El Zarco by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

Yautepec is a village of orange and lemon groves in the tierra caliente, the hot lowlands south of the Valley of Mexico. In August 1861, as soon as the sun goes down, the villagers lock themselves in: the region is in the hands of the plateados, gangs of hundreds of horsemen decked out in silver on their clothes, hats and saddles, who rob, kidnap and kill from their hideout at Xochimancas, a ruined hacienda.

There lives Doña Antonia, a widow, with her daughter Manuela, fair, beautiful and proud; close by, with an aunt and uncle, lives her goddaughter Pilar, dark, gentle and melancholy. Nearly every afternoon they are visited by Nicolás, the Indigenous blacksmith of the Atlihuayan hacienda, an orphan from Tepoztlán who worked his way up to master smith. Doña Antonia wants him for a son-in-law; Manuela calls him an “indio horrible,” a hideous Indian; Pilar loves him in silence. What no one knows is that at night Manuela meets, at the garden wall, El Zarco, a blue-eyed bandit who gives her stolen jewels, and that in the case of a pair of earrings she finds two drops of fresh blood.

When Doña Antonia decides to leave for Mexico City with the troops due to pass through the village, Manuela agrees to elope with her lover. From then on the novel follows two paths: Manuela’s in Xochimancas, among bandits such as El Tigre, and that of Nicolás, who urges the troops to go and rescue her and clashes with a cowardly commander. Martín Sánchez Chagollán also appears, a rancher whose father and son are murdered by the plateados and who decides to hunt them down.

Altamirano sets the novel just after the Reform War, as the French intervention was beginning, when the government, absorbed by the war, could not hold the bandits in check, and he insists that Martín Sánchez Chagollán is a “strictly historical figure, as are Salomé Plasencia and El Zarco.” He blends the Romanticism of an elopement on a stormy night and the omen of the hooting owl with a realistic portrait of the hot lowlands. Everything is built on contrasts: Manuela’s roses and Pilar’s orange blossom, stolen silver and honest work, the fair-haired white bandit and the Indigenous blacksmith.

It is still read because it raises questions that remain alive: what a community can do when the state fails to protect it, whether taking justice into one’s own hands is justice (of Martín Sánchez the narrator says: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Such was his penal code”) and why people are scorned for their colour or origins.

Ignacio Manuel Altamirano was born into an Indigenous family in Tixtla, in today’s state of Guerrero, on 13 November 1834, and died in Sanremo, Italy, on 13 February 1893. A liberal, he fought in the Ayutla Revolution, the Reform War and against the French intervention.

He was a teacher, a journalist and the founder of the magazine El Renacimiento; he championed free, secular and compulsory primary education and presided over the Supreme Court. His novel Clemencia (1869) is often considered the first modern Mexican novel.