The Death of Artemio Cruz

Panamanian-born Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes wrote The Death of Artemio Cruz (La Muerte de Artemio Cruz) in 1962. It was Fuentes’s third novel and established him as a major figure in Latin American literature. The novel belongs to the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the translation of major works of Latin American writers, such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina) and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), for circulation in Europe and the United States. Although Cruz’s story alludes to real events and people in the Mexican Revolution, the novel is a work of fiction.

The original Spanish novel was published in 1962 by the Mexican publishing group Fondo de Cultura Económica. An English translation was published in 1964 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux (FSG). A more recent translation by Alfred MacAdam, published in 1991 by FSG, is the basis for this study guide.

Content warning: This guide contains explicit language and discusses, sexual violence, war, and death.

Plot Summary

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, the novel describes Artemio Cruz’s growth from an orphaned peasant child to an idealistic soldier of the revolution to a corrupt, ruthless, and wealthy politician. The novel spans Cruz’s lifetime, from the present day in 1960, when Cruz is 71 and on his death bed, to his birth in 1889.

The novel is structurally and stylistically complex. The chapters are organized out of chronological order, jumping between earlier and later periods in Cruz’s life; the final chapter ends with his birth. The novel uses different narrative voices; the novel’s present day uses first-person present tense to describe Cruz’s physical pain and observations. Other sections use third-person past tense for a narrative voice that follows Cruz or other characters. Finally, some portions of the novel use the unusual second-person future (or imperative) tense—“you will”—for Cruz’s internal conversations with himself. Most sections in the novel are Cruz’s memories, and Fuentes writes them in a stream-of-consciousness style. Different sections within the same chapter switch between different narrative points of view.

The novel opens with a feeble Artemio Cruz, a former politician, real-estate magnate, and newspaper tycoon, on his deathbed at age 71. With him are his wife, Catalina; his daughter, Teresa; and his lifelong secretary, Padilla, who is the executor of Cruz’s estate. Catalina and Teresa want Cruz to reveal the location of his will, but he refuses.

The following summary presents the plot’s events chronologically, rather than how they are presented in the novel.

Artemio Cruz is born in 1889 as the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, Atanasio Manchaca: Manchaca raped Cruz’s mother, Isabel Cruz, one of the enslaved peasants who worked Manchaca’s land. Isabel Cruz dies in childbirth, and Manchaca would have ordered Cruz to be killed, but another landowner murders Manchaca in order to steal Manchaca’s land. Isabel’s brother, Lunero, raises Cruz, and they work on the new landowner’s land as peasants; Cruz does not know that Lunero is his uncle.

In 1911, the 22-year-old Cruz becomes a soldier fighting in the Mexican Revolution on the side of Venustiano Carranza, a US-backed general who opposes the forces of Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south. Each faction has a different vision for Mexico’s democratic future.

The Mexican Revolution is a class-based civil war. It began in 1910 when the colonialist president, Porfirio Díaz, failed to meet the people’s demands for economic justice and land reform. At that time, Mexico maintained a feudalistic system called la encomienda begun during Spanish rule, in which wealthy landowners reaped the profits of the peasants who worked their land. In 1911, Díaz resigned and fled the country. Now, revolutionary factions fight each other and the Federal Army (federales), which is trying to restore the fallen government.

The revolution has a racial and ethnic dimension as well. The upper-class minority of Mexican society are criollos, descendants of the Spanish colonizers, while the Mexican populace are mestizos, a mix of Spanish and Indigenous Mexican heritage. Cruz’s ethnicity as the son of a criollo landowner who sexually violated his Indigenous mother symbolizes Mexico’s larger class conflict and colonial history.

As a soldier, Cruz devotes himself to redistributing land to the peasants in the north. During one of his missions in 1913, he meets Regina, a young woman in the village where his troop is encamped. He sexually violates Regina, and they have a romantic love affair. They spend seven months together until Cruz returns to the village one day to find Regina hanged. This moment embitters him and makes him question his purpose and the purpose of the revolution.

In 1915, the Villistas ambush Cruz’s battalion and take him prisoner. In prison, Cruz meets Gonzalo Bernal, a young soldier who has become disillusioned. Gonzalo is the son of the wealthy landowner Gamaliel Bernal, and he tells Cruz about his beautiful sister, Catalina, as well as how Carranza betrayed him. After listening to Gonzalo, Cruz decides to switch sides and makes a deal to get out of prison. Gonzalo is executed by firing squad, and Cruz makes no attempt to save him. Instead, Cruz visits Gamaliel Bernal on the pretense of knowing his son with the real intention of marrying Catalina and inheriting Bernal’s land. Cruz’s plan succeeds, and when Bernal dies a few years later, he leaves his estate to Catalina and the usufruct (control of property) to Cruz.

From that point forward, Cruz lives his life in pursuit of wealth and power. Cruz and Catalina have a loveless marriage; she married him on her father’s orders and resents that Cruz controls her estate. Using illegal methods, Cruz expands the family’s land holdings. Afterward, he purchases a Mexico City newspaper, which he utilizes to further expand his land holdings and influence. He uses the paper to extort businesses and to ruin the reputations of political figures who do not cooperate with him. He becomes instrumental in helping corrupt businesses sell natural resources to the United States.

Cruz and Catalina have a son, Lorenzo, and daughter, Teresa. When Lorenzo is 12, Cruz sends him to run the family’s estate at Cocuya. He does this to hurt Catalina, whom he knows is devoted to the boy. When Lorenzo turns 17, he follows his idealistic nature and goes to Spain to fight against the Fascists. He is killed in the battle, leaving Cruz with only Teresa, whom he ignores. On his deathbed, Cruz lies to both his wife and daughter about the location of his will. In the end, he leaves most of the estate to Padilla, who has been his trusted aide.

Cruz uses his memory to fight death until his last moments, while growing ever more conscious of the corporeal changes that cause him unfamiliar and uncomfortable pain. He desperately tries to convince himself that he lived an honorable life and that his cruel and illegal acts served a greater cause. Because the events of his life are not laid out in chronological order, the reader must piece them together to appreciate the trajectory of Cruz’s life and decide whether Cruz deserves redemption.