El gallo de oro, written around 1958 and published in 1980, has received astonishingly little critical attention, especially in light of the enormous expectation about Rulfo's next publication after Pedro Páramo. Milagros Esquerro wonders why nobody tried to tie Rulfo down on the genesis, history and nature of his text, published with the title El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine. In the Introduction to this edition, Jorge Alaya Blanco has no hesitation in stating that it is a text written for the cinema in a plain language which was drastically different from his ‘literary’ texts: ‘[Está] redactado en el lenguaje llano, plástico, funcional y sin preocupaciones estilísticas que requiere todo proyecto cinematográfico repleto de precisiones, cosa que contrasta con la acabadísima elaboración formal de la obra literaria de Rulfo’ (14). Esquerro radically rejects this notion: ‘me importa declarar rotundamente que El gallo de oro no es un texto para cine, sino una novela corta que forma parte cabal del núcleo central de la obra del escritor jalisciense’ (‘El gallo’ 787). Alberto Vital has more recently written that, while it was certainly not written as a commission for the film industry, it does sit between the t wo media which defined the Mexican cultural scene in the 1960s:

Whatever the exact purpose and history of the novella, readers quickly find themselves immersed in a colourful and boldly dramatic cinematic world. It is far more visually explicit than the diffuse halftones of the world of Comala and different also from the poetically striking but extremely subtle images of stories like ‘No oyes ladrar los perros’. The clothes and body of Bernarda, la Caponera, are described in exciting visual detail, uncharacteristic of either El Llano en llamas or Pedro Páramo: