Juan Rulfo’s El Llano en llamas (1953) as Literary Expression of Agrarian Protest

The history of Mexico in the first half of the 20^th century is almost completely dominated by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920/40). Revolutionary events continue to shape Mexican society up to the present day. Due to the unequal distribution of resources and land and political instability, persistent social tensions have developed, resulting primarily from a collective impoverishment accompanied by de facto lawlessness, violence, and oppression of the Mexican rural population, and a rising elite in the cities. Mexican author Juan Rulfo (1917–1986) experienced violent clashes between social revolutionary and state actors in which around two million people died. These events fundamentally shaped Rulfo’s literary works, El Llano en llamas (1953), an anthology of short stories, and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). This article focuses on El Llano en llamas, understanding the collection of short stories as an aestheticization of the structural grievances suffered by the Mexican rural population at the beginning of the 20^th century and regards it as a form of literary protest. Showing that Rulfo’s stories are placed in a tension between ethics, aesthetics, and documentation, this article seeks to uncover the social agenda that Rulfo pursued as an author, giving voice to figures who can hardly articulate themselves outside of literature. Through literature, Rulfo appropriates, reshapes and reflects socially located power structures and socio-economic hierarchies. Finally, this article shows that the links between poverty, inequality of opportunity, structural discrimination, and spatial marginalization that Rulfo’s stories express remain virulent in the 21^st century.