"The bullets buzzed until they killed us": Suspense at the Border and Binational Violence in Juan Rulfo's «Paso del Norte»

Abstract

Placed between the borderline and the Río Grande, the life of the protagonist of Juan Rulfo's «Paso del Norte» hangs by a thread. Due to famine and unemployment, the character searches for a better life on the other side, but overwhelming binational forces hamper his objectives, falling abruptly into his own ruin. Juan Rulfo's tale can be read not only as one of the first approaches to the border literature in Mexico, but also as a thriller or a piece of literature that employs suspense to depict the binational violence that tears up bodies and silence people in the borderlines. This essay proposes a way of reading Juan Rulfo's text, «Paso del Norte», as a thriller that employs technical procedures from the aesthetic of film noir to reveal the dehumanizing process and the violence that inhabits the borderlines.