SOURCE: "Juan Rulfo: Contemporary Mexican Novelist," in New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Winter, 1965-66, pp. 293-318.

In the following excerpt, Harss stresses Rulfo's significance as a regionalist writer, contending that his short fiction successfully incorporates political and cultural themes without using propaganda or exaggerated sentiment.

The current of regionalism, once a tidal flow, though somewhat diminished lately, continues to run strong in our literature. A lot of what it hauls along is old-fashioned stuff of little more than pictoric interest. The old regionalists who started producing the bulk of our literature toward the end of the nineteenth century were medíators between man and nature. Their function was less literary than agricultural. Their eye was innocent: it alighted only on surfaces. There was a wilderness to be tamed, an unmarked land to be given man's image and imprint. There were remnants of tribal cultures to be explored...