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The history of Mexico in the first half of the 20th century is almost completely dominated by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920/40). Revolutionary events continue to shape Mexican society up to the present day. Due to the unequal distribution of resources and land and political instability, persistent social tensions have developed, resulting primarily from a collective impoverishment accompanied by de facto lawlessness, violence, and oppression of the Mexican rural population, and a rising elite in the cities. Mexican author Juan Rulfo (1917–1986) experienced violent clashes between social revolutionary and state actors in which around two million people died. These events fundamentally shaped Rulfo’s literary works, El Llano en llamas (1953), an anthology of short stories, and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). This article focuses on El Llano en llamas , understanding the collection of short stories as an aestheticization of the structural grievances suffered by the Mexican rural population at the beginning of the 20th century and regards it as a form of literary protest. Showing that Rulfo’s stories are placed in a tension between ethics, aesthetics, and documentation, this article seeks to uncover the social agenda that Rulfo pursued as an author, giving voice to figures who can hardly articulate themselves outside of literature. Through literature, Rulfo appropriates, reshapes and reflects socially located power structures and socio-economic hierarchies. Finally, this article shows that the links between poverty, inequality of opportunity, structural discrimination, and spatial marginalization that Rulfo’s stories express remain virulent in the 21st century.

Rulfo's literary reputation rests on just two slim books-the short story collection El Llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames), first published in 1953, and the novel Pedro Páramo, released two years later. The story's central drama is that Tacha, the narrator's sister, has lost her cow to the swollen river: a cow given to her by her father to serve as a dowry to help attract a decent husband, an animal that represented all the wealth and promise the family could muster. Everywhere we went on that trip I looked for traces of the Mexico sketched in Rulfo's books, hunting for images frozen in time: empty streets and crumbling buildings, fields of agave and maiz, rolling desert vistas and ruined haciendas. After registering his birth in the town of Sayula, his parents soon moved to San Gabriel, where Rulfo spent most of his childhood, attending school at the nearby Colegio Josefino.

[...]the character of Natalia is presented as a Malinche figure-the paradoxical symbol of rape victim and national traitor incarnated by the indigenous female-which links the oppression wrought by the colonial Church to a persistent oppression of women. Upon their arrival in a new village, the captains of the conquest read a speech (in Spanish) to the native people, which declared that if they did not convert to the Catholic faith, they would be either enslaved or killed (Galeano 29). [...]colonization and conversion were inseparable processes in the early days of New Spain. Tombs notes that in Latin America, \"the church's priority was usually to protect its institutional interests rather than present a prophetic voice on the suffering of the disadvantaged\" (41). [...]from the inception of the European presence in Mexico, the Christian religion was used as a tool in a process of domination and repression of indigenous cultures, rights, and lives. The Church in Post-revolutionary Mexico In Rulfo's era, the role of the Church in government and society was a source of controversy, repression, and violence, beginning in 1917, the same year that he was born, with the new Constitution implemented by the revolutionaries: one its main revisions was the emphasis on the separation of Church and state, especially through the creation of a public system of education.

At a time when cognitive literary scholars and scientists are delving deeper into the relationship between reading and meaning-making, and between reading and the mental simulation of sound, it is worth revisiting the role of the auditory in Juan Rulfo's short fiction. In this study I offer an analysis of the author's symbolic use of sound, especially non-verbal sound, in four stories from El llano en llamas . I argue that Rulfo employs sound as a means of auditory symbolism, frequently overturning accepted symbolic meaning in order to express a profoundly pessimistic vision of human nature and experience.

This article argues for a shift toward aurality and away from the emphasis on orality that has long been a keynote in criticism about the work of Juan Rulfo. To attend to the ears that listen rather than solely the voice that speaks, I not only consider the Jaliscan writer’s entire oeuvre but also turn to a seldom-studied yet readily available archive: Rulfo’s recordings of a few stories from El llano en llamas and two fragments from Pedro Páramo. Addressing these audio versions amplifies the importance of the aural throughout Rulfo’s writings and expands on the readings of other critics who examine some of the sounds that echo across his works but who rarely acknowledge the constitutive role of the listener. And just as Rulfo’s own experiences with tape reveal these listening techniques, his representations of other sound reproduction technologies portray the effects of changing aural perceptions and practices.

Despite linguistic and cultural divides, the works by Juan Rulfo and by Andrey Platonov parallel each other in their strikingly overlapping literary treatment of the spirit—one in the spectral form of the ghost, and the other in the internal, intangible form of the soul—and its affective manifestation in comparable contexts of postrevolutionary modernization and agricultural-economic transition. Both texts rupture the social realism that had dominated the literary scenes of Russia and Mexico, respectively, in the early twentieth century through the use of the social figure of the spirit/specter that emerges in the protagonists’ return to places of origin. In the liminal yet visionary desert landscapes haunted by the Comalan ghosts and the enduring Dzhan dispossessed, the Hegelian notion of historical development is unseated and, with it, the dialectical (im)possibility of utopia after upheaval, generating consideration of a new political and social order. In both works, the reader is left to make meaning in a spatialized, affective framework wherein spectral melancholy is not necessarily tied only to mourning or loss but also to imagination, endurance, and ambiguity about the future, loosely in the vein of Fredric Jameson’s linking of death to utopia and Walter Benjamin’s vision of “mortification.”

Son muchas las lecturas que se han desarrollado en torno al personaje de Susana San Juan (Molloy, Bastos, Alonso, Aguinaga, de Valdės, entre otros y otras); pocas han logrado, sin embargo, percatarse del elemento político que guarda dicho personaje. Estas lecturas nos han proporcionado interesantes perspectivas desde las cuales nutrir el gran e infinito sistema de posibilidades de lectura que guarda Pedro Páramo (1955) y en particular Susana San Juan. Entre estas lecturas, sin embargo, se ausentan las consecuencias que el pensar al personaje, su cuerpo y su locura, tienen, específicamente, en el poder patriarcal de aquellos padres que gobiernan y manejan la existencia de las y los pobladores de Cómala. Así, en el presente artículo propongo analizar al personaje de Susana San Juan como espacio de resistencia y límite al poder patriarcal representado en la novela por Pedro Páramo, padre económico, el padre Rentería, padre religioso, y Bartolomé San Juan, padre biológico. Como se demostrará a lo largo del escrito, este poder patriarcal es movilizado por una urgencia de poder y posesión que se traduce en una fuerza corruptora extendida a las relaciones que los tres padres mantienen entre sí y entre los demás pobladores de Cómala. Con ello, Pedro Páramo evidencia la manera en la que operan las relaciones sociales patriarcales, en tanto cada uno de los padres persigue la posesión de gente y tierra (Páramo), del más allá (Rentería) y del cuerpo femenino (Bartolomé San Juan), en ejercicio de su derecho y virtud por ser varones hegemónicos con poder.

La anécdota de un encuentro entre dos escritores consagrados permite identificar ciertos rasgos de la escritura y de la figura autoral de Juan Rulfo, como el empleo de una óptica ajena para percibir lo propio y la estrategia de producir una obra magistral sumamente acotada a fin de esquivar el eventual fracaso. El uso calibrado de voces ajenas en la narrativa rulfiana da paso al reconocimiento de responsabilidades fatales y a un habla de derrotados y muertos que no cesan de confesarse, cuyos cuerpos se ajustan a las derivas de un río silencioso.

In this article, we will review the role played by hunger and food in the represented characters of the Rulfian universe. We will specifically deal with the ideas of Roman Ingarden about the sets of circumstances projected by the sentences in the work of literary art. According to Ingarden, here we can find different types of sentences, depending on the sets of circumstances that refer to a content of 'this is it', 'it seems' or 'it happens'. It is thanks to the functions of these sets of circumstances that we perceive the objects, because they 'illuminate' or so to speak the field of vision and 'disappear' so that we can perceive the objects. This determines, on one hand, the configuration of the represented world and, on the other, makes us to perceive, as readers, that rickety and hopeless world where the Rulfian characters are just shadows that wander in search of survival.

The theater as a means of expression can go beyond an aesthetic ideal. It can give agency to those who due to different circumstances have either lost their voices or have remained silent. It has the power to question humanity, to speak of historical processes, and to tell stories of the people that remained marginalized. This thesis explores how through a staging of my own version, “El Corrido de Pedro Páramo”, a bilingual (“Espanglish”) adaptation based on the novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, I was able to empower the Latino community at the University of California, Santa Cruz by giving them a voice for their own cultural expression, while bringing together a diverse audience to view this iconic work through the use of a bilingual approach. My adaptation of the text reframes two central characters using a feminist lens, and incorporates the corrido form, a musical device that empowered the female voice. My adaptation reflects both the original identities of Rulfo’s writing, and their transposition through my innovations.