The Old Gringo

An embittered American writer and former journalist, not named until the final chapter as Ambrose Bierce, decides to leave his old life behind and seek death in the midst of the Mexican Revolution.

At that same hacienda, the old man meets Harriet Winslow, a 31-year-old woman from Washington D.C., hired as a blind to tutor the Miranda children, while the family has fled the country.

Arroyo's partner, a woman referred to as "La Luna", whom the Revolution has liberated from an abusive landowning husband, accepts his infidelity as necessary.

Later, Harriet presses for the return of the gringo's body, claiming him as her father, so that he may be buried in the grave reserved for the vanished Winslow at Arlington National Cemetery.

According to a 1992 interview, the initial idea for a novel on this theme came after Fuentes encountered the work of Ambrose Bierce in his teens, and was one to which he occasionally returned over the decades.

[7] This is echoed by a comment in one encyclopedia that Fuentes' experiments in narrative are meant as a demonstration of the novel's master theme: the almost unbridgeable distance between the Hispanic and Anglo-American cultures.

[8] Another critic sees in the novel "a negotiation of borders within and between selves and between and within countries", of which the mirrored ballroom that is all that remains of the Miranda hacienda is made the deceptive symbol.

[9] Publishers Weekly summed it up by finding that, "in this fine short novel, Fuentes remains, as usual, wisely suspicious of both American politics and those of the Revolution".

The murder, exhumation and posthumous execution of Bierce is based on the actual killing of the Englishman William Benton by one of Pancho Villa's generals in 1910.