German List Arzubide

Vocation

Mexican poet and revolutionary. He was an active participant in the Revolution, fighting alongside Emiliano Zapata as well as extolling him and other revolutionary leaders in his poetry. He was wounded and jailed three times, the first occasion providing the inspiration for his very first poem, a mocking caricature of his jailer. He wrote biographies of both Zapata (Exaltacion, published in 1927) and another assassinated revolutionary leader Francisco Madero (Madero, el Mexico de 1910, published in 1973). According to the poet James Kirkup, who wrote an obituary of List upon his death: "The literary work of List and his contemporaries, both poets and novelists (including Martin Luis Guzman and Mariano Azuela), create the best picture of those passionate uprisings." List Arzubide was one of the major members of Stridentism and, with Manuel Maples Arce, redacted and gave out the second stridentist manifesto in the city of Puebla. He also wrote a comprehensive account of the movement, titled El movimiento estridentista (1926), remarkable because it is, at the same time, a history, a defence and a literary work. His other work, Practica de educación irreligiosa (1936), is listed in Index Librorum Prohibitorum. He was a close friend of the painter Fernando Leal, who portrayed him as one of the characters of his cycle of frescoes dedicated to Bolivar's Epic. He died on 19 October 1998 in Mexico City at the age of 100, one of the last survivors of the Revolution. Link to Wikipedia biography