SOURCE: "The Old Gringo and the Elegiac Western," in University of Dayton Review, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 137-47.

In the following essay, Hall examines Fuentes's handling of the female perspective in The Old Gringo and illustrates parallels between the novel and "elegiac Western" films "which are characterized by a quality of lament for the passing of the hero, and by extension, of the heroic age of the American West."

The opening of The Old Gringo (1985), by Carlos Fuentes, sets in place the chief organizing principle of the novel, the narrated memories of Harriet Winslow, an unmarried schoolteacher from Washington, D.C., who, the reader discovers, once came to Mexico to instruct the children of the rich hacendado Miranda family and there became embroiled in the Revolution. Her contacts with the uillista general Tomas Arroyo and the Old Gringo polarize her experiences between an apparent infatuation with Arroyo and...