BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Struggle of Love, Revenge and Misguided Machismo : DREAMS OF THE CENTAUR by Montserrat Fontes; W.W. Norton $23, 349 pages

This novel about a Sonora ranch family at the turn of the century describes one of the great tragedies of Mexican history and touches on another--events so powerful that they make the novel itself, perhaps undeservedly, seem flimsy.

Under the Porfirio Diaz regime, as many as 15,000 Yaqui Indians were rounded up in northern Mexico and sent on foot and by ship and cattle car to the henequen (rope fiber) plantations of the Yucatan, where they were sold at 65 pesos a head as slave laborers.

Thus, at one stroke, the government ended decades of intermittent fighting with the Yaquis and supplemented the supply of plantation labor available from the Mayas, who had nearly regained control of the Yucatan at one point during a “caste war” that lasted 60 years.

In 1900, hundreds of the Yaquis still in the north were slaughtered in the Battle of Mazocoba on a mesa in the Sierra Bacatete near Guaymas. Meanwhile, the men, women and children deported to the Yucatan worked in hellish conditions until Diaz was toppled by the revolution of 1910.

Montserrat Fontes, a Los Angeles-area resident whose debut novel, “First Confession,” appeared in 1991 (Norton), shows us these events through the eyes of three members of the Durcal family.

Jose (“the Centaur”) founds a ranch near Alamos in the 1880s and prospers by treating his Yaqui workers fairly. He has three sons with his wife, Felipa--and, she suspects, other children by other women. He wins more land from a wealthy rival in a card game, then is shot dead. The corrupt judiciary files no charges.

Jose’s oldest son, Alejo, avenges his father’s murder and is sentenced to open-pit cells called bartolinas, which nobody survives for long. His only escape is to join the army and guard Yaqui captives being marched south--a painful duty, because an old Yaqui, Tacho, has been his mentor on the ranch and he has met his half-Yaqui half-brother, Charco, in prison.

Felipa mourns Jose, clings to her younger sons, keeps the ranch going and, from a distance, watches Alejo, still a teenager, harden under his ordeals. She tries to maintain the psychic bond she and Alejo have always enjoyed. When Alejo returns to Sonora to warn the Yaquis about what awaits them in the Yucatan, he is wounded at Mazocoba; to save his life, Felipa cuts off his leg.

This amputation--based on one that Fontes says her great-grandmother performed--is described in gruesome and convincing detail. “Dreams of the Centaur” is clearly the fruit of much research. How to mill boards by hand, breed livestock, build a ranch house, break a horse, harvest a henequen plant; how the Yaquis hid guns and adapted Christian ritual; how those awful prisons and plantations functioned; how the army segregated the ex-criminals in its ranks--all this Fontes tells us.

And she tells us in short sentences and short paragraphs, in scenes almost unbroken by narration, without diverting attention from her characters or slowing down the action. Nine times of out 10, in a historical novel, that’s the right way to do it.

This, however, may be the 10th time. The history we learn about in “Dreams of the Centaur” is so fascinating, and so new to non-Mexican readers, that this lively but thoroughly conventional story of love, revenge and misguided machismo seems inadequate to convey it in depth. Whatever their basis in reality, Fontes’ characters (the indomitable matriarch, the indestructible picaresque hero) are stock.

If we can’t have the brilliant technique a William Faulkner, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or an Isabel Allende would bring to such a subject, we at least wish Fontes would have taken her time, put the plot on idle and--may the gods of literature forgive us!--lectured a little.