The period 1924–1925 witnessed the publication of two novels in “La Novela Semanal,” a weekly collection of the newspaper El Universal Ilustrado: La resurrección de los ídolos by José Juan Tablada and a reissue of Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela. In the 1920s, El Universal became a journalistic forum, paradigmatic of the discursive machine that the Mexican Revolution set in motion after its armed phase. The goal was to find the node of inscription of the nomadic force triggered by the revolution after the fall of the Porfiriato and cipher its meaning within a horizon of confrontation over the symbolic capital of postrevolutionary nationhood. Los de abajo was destined to gain sudden fame; it became canonized as the foundational novel of the Mexican Revolution after a series of debates, which turned Azuela, a hardly known novelist until then, into the sine qua non writer of the revolution.

Unlike Los de abajo, and contrary to Tablada's expectations, La resurrección de los ídolos went down in history as an oddity, a minor achievement of Tablada's otherwise highly reputed trajectory as a former modernista and as a prominent avant-garde poet, a foremost connoisseur of Japanese art, who considered himself ambassador of Mexican modern culture in the United States. José Eduardo Serrato Córdova attributes this failure to Tablada's anachronistic and elitist perspective to politics and culture in this novel, which made him appear as the last nineteenth-century intellectual of the new century (2001, 57). Tablada did remain a closet Porfirian despite his ability to survive the vicissitudes of the revolution as the representative of José Vasconcelos, minister of education, in the city of New York. His repulsion toward revolutionary anomie is indisputable in the novel. Yet, such attitude was not necessarily outdated. It was shared by many intellectuals at the time, including Noriega Hope, the editor in chief (1920–25) of El Universal Ilustrado. The idea that the Indigenous masses engaged in revolutionary violence without knowing why was a shared assumption among the intellectual elites and became a salient motif in La inútil curiosidad (1923), a collection of short stories by Noriega Hope as well as in Los de abajo by Azuela.