Output details

One rainy market day: 'integration' and the indigenous community in the fiction and thought of Juan Rulfo.

The Mexican Juan Rulfo wrote his two major works in the 1950s: a collection of short stories, El llano en llamas (1953), and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). He worked for Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista for more than twenty years. Biographers have discussed his stance on indigenous issues based on the many interviews he gave on the subject. But this is the first study to explore the relationship between Rulfo’s comments on indigenous cultures and his fictional representation of these cultures. It examines theoretical approaches to the concept of integration, favouring that of the Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla on México profundo and México moderno. Critics of Rulfo’s fictional work rely on the sole passage of text in his work in which indigenous characters appear. In this fragment, indigenous people from the town of Apango visit the mestizo town Comala to set up their stalls on a grim, rainy market day. The essay places this fragment of Pedro Páramo in the context of the narrative of the novel itself and in that of the wider narrative of Mexican history. With an analysis based on competing interpretations of the word ‘integración’, the fragment suggests that economic incentives are not a useful basis for social interaction between the two groups. Along with the edited volume itself, this chapter was reviewed in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXVIII, Number 4, 2011, 628. Please note that a seven-page section of the monograph on Rulfo submitted for REF2014 by the same author (section called ‘Ethnic Unity’, pp. 44-52) contains material which appears in this chapter. That seven-page section of the monograph should be disregarded for REF2014; this chapter has a different argument, deals with different theories and contains a much deeper engagement with the theme by analysing the aforementioned interviews given by Rulfo