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 structure, El Zarco is also "original" in its approach to race: green-eyed white characters are the villains, while the heroes are Indian or mestizos. What makes a heroe, however, is not a matter of race, but the strict adherence to honor, family and hard work, the «civil» values guiding the actions and the ethos of each and every good citizen or "hombre de bien" of Yautepec. The nineteenth...