[University of Texas Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Spanish by Douglas Weatherford
In the first story of Juan Rulfo’s newly translated collection The Burning Plain, first published in 1953, the protagonist is part of a small group of poor rural farmers who have been given land. Aptly, the title of this story is “They Have Given Us the Land.” As the farmers walk across this land, the number of the group dwindles, from twenty-something to four. The land or llano, on the plains of Jalisco, Mexico, is so big that no one knows when or where they’ve gone. The narrator reflects that the remaining four have “walked more than the distance [they’ve] covered.” The group doesn’t talk because it’s too hot and arid. If it’s too arid to speak, it’s certainly too arid to grow crops, which for peasant farmers amounts to starvation. This land that the government has redistributed after the Mexican Revolution will remain as empty as the gesture. Despite fighting and winning, the rural poor will stay poor and the government will stay in power.
In The Burning Plain, Rulfo depicts the struggles of those at the bottom of the social ladder against the powers that keep them there. This short story collection, along with the novels Pedro Páramo and The Golden Cockerel, make up Rulfo’s complete body of work. Though these books are short, their influence on the course of Latin American literature has been tremendous. Weatherford has translated all three books over the last ten years; his translation of Pedro Páramo made a new Rulfo fan of me when I read it for the first time last spring. The novel uses dialogue and a double plot to combine the living and the dead so that we are always wondering what is real and what is imagined, who are ghosts and what is memory, what is past and what is present. In Pedro Páramo, Rulfo banishes these borderlands and instead focuses his eerily succinct prose on his characters, their inner longings and how their decisions reverberate through generations. While Rulfo’s books are seventy years old, his experimental style and complex character portraits are still alive and relevant.
In “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!,” one of seventeen stories in this more realist collection, a destitute farmer named Juvencio Nava pleads that his life be spared. While he doesn’t deny committing the murder that he will be killed for, he doesn’t believe it deserves such a harsh punishment. Decades ago he murdered the neighboring landowner Don Lupe Terreros after he did not allow Juvencio to graze his animals on his land. Without the grass, Juvencio’s cattle would starve and his livelihood would collapse. So Juvencio killed the man and saved his cows. Years later, Don Lupe’s son has captured Juvencio and intends to revenge his father’s murder. He says, “It’s hard growing up knowing the one thing you might grab hold of to put down roots is no more.” He explains how Don Lupe died a slow and painful death. With these words, the son generates some sympathy too. It is clear why he must kill Juvencio, who is then tortured to death. As in “They Have Given Us the Land,” in “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!” the one with more money and power has the last say (here the son, there the government), but unlike the first story, the poor and the rich are seemingly equalized by their violence.
But when Juvencio’s son Justino comes to collect his father’s body, “so full of holes from all the death blows they dealt you,” he accepts this death by calmly “slinging” the body over his burro. Justino knows he cannot avenge his father’s murder as Don Lupe has just done, because Don Lupe’s son is a colonel. Justino would be murdered in turn and then “who’s gonna look after my wife and kids.” The colonel is an important person, while Juvencio, Justino, and their families are no one special. The poor can either refuse disenfranchisement like Juvencio and die while putting up a fight or accept their lack of rights like Justino and carry your dead father’s body home. Rulfo does not condone one choice over the other, but shows just how fraught they both are.
The power difference from which so much of the violence erupts in The Burning Plain is not always between rich and poor. Hierarchical father-son relationships are also a central plot point. In “Paso del Norte,” a dissatisfied son goes to his stingy and equally dissatisfied father to tell him he’s going North and to ask him to watch out for his wife and kids. The son is “gonna make money” because “all you’ve gotta do is get there and make it back.” The father refuses to help, and the son insists that his poverty is his father’s fault because he wasn’t taught a viable occupation. The son goes north anyway. He returns after those he was traveling with were killed trying to cross the border. When he tells this story to his father, he learns that his wife has run off with a muleteer and his father sold his house to cover the expenses. The story ends with the son leaving again to track down his wife. Though there is death in this story, the more narratively compelling violence emerges from the father’s callousness and how the son’s children are “set loose . . . in the milpas to run wild like some horse,” just as the son was. The cycle of abandonment continues.
The real perpetrator of violence in The Burning Plain is exactly this cycle of poverty and the systems that engender it. The characters in these stories are so vulnerable that their existence rests on an edge, and the smallest upheaval or change becomes magnified and topples them completely. In “Because We Were So Poor,” a daughter’s cow—her future livelihood and guarantee to marry a working husband—is washed away in a storm and her fate as a prostitute is sealed. Though Rulfo’s characters might do some despicable things, the author stresses the snares they are caught in, the need for food and purpose, the constant attempts to forge a more stable and sustainable life. Reading these stories during an election year where political rhetoric about violent immigrants at the US/Mexico border is being used to rabble rouse America’s rural poor highlights how little the power structures have changed. Rulfo doesn’t provide any false hope. Instead, he allows Mexico’s agricultural working class to speak and act for themselves, painting a full and complex picture of economic refugees, no matter their origins, as if to say: You, too, would act like his characters if put in their place.
Amber Ruth Paulen is a writer and educator living in rural Michigan. She earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia University and is currently writing a multi-generational novel-in-stories. www.amberpaulen.com.
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