From its opening lines, Pedro Páramo invokes the classical association between identity and paternity: Juan Preciado seeks out his estranged father, Pedro Páramo, in order to cope with his mother Dolores’s death and claim the property that is his birthright. But Pedro Páramo is dead, and everyone in Comala is also Pedro’s descendant, giving them an equal claim to Pedro’s land. Juan learns that Pedro exercised absolute power over all the women and property in Comala—but then destroyed the town precisely by becoming its patriarch. Through his misogynist, possessive, patriarchal view of love and family, Pedro also erodes his own capacity to give, receive, or recognize genuine love. As a large-scale version of a traditional nuclear family structure, the town of Comala shows how patriarchal social and family structures, in which men possess and control women and property, are both profoundly violent and fundamentally self-undermining. Whereas Pedro Páramo treats his numerous wives, mistresses, and children like objects, other characters show that a different kind of love is possible: one that’s genuine, selfless, and predicated on equality.
Pedro Páramo becomes Comala’s patriarch by controlling land and women. Pedro spends much of his time cheating the townspeople out of their land—for instance, by suing and killing Toribio Aldrete. But, more insidiously, he also manipulates all the town’s women into sleeping with him. He hopes that this will ingratiate them to him and ensure that all the children born in Comala are his. He turns the town into an extended family, with himself as the all-powerful patriarch. But Pedro also refuses to recognize almost all of these children as legitimate heirs, which lets him avoid materially providing for them. Pedro forms his family in order to possess and control people—not for love, companionship, or posterity. But ironically, despite building up an enormous family, vast estate, and mythical legacy, he dies alone, without an heir. By taking patriarchy to an extreme—compulsively accumulating and controlling women, children, and property—Pedro shows the incoherency in the argument conventionally used to defend it: that men need absolute power over their families in order to protect them and pass an estate to their children. In reality, Pedro terrorizes and plunders his family rather than protecting and securing property for it.
Pedro’s possessive concept of love also profoundly injures the women in his life. His cruelty shows how control and ownership are incompatible with genuine love. This is clearest in his relationship with Susana San Juan, the only woman he thinks he truly loves. First, Pedro ruthlessly exploits and oppresses Susana to convince her to marry him. First, he treats her as property and tries to trade her father Bartolomé a house in exchange for her. Bartolomé refuses, so Pedro kills him, leaving Susana with no option but to marry Pedro. In fact, she was willing to do so anyway, but only to get away from Bartolomé, who also mistreats (and possibly sexually abuses) her. Because they conceptualize love as control and possession rather than a reciprocal agreement based on genuine feeling, both Pedro and Bartolomé terrorize Susana, then still expect her to love them back. Traumatized, Susana locks herself inside and spends her life writhing around in bed, daydreaming about freedom and reminiscing about her first husband, Florencio.
But Rulfo doesn’t play into harmful stereotypes about women by portraying Susana’s behavior as crazy or frivolous—rather, he shows that Susana’s fantasies are actually how she finds freedom from Pedro. Her favorite memory is swimming in the sea—first with Florencio, and then alone, which represents a vision of absolute freedom from male control. This shows that she can envision both love and freedom, but she understands that they are impossible to achieve with Pedro. In contrast, after Susana’s death, Pedro lives out the rest of his days sitting on his chair, physically and emotionally frozen in place, fixated on the fact that he never got to live out the marital bliss he envisioned with Susana. While Susana responds to Pedro’s control by shrinking into the only domain where she can truly be free—her fantasies—Pedro loses the ability to feel any sense of freedom at all, because his sense of love depends on depriving others of their freedom.
Despite the novel’s general pessimism about love, some of its characters do offer a competing vision of love based on equality, respect, and consent, which offers a counterpoint to Pedro Páramo’s patriarchal mindset. The clearest example of this mindset is the other protagonist, Juan Preciado, who goes to Comala to fulfill his mother’s last wishes and make sense of the memories she used to recount to him. His journey is a pilgrimage in honor of the mother he loved, and he carries a photo of her in his pocket, against his heart, which symbolizes this love. The marginalized, maternal figures Juan Preciado meets in Comala—from Eduviges Dyada and Donis’s sister to the beggar Dorotea—care for him selflessly. Even after Pedro Páramo has left them invisible and destitute in Comala, much like Susana, they are still capable of love, while he is not. Finally, Pedro’s death also symbolizes genuine love defeating patriarchal cruelty. The burro driver Abundio Martínez—one of Pedro’s numerous sons—stabs him to death in a fit of rage and grief over the death of his wife, whose terminal medical condition Abundio worked tirelessly to cure. Abundio’s love for his wife, in other words, drives him to take revenge for his father’s cruelty.
Rather than reinforcing the archetype that one’s paternity defines one’s identity, Rulfo instead undermines it. Pedro Páramo’s vicious rise to power depends upon possessing land and women, and the cruelty he inflicts on both illustrates that the possessive love normalized under the patriarchal model of family is not real love at all. Pedro’s downfall at the hands of his illegitimate sons—Abundio Martínez, who kills him, and Juan Preciado, who retakes the story of Comala from him—represents a victory for a more egalitarian view of love.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Patriarchy ThemeTracker
Love and Patriarchy Quotes in Pedro Páramo
I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything. “Don’t fail to go see him,” she had insisted. “Some call him one thing, some another. I’m sure he will want to know you.” At the time all I could do was tell her I would do what she asked, and from promising so often I kept repeating the promise even after I had pulled my hands free of her death grip.
Still earlier she had told me: “Don’t ask him for anything. Just what’s ours. What he should have given me but never did… Make him pay, son, for all those years he put us out of his mind.”
I had expected to see the town of my mother’s memories, of her nostalgia—nostalgia laced with sighs. She had lived her lifetime sighing about Comala, about going back. But she never had. Now I had come in her place. I was seeing things through her eyes, as she had seen them. She had given me her eyes to see. Just as you pass the gate of Los Colimotes there’s a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn. From there you can see Comala, turning the earth white, and lighting it at night. Her voice was secret, muffled, as if she were talking to herself… Mother.
“It’s hot here,” I said.
“You might say. But this is nothing,” my companion replied. “Try to take it easy. You’ll feel it even more when we get to Comala. That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket.”
“Do you know Pedro Páramo?” I asked.
I felt I could ask because I had seen a glimmer of goodwill in his eyes.
“Who is he?” I pressed him.
“Living bile,” was his reply.
And he lowered his stick against the burros for no reason at all, because they had been far ahead of us, guided by the descending trail.
“Look at my face!”
It was an ordinary face.
“What is it you want me to see?”
“Don’t you see my sin? Don’t you see those purplish spots? Like impetigo? I’m covered with them. And that’s only on the outside; inside, I’m a sea of mud.”
I waited thirty years for you to return, Susana. I wanted to have it all. Not just part of it, but everything there was to have, to the point that there would be nothing left for us to want, no desire but your wishes. How many times did I ask your father to come back here to live, telling him I needed him. I even tried deceit.
“Hand me that, Susana!”
She picked up the skull in both hands, but when the light struck it fully, she dropped it.
“It’s a dead man’s skull,” she said.
“You should find something else there beside it. Hand me whatever’s there.”
The skeleton broke into individual bones: the jawbone fell away as if it were sugar. She handed it up to him, piece afterpiece, down to the toes, which she handed him joint by joint. The skull had been first, the round ball that had disintegrated in her hands.
“Keep looking, Susana. For money. Round gold coins. Look everywhere, Susana.”
And then she did not remember anything, until days later she came to in the ice: in the ice of her father’s glare.
“I went back. I would always go back. The sea bathes my ankles and retreats, it bathes my knees, my thighs; it puts its gentle arm around my waist, circles my breasts, embraces my throat, presses my shoulders. Then I sink into it, my whole body, I give myself to is pulsing strength, to is gentle possession, holding nothing back.
“‘I love to swim in the sea,’ I told him.
“But he didn’t understand.
“And the next morning I was again in the sea, purifying myself. Giving myself to the waves.”
People began arriving from other places, drawn by the endless pealing. They came from Contla, as if on a pilgrimage. And even farther. A circus showed up, who knows from where, with a whirligig and flying chairs. And musicians. First they came as if they were onlookers, but after a while they settled in and even played concerts. And so, little by little, the event turned into a fiesta. Comala was bustling with people, boisterous and noisy, just like the feast days when it was nearly impossible to move through the village.
The bells fell silent, but the fiesta continued. There was no way to convince people that this was an occasion for mourning. Nor was there any way to get them to leave. Just the opposite, more kept arriving.
[…]
Don Pedro spoke to no one. He never left his room. He swore to wreak vengeance on Comala:
“I will cross my arms and Comala will die of hunger.”
And that was what happened.
“I need money to bury my wife,” he said. “Can you help me?”
Damiana Cisneros prayed: “Deliver us, O God, from the snares of the Devil.” And she thrust her hands toward Abundio, making the sign of the cross.
Abundio Martinez saw a frightened woman standing before him, making a cross; he shuddered. He was afraid that the Devil might have followed him there, and he looked back, expecting to see Satan in some terrible guise.
