Talk:The Mexican (short story)

Questionable source on connection to Joe Rivers

Regarding this statement: "The protagonist is based on the real-life "Joe Rivers," the pseudonym of a Mexican revolutionary whose boxing winnings supported the Junta Revolucionaria Mexicana, a group of revolutionaries-in-exile. Joe Rivers eventually retired from boxing and became an ice delivery person in El Paso."

The current citation for that is an interview with Bert Corona in 1995, who first says Jose Ybarra a.k.a. Joe Rivers once delivered ice to his house in El Paso— which I guess could have happened (though if Ybarra lived in El Paso between his retirement and his death in LA, it wasn't mentioned in obituaries). Then Corona says London's story is "about" Rivers— which is true enough in the sense that the character would've been a very obvious reference to Ybarra, at least to anyone who was following boxing at the time. But then he goes on to mention a bunch of plot points from the story and the movie, not actually saying that those things were true of Ybarra, but just that that's what London wrote... at least until the following bit:

"Villa sends Rivers to the border to acquire guns and ammunition. In El Paso, he comes into contact with the Junta Revolucionaria Mexicana, a group my father worked with. Rivers remained on the border and became a prizefighter. He fought for the welterweight and lightweight championship and then donated all his prize money to the Junta."

There, he seems to be talking about the real person, not the character. And we can infer that maybe he knows non-public aspects of Ybarra's history because his father worked with the Junta— although that seems more like hearsay, repeating his father's statements about things that happened before Corona was born, something that I'd expect a WP article to mention as a claim rather than as fact. But Corona is also clearly mixing up the story somehow, because even though the character was from Mexico, Rivers/Ybarra was from Los Angeles— he couldn't have been "sent to the border" by Pancho Villa, he didn't go to the border at all from either side as far as I can tell, he remained in LA County during his entire boxing career. (In fact, London's story doesn't say anything about Rivera being sent anywhere by Villa; I think that's a plot point from one of the movie adaptations, which London didn't write. In the story, this kid is a complete unknown to the expat revolutionaries.)

And, as far as I can tell, nobody was saying anything like this about Ybarra in between 1911 and his death in 1957. So the citation seems to imply that this secret about his involvement with the Junta came out in this book in 1995... and as it's a pretty dramatic claim about someone who was a minor celebrity in his day, made by someone was a prominent public figure himself, I'd expect there to have been some other mention of it in the next 26 years, by Mexican historians or boxing aficionados or London scholars. But I can't find a thing. That makes me think that no one else thought this was either meant as a historical statement or verifiable as one(*) and that the WP editor who added this citation may have jumped to conclusions. I'm inclined to either reword that passage to say only that "Rivera" has such-and-such things in common with what was known about "Rivers", and remove the rest— or, if we retain the quote (which is certainly interesting, and probably counts as notable due to Corona's own fame), to clarify that it is just a secondhand claim. ←Hob 06:28, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

(*) OK, I do see one contemporary reference that interprets Bert Corona's statements there as fact: this review from 1995. However, in the review, every statement about Rivers/Ybarra that is verifiable is false ("a Mexican campesino who joined Pancho Villa's forces in the Mexican Revolution after his wife was raped and killed by federal troops. During the war, he became a prizefighter in El Paso"), which makes me think that the reviewer didn't know anything about Rivers and was simply paraphrasing Corona. ←Hob 08:09, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

It looks to me like this part of the Background section dates back to the very first version of this article in 2007, by User:Rockero, and has not been discussed since. As this user seems to still be active, and I haven't been active in a long time, I'll invite them to comment here before I make any changes. My concern is that this article seems to have become the basis for literally every other such claim I can find online— many references to Rivers being a secret revolutionary are using the exact same wording. So I'd like to make sure it's not a mistake. ←Hob 06:49, 21 December 2021 (UTC)