Pulp Revolution: The Space of Development and Labor in B. Traven’s Mexico

Abstract

This article examines the representation of white and indigenous labor in B. Traven’s oeuvre. B. Traven was born in Germany and was forced to emigrate in the early twentieth century. He then lived and wrote in Mexico. Traven’s novels depict the the plight of both white and indigenous labor in Mexico before and after the Mexican Revolution. The novels were written in Mexico between 1930 and 1939 in German for a leftist German audience. Their depiction of labor is therefore bound up with the hopes and disappointments of European labor movements. This article presents the contradictions that emerge out of Traven’s portrait of white and indigenous labor in Mexico and situates them within the dynamics of interwar capitalism, the ideologies of imperialism, and the idiom of the novel itself. (JT)