The collective enunciation of the dead as a rewriting of Mexican history in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Abstract

The present work tries to glimpse the inscription vehicles of Mexican history in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, contemplating the European conquest, the caciquismo and the Zapatista revolution. It will be argued that the novel allows us to conceive the historical event from the constant return of the symbolic and effective violence exerted on the subaltern indian and peasant subjects, analyzing the way in which the enunciation of the dead reveals events hidden by the dominant discursive formations. In this sense, the oral accounts of the dead reveal what the written archive silences, calling into examination the exercise of colonial, ecclesiastical and cacical power, through formal transcultural strategies. In this way, the figuration of violence, carried out, among other resources, through the review of narrative parameters of the Western worldview and the inarticulate way of enunciation of the dead, is contrasted with the exotic and idyllic image of Latin America propelled by the writings of the Latin American boom, putting in question the precursor character on this that literary criticism usually grants to the novel.