The Old Gringo (Spanish : Gringo Viejo) is a novel by Carlos Fuentes, first published in 1985. Its English language translation of the same year was the first novel by a Mexican author to be a U.S. bestseller [1] and was one of three nominees for the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award as best novel of 1985. [2] An unsuccessful adaptation to film followed in 1989. [3] Later criticism has found in the novel a wary consideration of the irreconcilability of United States and Mexican mindsets.
The novel is framed as the reminiscence of a female character (identified as Harriet Winslow through its course) "now she sits alone and remembers".
An embittered American writer and former journalist, not named until the final chapter as Ambrose Bierce, decides to leave his old life behind and seek death in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. A widower whose two sons are dead and whose daughter refuses to speak to him, he seeks out part of the Army of the North under Pancho Villa. The particular group he encounters in Chihuahua, led by 'General' Tomás Arroyo, has just liberated the massive hacienda of the Miranda family. Arroyo is mestizo, the product of the rape of his mother by his Miranda father, and is persuaded by the old gringo to let him join the revolutionary force.
At that same hacienda, the old man meets Harriet Winslow, a 31-year-old woman from Washington D.C., hired as a blind to tutor the Miranda children, while the family has fled the country. Harriet, however, refuses to leave the hacienda, insisting that she has been paid and will wait for the family's return. At first, she will not call Arroyo "General" (insisting that he has merely given himself the title), and has a patronizing view of the revolutionary army and the Mexican people. Her own father had disappeared during the earlier American invasion of Cuba and the Winslow family has been living off his army pension. Only Harriet knew that he had really stayed behind to live with a mulatto woman.
Harriet is committed into the care of the old gringo, who subsequently falls in love with her. The gringo displays considerable courage under fire, risking what seems like obvious death, and gains a reputation for valor. However, his refusal to obey Arroyo's order to shoot a captured Federal officer means that the 'General' could have him executed. Instead Arroyo shoots the officer himself, then parlays Harriet into a sexual relationship in return for sparing the gringo. Although Harriet appreciates their encounter, she cannot forgive his sexual arrogance. Arroyo's partner, a woman referred to as "La Luna", whom the Revolution has liberated from an abusive landowning husband, accepts his infidelity as necessary. But the gringo finds Harriet's sacrifice ironic, forcing him to reveal to her his real purpose in coming to Mexico. Instead, he now treats Harriet as a daughter in place of his estranged child, while she takes the old gringo in place of the father who has abandoned his family.
While Arroyo was away fighting in the mountains, Harriet had been attempting to rebuild and restore the hacienda and teach the women and children there. He, however, wishes to destroy his place of birth, remembering his humiliation there as the unrecognized son of the owner, and wins over the local peasants by posing as a true son of the people and using the name of his mother (Arroyo) rather than Miranda, to which he has a right. That right he believes contained in a document which he keeps close to him (though he cannot read it), until the gringo sets it on fire in revenge for his treatment of Harriet. Arroyo then responds by fatally shooting him in the back.
Later, Harriet presses for the return of the gringo's body, claiming him as her father, so that he may be buried in the grave reserved for the vanished Winslow at Arlington National Cemetery. Pancho Villa now faces criticism for an alleged cold-blooded murder of an American by troops under his overall command. Villa has the American's body exhumed and 'executed' by firing squad (passing it off as the work of the Federales). When Arroyo approaches to give the dead body the coup de grâce, Villa orders the firing squad to shoot Arroyo as a means of preventing any further American response.
After Harriet crosses the border back to the US, she refuses to testify in front of Congress as part of a journalistic campaign to encourage the U.S. to 'civilize' Mexico, and decides that instead of attempting to change Mexico, as she had wanted to earlier, the better approach, as she now tells the waiting journalists, is "to learn to live with Mexico".
According to a 1992 interview, the initial idea for a novel on this theme came after Fuentes encountered the work of Ambrose Bierce in his teens, and was one to which he occasionally returned over the decades. [4] Following publication, he commented that "What started this novel was my admiration for [Bierce] and for his Tales of Soldiers and Civilians . I was fascinated with the idea of a man who fought in the United States Civil War and dies in a Mexican civil war." [5] The novel was written originally in Spanish and Fuentes then worked closely with Margaret Sayers Peden on the English translation. Between the two versions there are some differences in wording and even in the number of chapters. [6]
Reviewers of the novel had difficulty with the postmodern rhetoric employed by Fuentes. The Los Angeles Times found it "not always easy to follow; perhaps his convulsive involvement with his native land prohibits that". [7] This is echoed by a comment in one encyclopedia that Fuentes' experiments in narrative are meant as a demonstration of the novel's master theme: the almost unbridgeable distance between the Hispanic and Anglo-American cultures. [8] Another critic sees in the novel "a negotiation of borders within and between selves and between and within countries", of which the mirrored ballroom that is all that remains of the Miranda hacienda is made the deceptive symbol. [9] Publishers Weekly summed it up by finding that, "in this fine short novel, Fuentes remains, as usual, wisely suspicious of both American politics and those of the Revolution". [10]
One key incident, however, is not of the novelist's invention. The murder, exhumation and posthumous execution of Bierce is based on the actual killing of the Englishman William Benton by one of Pancho Villa's generals in 1910. [11] In reality, no one really knows what became of Bierce, thus allowing Fuentes to make of his fate an existential parable of personal choice and redemption. [12]
Francisco "Pancho" Villa was a Mexican revolutionary. A general in the Mexican Revolution, he was a key figure in the revolutionary movement that forced out President Porfirio Díaz and brought Francisco I. Madero to power in 1911. When Madero was ousted by a coup led by General Victoriano Huerta in February 1913, Villa joined the anti-Huerta forces in the Constitutionalist Army led by Venustiano Carranza. After the defeat and exile of Huerta in July 1914, Villa broke with Carranza. Villa dominated the meeting of revolutionary generals that excluded Carranza and helped create a coalition government. Emiliano Zapata and Villa became formal allies in this period. Like Zapata, Villa was strongly in favor of land reform, but did not implement it when he had power. At the height of his power and popularity in late 1914 and early 1915, the U.S. considered recognizing Villa as Mexico's legitimate authority.
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
Let's Go with Pancho Villa is a Mexican motion picture directed by Fernando de Fuentes in 1936, the last of the director's Revolution Trilogy, besides El prisionero trece and El compadre Mendoza.
Martín Luis Guzmán Franco was a Mexican novelist and journalist. Along with Mariano Azuela and Nellie Campobello, he is considered a pioneer of the revolutionary novel, a genre inspired by the experiences of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He spent periods in exile in the United States and Spain. He founded newspapers, weekly magazines, and publishing companies. In 1958, he was awarded Mexico's National Prize in Literature.
Pedro Armendáriz Bohr, better known by his stage name Pedro Armendáriz Jr., was a Mexican actor.
Old Gringo is a 1989 American romantic adventure film starring Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Jimmy Smits. It was directed by Luis Puenzo and co-written with Aída Bortnik, based on the 1985 novel The Old Gringo by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.
Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo was a Mexican film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific film directors of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best known for his work as director of the film María Candelaria (1944), which won the Palme d'Or award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. As an actor, he worked in numerous film productions in Mexico and in Hollywood. He was the father of the Mexican actor Jaime Fernández.
Soldaderas, often called Adelitas, were women in the military who participated in the conflict of the Mexican Revolution, ranging from commanding officers to combatants to camp followers. "In many respects, the Mexican revolution was not only a men's but a women's revolution." Although some revolutionary women achieved officer status, coronelas, "there are no reports of a woman achieving the rank of general." Since revolutionary armies did not have formal ranks, some women officers were called generala or coronela, even though they commanded relatively few men. A number of people assigned female at birth, took male identities, dressing as men, and being called by the male version of their given name, among them Ángel Jiménez and Amelio Robles Ávila.
From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter is a 1999 American Western horror film directed by P. J. Pesce. It serves as a prequel to the 1996 film From Dusk till Dawn. It was released directly to video and was nominated at the 26th Saturn Awards for "Best Home Video Release". In late 2010, the production of a fourth film in the series was discussed, but, as of August 2012, further work on this possibility has not been revealed. A TV series adaptation was released in 2014.
The Death of Artemio Cruz is an historical fiction novel published in 1962 by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. An English translation by Sam Hileman was published in 1964, and a new translation by Alfred MacAdam in 1991. It is considered to be a milestone in the Latin American Boom.
Margaret ("Petch") Sayers Peden was an American translator and professor emerita of Spanish at the University of Missouri. Prior to her death in 2020, Peden lived and worked in Columbia, Missouri.
"A Horseman in the Sky" is a heavily anthologized short story by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. It was published on April 14, 1889 under the title The Horseman in the Sky in the Sunday edition of The Examiner, a San Francisco newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. It is set during the American Civil War and is one of Bierce's best known war stories. Bierce revised the story for his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.
General Rodolfo Fierro was a railway worker, railway superintendent, federal soldier and a major general in the army of Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution in the Division del Norte. Fierro and his counterpart and fellow lieutenant, Tomas Urbina, have been cited as the two halves of Pancho Villa, Fierro representing his malicious side. It is believed Fierro met Pancho Villa in 1913 following the Madero revolution. Originating from Sinaloa, Fierro was a former federal officer having taken part in fighting against the Yaqui Indians. Following his role as a federal officer, Fierro went on to work as a railway man, eventually being absorbed into Villa's ranks.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was named by the Grolier Club one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.
NellieFrancisca Ernestina Campobello Luna was a Mexican writer, notable for having written one of the few chronicles of the Mexican Revolution from a woman's perspective: Cartucho, which chronicles her experience as a young girl in Northern Mexico at the height of the struggle between forces loyal to Pancho Villa and those who followed Venustiano Carranza. She moved to Mexico City in 1923, where she spent the rest of her life and associated with many of the most famous Mexican intellectuals and artists of the epoch. Like her half-sister Gloria, a well-known ballet dancer, she was also known as a dancer and choreographer. She was the director of the Mexican National School of Dance.
San Angel Inn is an old Carmelite monastery which was turned into a well-known restaurant in the southwest of Mexico City in the historic neighborhood of San Ángel. It is famous for its international cuisine, variety of dishes, Mexican-colonial architecture and interior decorations, and spacious gardens and fountains. In the old Hacienda Goicoechea, viceroys, their consorts, and the aristocracy would relax and take a break in New Spain's capital.
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians is a collection of short stories by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce, also published under the title In the Midst of Life. With a stated publication date of 1891 the stories describe unusual incidents in the lives of soldiers and civilians during the American Civil War. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900, stating "These short stories are among the finest, and best known, in American literature. ... Written in a clear simple style, with each phrase contributing to the total effect, Bierce's tales pointed the way for the American short-story writer." Bierce's famous story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is included in this collection.
Pancho Villa was famous during the Mexican Revolution and has remained so, holding a fairly mythical reputation in Mexican consciousness, but not officially recognized in Mexico until long after his death. As the "Centaur from the North" he was considered a threat to property and order on both sides of the border, feared, and revered, as a modern Robin Hood.
The Battle of Ojinaga, also known as the Taking of Ojinaga, was one of the battles of the Mexican Revolution and was fought on January 11, 1914. The conflict put an end to the last stronghold of the Federal Army in Northern Mexico.
