Narco, Dust, and Myth: Juan Rulfo’s Plains Now Belong to the ‘Lord of the Roosters’

This chronicle is part of a selection of the most read and commented-on chronicles of 2025.

Sayula, San Gabriel, and Apulco are towns with a Cristero War past and a tradition of distilled spirits, but they are also overrun by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which takes advantage of their location among the hills to operate with discretion and maintain territorial control.  In this remote southern region of Jalisco, the birthplace of Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, better known as Juan Rulfo, is a subject of dispute.

After Miguel de Cervantes, Rulfo is the second most translated author in the Spanish language. Beyond his fame and international success, he is also one of the most enigmatic writers, both for the texts he published and for the silences surrounding his private life. One of the greatest mysteries in his biography is where he was born. During his lifetime, he offered different versions. To this day, Sayula, San Gabriel, and Apulco all claim to be the birthplace of the author of “Pedro Páramo” (1955).

Sayula is 41 kilometers from San Gabriel, and San Gabriel is 22 kilometers from Apulco. Since 2017, efforts have been underway to create a Rulfo Route that would connect Sayula to the municipality of Comala, in Colima, the real-life location of the mythical Comala from “Pedro Páramo.” Paradoxically, this same area is known as the CJNG’s “golden triangle,” due to its strategic location between Jalisco, Michoacán, and Colima. This is no coincidence: last February, in Tonaya—a few kilometers from Apulco—”Don Rodo,” the brother of the cartel leader, was arrested for the second time.

But let’s return to Rulfo. In a 1977 interview with RTVE, as part of the series “A fondo,” hosted by Joaquín Soler Serrano, Rulfo gave an answer that many of his biographers have taken as definitive:

—Well, you were born in Sayula, correct?

—Not in Sayula, but in a nearby town called Apulco.

—Ah, Apulco. Because the biographies give different names: they mention Sayula, San Gabriel, Apulco.

—Apulco, yes. We were indeed born in Apulco. The thing is, it’s a town that belongs to San Gabriel, and San Gabriel, in turn, belongs to the district of Sayula. And since it’s a town that doesn’t appear on maps, the larger town is always given as the place of origin.

An undeniable fact, however, is that Rulfo was registered and baptized in another place, in what is now the designated “Magical Town” of Sayula. In the House of Culture that bears his name, the official documents that attest to this are displayed in frames.

“It was Rulfo himself who created the controversy about his birthplace,” says Rodrigo Sánchez Sosa, a historian from southern Jalisco. “These circumstances are related to the historical context in which he was born. It’s likely that even he didn’t know for sure. He had just turned six when his father was killed [1923], and when he turned 10, his mother died. So it probably wasn’t important to ask where he was born; he wasn’t certain himself.”

Rulfo achieved worldwide recognition with only two works: the short story collection ‘El Llano en llamas’ (The Burning Plain) (1953) and the novel ‘Pedro Páramo’. Although he never stopped writing, his subsequent publications were scarce: some film scripts and reviews.  He was also the author of a vast body of photographic work, mostly focused on people and the countryside, which has earned him a place among the great masters of photography of the 20th century.

To illustrate the profound significance of his work, Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1985: “‘Pedro Páramo’ is one of the best novels in Spanish-language literature, and even in all of literature.”  For his part, Gabriel García Márquez confessed in 1978: “If I had written ‘Pedro Páramo,’ I wouldn’t worry about anything else and wouldn’t write again in my life.”

So, to approach the mystery—that imprecise point between dust, memory, and myth—I venture on a journey through southern Jalisco, to discover that perhaps the exact details don’t matter as much as the way the landscape is woven into his literature. Because Rulfo wasn’t born merely at a point on a map: he was born in the mist of San Gabriel, in the silence of Apulco, and in the whispers of Sayula.

Sayula, Juan Rulfo’s denied homeland

At number 124-A on Manuel Ávila Camacho Poniente Avenue in Sayula, Jalisco, Juan Rulfo was born. It could easily go unnoticed, but if you look closely, a plaque on the yellow facade commemorates it: “On May 16, 1917, the celebrated novelist Juan Rulfo was born in this house, number 48 on what was then Madero Street.”

Sayula is a town that aspires to be a city. There’s a movie theater, a Soriana supermarket, a Bodega Aurrera, and a Coppel department store, but horses and people returning from working in the fields can still be seen on its streets. In the heart of the town, the Cultural Center that bears his name houses, framed, the writer’s birth certificate and baptismal record, both documents issued in Sayula. As if, upon opening its doors, the building offered irrefutable proof.

Inside, a bronze bust reproduces Rulfo’s stern expression and profound gaze, one that seems to contemplate absences. Written behind it, in cursive letters, is one of the few fragments of his work in which he explicitly mentions Sayula: “It was the hour when children play in the streets of all the towns, filling the afternoon with their shouts. When the black walls still reflect the yellow light of the sun. At least that’s what I had seen in Sayula, just yesterday at this same time.”

This is a scene from ‘Pedro Páramo,’ when the narrator recalls the landscape before his arrival in the silent and ghostly Comala: the flight of the doves, the laughter of the children, the twilight light. He had seen all of that, he says, in Sayula.

This municipality in southern Jalisco, with a population of over 37,000 inhabitants according to the latest census, maintains an agricultural tradition and a deep historical memory. Conquered in 1521 by the Spanish, Sayula’s urban layout follows colonial logic: straight, wide streets, an imposing central plaza, a church with a courtyard, and an old inn. Ten arcades surround the historic center, each with styles that evoke the splendor of the viceregal era.

Due to its history, architecture, and cultural richness – its cajeta (caramelized goat’s milk), metalwork, and pitayas (dragon fruit) – it was declared a Magical Town in 2024. However, in 2020, the municipal government faced a scandal. A video went viral showing municipal police blocking the passage of a Mexican army convoy while escorting alleged members of the CJNG, whose leader is known as ‘El Mencho’.

In addition to official documents, other evidence points to Sayula as Rulfo’s birthplace. The municipal chronicler, Rodrigo Sánchez Sosa, highlights a letter dated May 22, 1917, written by José de Jesús Pérez Rulfo – the writer’s uncle – and reproduced in the book ‘Noticias sobre Juan Rulfo’ by Alberto Vital. In the letter, the uncle responds from Sayula to his brother’s invitation to be the godfather of his newborn child.

“My dearest Brother: I am replying to your letter dated the 16th of this month, in which you inform me of the birth of your new son and that both he and María [the mother] are doing well, which makes me happy, because I believe that his crying is merely due to being fussy and not because of illness,” the document says, and it indicates that the news of the birth came from Sayula.

In an interview with Elena Poniatowska, Rulfo also said he was born there. And according to Federico Munguía, a historian from Sayula, the author’s sister, Eva, confirmed the same in an interview for Televisa in the 1980s. However, she added a nuance: “Juan would have liked to be born in Apulco,” she said.

The ghost of Sayula, a sexist narrative?

That desire to be associated with Apulco—which was his mother’s hometown—has given rise to speculation about a supposed disdain for Sayula. One of the most discussed theories is that Rulfo avoided associating himself with the municipality because of a popular legend, satirical verses attributed to Teófilo Pedroza—with a sexist narrative—about the ghost in the Sayula cemetery. He didn’t want to be ridiculed, as was common at the time, for being from “a place of homosexuals,” Sánchez Sosa points out.

The satire tells the story of a ragpicker—a junk dealer—in precarious circumstances who, encouraged by his friend, goes to the local cemetery hoping to encounter a ghost that gives away gold. What he discovers is that the supposed ghost was a homosexual man who demanded sexual favors in exchange for money. The character, indignant, utters a phrase that people from Sayula carry as a stigma: “In this land of brutes, where the dead are faggots, what guarantees do I have?” The chronicler Sánchez Sosa says that perhaps, like many other people from Sayula of his time, he didn’t appreciate the verses about the departed souls, but the denial went deeper: “Rulfo not only wished he had been born in his mother’s homeland; his public image, that symbol of Mexican identity that he represents, fit better with an origin in Apulco, that dry and remote place in the deep south,” he adds.

After all, what place could be more appropriate for the birth of the mythical Rulfo than an arid, remote town, made of solitude and dust? What more literary cradle than Apulco, with its desolate landscapes, its relentless heat, and its silence?

Apulco, the original silence of Rulfo

Apulco possesses many elements of the imaginary world created by the Mexican writer. It is so small—it was then and still is now—that in 1917 the newborn Juan Rulfo had to be registered in Sayula, according to the version of the Perpetual Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament, who live in the hacienda that belonged to his maternal grandfather, Carlos Vizcaíno Vargas, a lawyer and local strongman, who they say inspired Rulfo to create Pedro Páramo.

Today, with barely 300 inhabitants, the town survives as a snapshot frozen in time: a former hacienda, a church, a few small houses. I walk through the town on an ordinary afternoon, and a dense peace fills the air. Silence reigns almost all the time, except when a recent model pickup truck speeds by, kicking up dust with narcocorridos playing in the background. “The whispers killed me,” Rulfo wrote, and here it sounds prophetic.

According to official figures, almost 47% of Apulco’s population lives in poverty and faces geographical obstacles that hinder access to basic services and economic opportunities, while armed men in vehicles without license plates travel along the nearby dirt roads.

The town church was a gesture from grandfather Vizcaíno Vargas, who had it built after a trip to Rome, from where they brought a replica of an altarpiece. Today, the remains of Rulfo’s grandparents and parents are buried there. Curiously, this small temple—with cracks in its walls after the 2021 earthquake—enjoys the privilege of being affiliated with a pontifical basilica, thus granting plenary indulgences to the faithful who visit it, meaning their sins are forgiven, as described in the short story “Talpa”: “I felt her weeping inside me as if she were wringing out the cloth of our sins.”

The hacienda where, according to Rulfo, he was born is now a monastery. A space consecrated to the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and to silence. A dense, profound silence, like the one that permeates his work: “That noise, that,” he once wrote.

Brother Bruno opens the door slowly and speaks in a low voice, as if the walls still held secrets. The religious man lives there with five other brothers from Colima, Jalisco, Puebla, Veracruz, and Aguascalientes. “Juan Rulfo was born in this room,” he says, pointing to a room at the end of a clean, simple, almost ceremonial hallway.

Inside the room, there is a wooden desk on which rest copies of ‘The Burning Plain’ and ‘Pedro Páramo’. On a shelf are documents in which the writer’s family acknowledges that he was born in Apulco. There is also a trunk, a simple bed, and a nightstand. A plaque on an easel summarizes it all: “Former Apulco hacienda, belonging to the family of Juan Rulfo, renowned writer…”

And below, the quote from the 1977 interview with RTVE: “Indeed, we were born in Apulco.” His own voice as proof.

Bruno admits he hasn’t seen the ‘Pedro Páramo’ film recently produced by Netflix, but he has read the books. “It’s a privilege to live in this place where, according to many, the writer was born. People come from many places, although it’s mostly foreigners who know that he was born here… and now even the textbooks say so,” he comments.

The monastery was also affected by the earthquake and, being private property, does not receive public funds. “We support ourselves with our work. We make cookies, we sell pizza, Day of the Dead bread, Three Kings’ Day bread, whatever we can to maintain the place,” says Brother Bruno. A makeshift pizzeria, on one side of the monastery, occupies part of the old hacienda. One can have a slice of pizza under an image of the Virgin Mary.

“People have come here who have visited other places where famous writers were born around the world,” the brother says. “And that completely transforms the environment. But here, in Apulco, you can still breathe the atmosphere in which he was born. That’s no small thing.”

Where was Rulfo born? Perhaps, like his literature, he was born at an invisible crossroads between silence and death. In Apulco—arid, remote, almost ghostly—there is a genealogy that connects it to the motherland, to the sacred, to the dead. A place where even the bread is baked amidst prayers and silence is savored like a communion wafer.

San Gabriel, the seed of the plain

At the “I Came to Comala” viewpoint, on the outskirts of San Gabriel, along the road leading to Sayula, stand three bronze figures: Juan Preciado—the son who arrives in search of his father—the muleteer Abundio Martínez (actually his spirit), and his donkey. They represent one of the first scenes of ‘Pedro Páramo’. From there, you can see the plain, a flat, expansive area where the town is located.

They say that at this point the heat is so intense that the earth seems to burn, that the plain is ablaze. They say it was the torches lit down below, like those that accompanied Rulfo’s father’s body at his funeral, that made it seem from a distance “as if the plain were on fire.”

San Gabriel, with its 16,000 inhabitants, emerges from the mist, just like in Rulfo’s stories. It is a town with a deep agricultural and livestock tradition, where old houses with spacious courtyards can be seen, remnants of landowners and local bosses, people on horseback, and pickup trucks. At dawn, the mist slowly dissipates, and the landscape that emerges—trees along the roadside, low hills, cracked earth—seems to have sprung from his pages. Rulfo spent several years of his childhood here.

On various occasions, Rulfo claimed to be from this place. “I was born in a town that had a river, but now it has no water,” he told the Sunday supplement of a Guadalajara newspaper. That river runs through the center of town, flowing from east to west and crossing Evaristo F. Guzmán Street. “I lived in a town called San Gabriel. In reality, I consider myself from there. I spent my childhood years there,” he would declare in another interview, according to the chronicler of San Gabriel, José de Jesus Guzmán.

Guzmán asserts that at least three short stories and several passages from ‘Pedro Páramo’ are inspired by this place. Not only because of the geography, but also because of the names, the rituals, and the voices. “You read Rulfo’s texts and everything sounds familiar,” he says.

In San Gabriel, Rulfo attended school for the first time in 1923, the same year his father was murdered and just four years before his mother’s death. In 1924, he continued his studies at the French Nuns’ School of the Josephine Order. One of the best-known photographs of his childhood, taken in this town when he was only six years old, still circulates; it already shows that serious and melancholic gaze that would accompany him throughout his life.

Following the revolutionary attacks against landowners in the region, the family – Juan Nepomuceno and María and their children Juan, Severiano, and Francisco – first moved to Sayula, and then settled in San Gabriel around 1919.

This plain that I traverse was for decades a metaphor for peasant failure and relentless violence. Today, that same territory, the great plain of Jalisco, is covered with white plastic greenhouses. Where before not even corn would grow, now berries and avocados sprout for foreign markets; the best doesn’t stay in the country. And the new masters of the plain – foreign agricultural investors – even have a private airstrip for small planes, right on the road that goes from San Gabriel to Apulco. The farmworkers are no longer locals from the region, but rather indigenous migrants arriving from Oaxaca or Chiapas, creating new communities alongside the fields where they work. The plain is no longer Rulfo’s, but Rulfo’s spirit still lingers on the plain.

Rulfo’s land now belongs to the ‘Lord of the Roosters’

This is also the territory of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. In some nearby communities, during celebrations such as Children’s Day or Mother’s Day, armed men descend from the mountains in pickup trucks to distribute gifts: clothing, food baskets, toys, all marked with the seal of the ‘Lord of the Roosters,’ Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the criminal group.

“Now the conflicts are different,” reflects the chronicler Sánchez Sosa. “We have agribusiness and organized crime. Social justice is on hold. There has been no real change that has lifted southern Jalisco out of poverty or its long-standing marginalization. The exploitation continues. Rulfo’s stories could be adapted to what we are experiencing.”

The plains remain synonymous with exploitation. In 2013, 270 day laborers were rescued by federal and state authorities from agricultural fields where they lived and worked in subhuman conditions. They had been recruited from Veracruz, Guerrero, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potosí with the promise of a decent wage, but instead received incomplete or delayed payments, or payment in food vouchers. The story of abuse and deception hasn’t changed much; only the faces are different.

Perhaps the ambiguity of his birth was deliberate, as if he had chosen to shroud his origins in dust and myth. Beyond birth certificates or records, he chose to position himself on the border between what was and what no longer is. Between Sayula, Apulco, and San Gabriel, he learned to listen to the silence, contemplate death, and narrate the invisible.

And although the plains no longer burn as they once did, Rulfo is still present. Not in the streets, but in the way the wind rustles the branches. Not in the houses, but in the whispers. Here, where the dust is still palpable, his literature remains the only possible form of permanence.

Sources: Milenio, Pedro Páramo