of it spills out here and there as property destruction and car fires.

If you've ever wondered what Mexican government violence actually looks like, what the planning conversations sound like, what deranged thoughts the alcoholic minds of the assassins generate, this is for you.

If you are sick of reading about petty-bourgeois bullshit that doesn't go, or take you, anywhere—like traveling Europe and contracting STDs (unless you’re Henry Miller, don’t do it) and ruminating which road in life you will pick to becoming an artist—then this is for you.

If you grow angry, even if it's just a tinge of anger, at how the deepest and most profound clocking-in-and-out masses are robbed of fair wages and their rights, how they are tricked by their bosses with their fake "company unions," then this is for you.

That is the story of Charras. The story of Mexico in the 70s, Mexico in the 60s, in the 50s, in the 40s, in the Mexico since even before Mexico.

This is the story of Mexican class struggle. Like the writings of Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Ida B. Wells and many more, but with the backdrop of the Yucatán. A tradition in literature and journalism, often living only as a footnote in a U.S. History textbook. But Zavala, and by extension Romaguera, raises Charras' story to our attention as if they were hoisting the flag of and for working class literature.

***

This year, November 13, Charras would have turned 79. But who knows if he would have made it. The average life expectancy in the Yucatán is in the mid-70s—unless you're a gringo tourist, if that's you, you're basically immortal—and the regional plague of alcoholism, cartel violence and every-day oppression and exploitation make it a more competitive struggle to survive.

In this day and age more Charras are needed. But perhaps they are already in existence. If so, the news from the depths of Mexico—especially the still-Mayan parts of Southern Mexico—don't make it, even with the aide of the speedy vehicles of TikTok and Instagram. Or maybe it just takes longer to get to us like the light from stars light-years away, like the news from the disappeared students of Ayotzinapa or the organized rural day laborers from San Quintín. Yet like the light of a star, dying or not, always dies violently. Like Charras. 

Mexico, while certainly "Lindo y Querido" as Vicente Fernandez would sing-cry, has long since been a violent country that produces too many campesino and working-class heroes, too many guerrilleros, too many disappeared, too many student activist martyrs who were barely old enough to drink and not old enough to worry about receding hairlines.

The English-speaking independent literary world, albeit small and insular, owes a great deal of gratitude to Romaguera for translating Zavala's novel and contributing it to the canon of working-class literature. May the tragic-yet-heroic tale of Charras move its readers to tears and deep sighs of reflection; but may it also move its readers to organize. That's probably what Charras would have wanted.