Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 in Apulco but spent most of his early years in the neighbouring town of San Gabriel. Both these towns are in Jalisco, a state which lies in the conservative north-west of Mexico, very much one of the focal points of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the epicentre of the Cristero War (1926-29). The Mexican Revolution left a legacy of violent score-settling which continued to shape the lives of those who lived in the countryside. Rulfo's father was murdered in 1923 (his paternal grandfather died a year after) and he was only eight at the start of the Cristero War, a bloody conflagration between Church and State which claimed the lives of some 250,000 combatants and civilians, among them Rulfo's uncles. …
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