This week we made a script based off a certain aspect of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution, started at about 1910 and affected almost every person in the country for the next 30 years. Almost every man was called up to fight for one of the factions within Mexico, and these men brought with them their wives and their children. Sadly, as the war went on, many of the older children, those upwards of 11 years old, were forced to participate in the conflict. The research we found showed that children were forced into confrontations between factions called levies (http://histclo.com/country/other/mex/hist/mh-rev.html, 2008). We wanted to bring one of these innocent children into our script as a ghost in order to tell the tragic story of these kids who were pushed into the Mexican conflict.
The part of the Ghost Kid in our script is probably the youngest a child could’ve been during the revolution.Based on photographs we found through an online blog post, the character is a 10-year old with a typical revolutionary outfit, complete with white shirt, ammo belts, and a rifle (https://jaisonhist580.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/children-of-the-mexican-revolution/, Hist, 2014). The ghost, juxtaposed with the 10 year old girl Kaissa, illustrates just how innocent these children were. Kaissa still plays make believe and hide and seek with the ghost, and it doesn’t register in her mind that she is interacting with someone from 100 years ago. To think that these children were forced to shoot guns at other people is a powerful and saddening picture.
The readings for this week also helped us to contextualize the interaction between Kaissa’s mother and the Ghost Kid. The comic strip After the Deluge broke down the barriers between the general story of Hurricane Katrina and connected it with the human lives that were affected. To readers’ minds, we usually hear about big current events as overarching statements about something, rather than stories with people behind them. Kaissa’s mom doesn’t even bat an eye at the story of the children revolutionaries until she sees one right in front of her eyes. Suddenly the revolution is so real, and we realize that human beings were behind each of the facts of the event given during the museum tour earlier that day.
Our script had the purpose of giving us a face behind the story of the children revolutionaries. We hope that this piece educates people on some of the more gruesome parts of the armed conflicts that made Mexico what is today in a entertaining and thrilling way.
My Partners were Luis Puente and Mandy Shepherd
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