El Zarco by Ignacio Atamirano in a US printed edition with preliminary study and notes by Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic Ignacio Manuel Altamirano's posthumous novel, El Zarco (1901), is much more than a novel about bandits. Written amidst the pax porfiriana, at the height of Altamirano's reputation within the cultural elite, the novel is a narrative that deals with the chaos and the banditry that prevailed in the 1860s to celebrate the insertion of Mexico into the international markets undertaken by Porfirio Diaz. Considered to be the first Mexican novel because of its carefully constructed...