Viscous Porosity: Interactions between Human and Environment in Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas

Critics have often noted the prominent role accorded to the natural world in Juan Rulfo’s work, interpreting the fusion of human and environment as a metaphor for the characters’ fate or for their desired but unrealizable state. However, the interactions between the human and more-than-human world that proliferate in Rulfo’s writing are not only metaphorical, but also material. Approaching El llano en llamas (1953) from an ecocritical perspective allows the reader to delve into the complex interactions between the geographical, geological and meteorological conditions of south-eastern Jalisco in which the stories are located and the social, historical and economic context of post-revolutionary Mexico, from religion and class to gender and sexuality. This article focuses first on the socio-economic factors surrounding the flood—a so-called ‘natural disaster’—in ‘Es que somos muy pobres’, before turning to the relationship between violence, machismo, weather and land/earth in ‘¡Diles que no me maten!’.