Everybody’s Cold War Novel: Cultural Diplomacy and the Internationalization of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955)

Abstract

In the late 1960s, the benignly named Farfield Foundation purchased a plot of land in the Mexican countryside for one of Mexican literature’s most celebrated figures, Juan Rulfo. A trailblazer of Latin American modernism, Rulfo had won his laurels a decade earlier when, as the star student of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME), he penned El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955), literary touchstones that were soon translated into English. Fifty years later, the true identity of Rulfo’s benefactor was uncovered: The Farfield Foundation was a front for the CIA, whose partner in Cold War cultural diplomacy, the Rockefeller Foundation, had bankrolled the CME’s founding in 1951. What, if anything, do these revelations tell us about Rulfo’s formal innovations, or about the midcentury elevation of his works as required reading for anti-communist liberals and revolutionary camaradas alike? This article explores how Pedro Páramo, by lyricizing midcentury debates on agrarian reform, became a touchstone for both the international left and center. Such framing invites us to rethink the relationship between Latin American modernist innovation and postwar internationalism, while also connecting the novel’s formal experimentation to its deep historical rootedness in a nexus of postrevolutionary projects aimed at transforming the Mexican countryside.