The article proposes a different reading of a living classic from the narrative of the Mexican Revolution: Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1915), by Mariano Azuela. This reading allows us to confront literary thought with rational and historic thought after the novel. Through this perspective, the article examines some aspects of the Mexican Revolution which reveal a long standing structural mismatch between the previous threshold and the modern imagination; it then reviews the historiographical and essayistic renewal regarding this mismatch, as well as the theme of disenchantment with the Revolution. This review forms a framework for a rereading of Los de abajo. This rereading highlights the imaginative agency and the literary vision of a novel published more than a hundred years ago, a work that intuits and reveals the Mexican reality in an enduring projection.