In 1955 Juan Rulfo published his sole novel, Pedro Páramo. It followed a collection of short stories, El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain), in 1953. Apart from a few more stories added to subsequent editions, some film-scripts, and a promised second novel that never fully appeared, to be titled La cordillera, that was the sum of Rulfo’s fictional work. The story of how such a meager output could attain canonic status, both within Mexico and abroad through translation, is itself instructive for the novel was poorly reviewed when it first appeared, and took four years to sell the first 1,000 copies of a first edition of 2,000 copies.

In a general way, Rulfo’s rural fiction offers a mirror into which local and foreign readers can explore the complex identity of what it meant to be Mexican in the twentieth century. The plot of this inquiry into identity follows an abandoned son setting out to confront his father. This personal quest is framed in a fiction that recreates the shattering experiences of the so-called Mexican Revolution (1910-20), especially how the decade of violence and the consequent jostling for power initiated the massive migration from the countryside to the city. This social phenomenon of migration to the cities is not solely due to political upheavals, for it happened across all Latin America. In 1928 Mexico City (México D. F.) reached 1 million inhabitants. Today, the rough figure is somewhere between 18 and 23 million. Juan Rulfo (1918-86) was but one of these urban migrants in his move from the state of Jalisco to the capital Mexico City.