Social and historical context

The fifteen stories of El Llano en llamas in the first Fondo de Cultura edition of 1953 and the two added in the second, 1970 edition, were first published in the ten years between 1945, with ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ [‘They Have Given us the Land’], and 1955, with ‘La herencia de Matilde Arcángel’ [‘The Legacy of Matilde Arcángel’]. One, the title story, relates episodes from the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution. Two are shaped by the problems of land reform, ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ and ‘La Cuesta de las Comadres’ [‘Comadre Hill’]. One is explicitly about the Cristero Wars, ‘La noche que lo dejaron solo’ [‘The Night They Left Him Alone’], and another two are intimately related to that conflict: the bitter and comical ‘Anacleto Morones’ and the harrowing ‘Luvina’. In many ways, the Cristero Rebellion is painfully emblematic of the defining conflict of the first half of the twentieth century in Mexico, which is at the heart of the irresolvable tensions in Rulfo's work: that between the modernizing, rationalist project of the state and the traditional, rural (and Catholic) peasant culture which, by the time of Rulfo's writing, had been finally crushed and violently, unhappily incorporated into the modern state. Ironically, or tragically, that ‘Revolutionary’ state drew its legitimizing discourse from the image of the sovereign people at the heart of the victorious popular revolution. It was also the Cristero Wars that triggered the irremediable devastation, depopulation and erosion of the land of Rulfo's Jalisco that provides the physical background to his stories, and the legacy of violence, despair and conflict that informs many of his plots. The characters of El Llano en llamas are predominantly peasants, violent, malicious, taciturn, crushed and alienated by modernity, or the by-products of an unevenly modern Mexico: the corruption and oppression of officials of the Revolutionary state. Their world is circumscribed by the dramatic historical, economic and political forces of early twentieth-century Mexico, although those forces are rarely outlined explicitly, and the discourse of the victors is generally only implied or obliquely present.