By the end of the 19th century, successive waves of immigration had modified the booming Argentine society at a vertiginous pace, violently shaking its structures. The undesired side effects of the massive immigrant flow forced readjustments in the free-thinking, free-enterprise, liberal line of thought, pursued until then by the aristocratic but progessive ruling classes. The contradictions in their ideology surfaced, steering official discourse towards an often xenophobic, racist, conservative and defensive stance. Within this context of socio-political skepticism boiling underneath the euphoria of material progress, a small group of gentlemen-writers of the 1980s started to question the decadence caused by the lust for luxury mixed with hypocrisy and speculation, which they viewed as foreshadowing disaster. Eugenio Cambaceres belonged to this first generation of the liberal ruling class gifted with a clear awareness of the predicament that threatened them, and, in 1887, in the midst of the liberal apotheosis brought by the Juarez Celman administration, his finely honed class-conservation instincts led him to write En la sangre, a novel that clearly describes patrician distrust towards immigration, portraying the "criollo"oligarchy-controlled spaces as stolen or lost. Genaro Piazza, the "son of a Neapolitan tinker," is the novel's main character, but stigmatized right from the beginning he becomes a source of infectious disease within the plot. Cambaceres makes no attempt to conceal his hatred of his own character, and adorns him with all the stereotypes of the social climbing immigrant, so often depicted in 80s argentine elite paranoia, and which continued to figure in the country's nationalistic thought in the 20th century. En la sangre is a loud and sustained cry, an active attempt to rouse and activate the elite class, pampered and put to sleep by the achievements of General Julio A. Roca and his successors. Using techniques of naturalism, Cambaceres reveals his central character as fraudulent, an illegitimate being that an ill chain of events made heir to the Argentine oligarchy. The anticlimatic effect is intended to convey a double lesson. It forces reexamination of the liberal principles whose excess condemns the dominant class to its own destruction; and at the same time lays the foundations of a substitute myth, aristocratic and defensive, built upon a common base of exclusion, homogeneity and self righteousness as a privileged racial and social group. As in many other 19th century novels this self centered point of view should hardly surprise us. On the contrary, at almost the same time and as a gesture copied from literature, Latin American politic liberal discourse showed the same inclination as Cambaceres to recycle the old liberal principles into new positivist molds, and to point out in the "others" the same transvestism embodied by Genaro Piazza in En la sangre. This edition of the disturbing novel En la sangre, with an introductory essay and notes by Mara Eugenia Mudrovcic, would be very interesting and provocative reading for both Latin American Literature and Social Studies courses.

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 century bourgeois obsession with "crime" emerges in El Zarco as the matrix of the two stories that end up being one: "crime" is the cause for the fear and -insecurity- that paralyze Yautepec middle classes as well as the reason for the glorification of the rural police. Altamirano presents the -good love- between Nicolas and Pilar as a counternarrative of the sexually undisciplined story of lust enacted by Manuela and el Zarco. But this narrative line seems to be, nonetheless, only a frame to celebrate Sanchez Chagollan as the heroic founding father of the police created by Benito Juarez in 1861 that later became an icon of the institutional order of the Diaz regime. In the study that introduces this edition, Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic reads the -unorthodoxies- of Altamirano's novel as part of the propaganda apparatus set by Porfirio Diaz in his effort to change the image of Mexico as a -bandit nation- that dominated the press at the time. Why Altamirano talks of -violence- in -times of peace-, thus, becomes the starting-point for a reading of El Zarco that pays attention not so much to bandits but rather to the police that was created as the only way to combat them.

Completed in 1819 and approved by the censorship in 1820, "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" was the last novel written by Jose J. Fernandez de Lizardi, and the only one that remained unpublished until 1832, five years after the death of its author. At first glance, the novel does not seem -at least morally- to doubt: bad characters die, "catrinismo" is sensationally defeated and the truth left standing is monopolized by the clergy, military, and nobility. Perhaps dazzled by the canonization process that Fernandez de Lizardi underwent at the hands of liberal historiography towards the end of the 19th century, critics tend to read "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" as the representative of a colonial order that an emergent Mexican nation must destroy in order to advance, free from those elements that halt progress, toward the promising period of liberal modernization. However, one can also trace in the protagonist the signs of the anxiety Lizardi experienced due to the development of a revolution that sooner rather than later would impose what he perceives as a materialist and bourgeois social code. This is probably why all political expectations in the novel rely on those redeemer-characters that form part of a colonial apparatus that Lizardi seems committed to modernize at all costs: clergymen that quote Rousseau, military officials who declare their loyalty to the king and the law, creole-aristocrats that do not speak of a nobility based on blood but of a nobility of virtues, and lettered men who fervently trust in the power of religion, education and work. Displaying what could be classified as a monarchical-constitutional reformism, Lizardi expects such privileged agents to carry out, without violence, the political and social changes needed in New Spain at the beginning of the 19th Century. Far from being in line with a view of Lizardi as revolutionary and liberal, the results of the clash of discourses that occurs within "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" seems to confirm the author's nostalgia for a colonial order in which eternal truth, honor and authority prevail as bastions of the church, the army and the nobility. In the current edition, Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic undertakes the analysis of Lizardi's last novel as well as provides notes that facilitate an in depth understanding of a text that though entertaining, is complex and contradictory.