Mexico City, 1913. While the streets of the capital were filled with blood and fire in what Alfonso Reyes called "the February of Cain and shrapnel," in the northern state of Coahuila, Governor Venustiano Carranza was preparing to disavow the mandate of the usurper Huerta and thus begin the second stage of the Revolution, leading the constitutionalist movement that would bring him to the presidency a few years later.

While the victors and losers in every armed conflict are the armies, Coahuilans Luis Jorge Boone and Julián Herbert remind us, in The Dust Raised by the Boots of the Dead, that these armies are made up of individuals, and that each of them enters the battle with their own baggage of strengths and weaknesses, fears and aspirations, resentments and hopes. In the two stories that make up this volume, we witness how two lives fulfill their destiny in the vertigo of "La Bola," each in its own way, just as thousands of Mexicans did during those years of chaos and uncertainty.

Both authors—poets, storytellers, and essayists—capture two intimate stories of the Mexican Revolution: that of a federal private who, from a church tower, awaits the arrival of the enemy while recalling how his future unfolded to him from childhood in dreams and nightmares; and that of a rural teacher who, after working his way through all the levels of the Carrancista bureaucracy, is appointed a deputy to the Congress that will promulgate the 1917 Constitution.

With dazzling language, honed by the experience of their long poetic practice, a refined narrative instinct, and a profound knowledge of both geography and regional history, Julián Herbert and Luis Jorge Boone manage to place the reader in the center of the battles, to the point where we can almost hear the bullets whizzing around us, and remind us, more than a century later, that the boots of those who participated in our greatest national feat will continue to raise dust clouds for a long time to come.