The Worm in the Wheat: Rosalie Evans and the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley of Mexico, 1906-1927. TIMOTHY J. HENDERSON: Duke University Press, 1998.

Abstract

First published in 1926, Rosalie Evans’ Letters from Mexico presents the story of a North American woman’s unsuccessful struggle to hold back the tide of the Mexican Revolution. Ranging from the profoundly intimate to the consciously public, Rosalie Evans’ correspondence describes her efforts to protect her hacienda, San Pedro Coxtocán, from the designs of agraristas in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley. Thrust into the turmoil of a country at war with itself, she often appears to have been an innocent abroad. Although showing little awareness of political issues, her account reveals many of the strains within Mexican rural society at the beginning of the twentieth century. From her perspective, the hacienda offered security and sustenance to a Mexican peasantry that lacked the intelligence and ambition to better itself. She dismisses agraristas as unscrupulous radicals bent on self enrichment at the expense of landowners like herself.