[2] The book tells us the story of Demetrio Macías, a peasant who, after having a misunderstanding with a local cacique (land owner), is hunted by national government soldiers (Federales) and decides to flee when they arrive at his home and kill his dog, prompting him to abandon his family and take revenge.
With a concise, unsympathetic tone, Azuela takes the reader along with this band of outcasts as they move along the hills of the country, seemingly struggling for a cause whose leader changes from day to night.
The role of Brenner who had coined the term Mexican Renaissance in her book Idols Behind Altars is generally uncredited, although writings from that work point to her being the hub and intellectual author of the whole project.
The first edition was an astounding success, receiving mostly positive critics from the Americans and even from the author himself, even if many questioned the name given as they think it didn't capture the true meaning of the expression Los de Abajo in Spanish, related more to the oppressed, the poor ones, those without privileges and the underdogs.
About the reviews, Timothy Murad wrote:"Ernest Gruening, writing in the Nation, considered the translation well done: Enrique Munguía, Jr. has performed creditably the task of rendering the almost untranslatable Mexican-Aztec argot into readable English."
To a degree, when Azuela coined the phrase he intended the socio-cultural and political meanings (the poor, the lower classes, the uneducated, the powerless, the downtrodden) that are inextricably linked to its use as the title of the novel.
The book became well known as Earl K. James suggested in 1932"Waldo Frank in his foreword to this story of love, lust and revenge south of the Rio Grande, calls Mariano Azuela 'one of the most eminent novelists of contemporary Mexico.'
"[6]Despite such shortcomings, the novel opened the American readers' doors to other Mexican and Latin-American novels and it became the base reference against others were compared, as suggested in the a review by Frank C, Hanighen in 1934:"With the advent of Gregorio Lopez y fuentes's 'Tierra, La Revolución Agraria en México' a new Mexican novelist has arrived, for many years the colorful Marion Azuela, author of 'The Underdogs' and 'Marcela' dominated the scene" [7]Since the first edition, the book has been translated again into English, a second translation by Frances Kellam Hendricks and Beatrice Berler was published in 1963 by Principia Press Trinity University, but it did not reach a widespread audience.
The Hackett Publishing Company edition, The Underdogs: with Related Texts, translated by Gustavo Pellón, also included contemporary reviews of Azuela's book, an excerpt from Anita Brenner's Idols Behind Altars (1929), and selections from John Reed's Insurgent Mexico (1914).