Book Description

The idea for this novel was conceived in the spring of 1996, at Casa Bonita Restaurant in Denver, Colorado; the title derives from a political tract circulating in that city at that time titled The Fourth Declaration of the Jungle. The forgotten heart of the homeland is a line from that tract. Casa Bonita---also known to fans of TV's South Park as Cartman's favorite restaurant---occupies a large cavernous space decorated to look like a Mexican village, with grotto-like nooks in the walls for a cozier dining experience and high cliffs from which athletic young people dive into limpid turquoise pools. I was having lunch there with my friend Diana, the first time I had been in that place. What struck me as more than a coincidence was its remarkable similarity to a place I had dreamed of, just days earlier. So it came as no surprise when she said: Douglas, we need to come up with something that'll make us some money...a project we can work on together. What did she have in mind? I asked, though an idea was already burbling around in my brain. Since we both did some writing, why not co-author a book? Hey, if Larry McMurtry and Diana Osana can do it, why not us? What kind of book? And sitting there in the warm light of tiki torches, working on a plate of enchiladas, I had a sudden inspiration. In my younger days I had enjoyed travels in Mexico. Also, I'm a history buff, and have always been interested in the era of the Mexican Revolution. And as the unrest that spurred the 1910 revolution persisted up until our own time, the conflict was still relevant in the year 1996. Many volumes have been written on the subject; but---what if a person from our time (a woman, in our case) could travel back into the past and experience it first-hand. It would be the story of a young woman, an investigative journalist, who travels into Mexico in search of the truth, and finds more than she bargained for. It would be a historical romance/science-fantasy epic, part recorded history and part fiction. The deal we agreed upon went like this: I would research and write the book; she would give me the woman's point of view, what a woman would think and feel and how she would react in any given situation; so that whenever a woman speaks in this novel, it comes from a woman's mouth. Once we had agreed on the subject matter for our opus, we paid a visit to the Tattered Cover Bookstore, where Diana purchased two volumes, John Womack, Jr.'s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa the Mexican Centaur, by Oren Arnold; these books would be my main source of information about Zapata and Villa. I also made extensive use of The Wind that Swept Mexico and 500 anos del Pueblo Chicano, a pictorial history, to get more of an overview and a flavor of the era. In time I read entries from the diary of Rosa King, owner and proprietress of the Hotel Bella Vista, an important person in this book. I read the stories of the Generals, of rich landowners, of artists and writers and engineers, politicians and radical reformers, and all these have their say. I took stories from each of these and included them in a single volume, my own panoramic picture of the Mexican Revolution. This book is a work of fiction within a true historical context. Wherever possible I have retold the history as I found it, only changing the wording around some to avoid outright plagiarism. In only one instance did I use an author's exact words to describe a person: when John Womack described Pablo Escandon as the last frail twig of his line---I wracked my brain searching in vain for a better way to put it but in the end found the line too delicious to resist. My apologies and thanks to Mr. Womack. I should add that the ideas of the very clever Mr. Dooley are not mine at all but the intellectual property of Chicago-based humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936). In regards to historical authenticity, there are things whic