The Cost of Dreams of Utopia: Neocolonialism in Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" and Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses"

According to Ramirez, the Mexican government has romanticized the internal workings of the country in an effort to mask the inequalities of elite land ownership under the system of caciquismo. [...]Julio Ortega suggests that Cómalas residents only understand life once they die (qtd. in Campbell 340). [...]the dead townspeople pay for their attachment to the land as well as their inability to reflect when alive because their memories of happiness and prosperity now cannot be disengaged from the cacique's exploitation of them in life. According to Owens, Americans perceive Mexico as a destitute landscape filled with desperate people. In colonial texts, however, Mexico appears as a "meeting place of the Old World and New World" (Alarcon 143), a place that "transcends reality" (159). Because of the ambiguous nature of Mexico's identity evidenced in the conflicting descriptions of the country, Cole begins to long for the vision of Mexico that best represents his desires: the Mexico that will transcend his current technologically cluttered reality.