Mexican Literature and Cross Border Identity in Carlos Fuentes’s The Old Gringo, 1985

Carlos Fuentes

First Edition

Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo, 1985, places Mexican and United States historical memory in direct conflict through a fictional account of Ambrose Bierce’s disappearance during the Mexican Revolution. Fuentes brings together Bierce, American schoolteacher Harriet Winslow, and revolutionary general Tomás Arroyo to examine national identity, foreign intervention, land, paternal authority, and the unequal assumptions shaping encounters between Mexicans and Americans. One of Fuentes’s best-known novels, it became the first novel by a Mexican author to reach a United States bestseller list, marking a significant expansion of Mexican literature’s readership within the English-language publishing market.

Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 1985. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. First edition, first printing. English language. The narrative reimagines the unresolved fate of American journalist and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce, who enters revolutionary Mexico and joins soldiers associated with Pancho Villa. His encounters with Arroyo and Winslow allow Fuentes to contrast competing ideas of history, property, loyalty, death, and national character without reducing the Revolution to a backdrop for American experience. Published as an octavo volume of 199 pages, the book is bound in white cloth over orange boards with gilt stamping and retains its decorated, unclipped dust jacket.

Published during the later international recognition of Latin American fiction, The Old Gringo extended Fuentes’s sustained inquiry into Mexican identity and the historical relationship between Mexico and the United States. Its use of Bierce’s disappearance connects the violence of the American Civil War with the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, while its shifting cultural perspectives challenge romanticized foreign interpretations of revolutionary Mexico. The novel was adapted as the 1989 film Old Gringo, starring Gregory Peck as Bierce, Jane Fonda as Winslow, and Jimmy Smits as Arroyo. Minor fading to the dust-jacket spine; jacket not price-clipped. Binding tight, with clean, crisp pages. Very good. A first printing of a major work of Mexican historical fiction whose United States reception broadened the place of Mexican authors in the American literary marketplace.

Item #20228

Price: $225.00