The links between Rulfo and García Márquez’s enigmatic landmark texts have often been reduced to their exaltation of magical realism, a mode constantly associated with Latin American literature and artistic expression from that time. But their thematic parallels run much deeper. Both tomes tell multigenerational stories about an ensemble cast of characters in fictional towns that serve as microcosms of their respective postcolonial societies, which share plenty of similarities. 

In both novels, the towns themselves function as portals between the world of the material and the beyond, as if by stepping into these places, their characters enter a sort of limbo. Rulfo and García Márquez’s protagonists face destinies that feel inescapable; the sins of their forebears have predetermined the curses that endure over time. The books are also tied through their engagement with the region’s history of violence, racism, economic disparity, and the ingrained machismo that oppresses women in patriarchal contexts, all of which stem from a blood-soaked colonial past. It’s a shared wound between all Latin American nations and many others around the globe. “The way the actions of previous generations impact our own psyches is a central theme of Pedro Páramo,” says Prieto. “Echoes of the past make themselves present to haunt Juan Preciado, just as Páramo’s own ancestors deeply affect how he lives his life.”

It’s also no secret that Rulfo’s novel, his most celebrated work, profoundly influenced García Márquez’s sublime writing in One Hundred Years of Solitude. “There is no doubt that those books are closely related, as were their authors,” says Rodrigo García, a lauded filmmaker and the son of García Márquez. “[Pedro Páramo] was one of the most influential books my father ever read, and when he met Rulfo, the two became friends.” García Márquez first learned of the Mexican novel shortly after arriving in the country in 1961, and upon reading it, he was stunned by what Rulfo had accomplished. “The book was doing [what] my father wanted to do, which was to mix the realistic and the psychological with the mythical,” says García. “He tried to experiment with some of the things Rulfo did so well, like moving fluidly between the living and the dead.” 

Prieto, who is making his directorial debut with Pedro Páramo, first read the seminal novel while in high school, like millions of Mexican students over the decades. That Rulfo’s characters simply accept the otherworldly as natural resonated strongly with him. “I was impacted by the portrayal of the mysterious ways the line between the dead and the living is blurred in rural Mexico,” says the four-time Academy Award nominee. “Hauntings and supernatural phenomena are just part of daily life.”

In addition to the precise atmosphere Rulfo evokes in his pages, Prieto also feels connected to the period where part of the narrative is set: the time of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. Prieto’s own grandfather fought alongside the revolutionary forces of Emiliano Zapata, a key figure who led an army of peasants against wealthy landowners. 

From a technical perspective, Prieto believes that the fragmented structure of Pedro Páramo reflects the cyclical concept of time of the Indigenous cultures in Mesoamerica in the pre-Columbian era. “By shunning the traditional linear narratives of postrevolutionary literature in Mexico, Rulfo immerses the reader in a surreal milieu that requires the active participation of the reader to put together the puzzle of the different timelines,” explains Prieto. 

The experimental storytelling techniques that Rulfo employed in Pedro Páramo shifted the paradigm of how narratives could be constructed in Latin American literature and continue to reverberate in modern writing and culture. Like Prieto, the film’s Spanish screenwriter, Mateo Gil, encountered Pedro Páramo as a teenager. Long before he was offered the opportunity to write a script back in 2004, Gil had already spent plenty of time researching and playing with the structure of the novel as an exercise based on his own devotion to the text. “Since I first read it, I’ve been obsessed with making it into a movie. Although adapting it led me to know it in depth and unravel many of its narrative mechanisms, I always felt that there was something mysterious in the way it captures you,” says Gil, who’s written such acclaimed Spanish films as the Oscar-winning The Sea Inside and Open Your Eyes. 

For his adaptation, Gil set out to maintain the novel’s general structure, while taking a few liberties. Still, everything that happens in his script happens in the source material. Gil preserves the author’s meditation on the nature of love, as the titular character justifies his extreme actions with his desire to recapture the feeling of a romantic love unbridled by societal expectations or class divides. But no matter how many lives he ruins, destiny keeps love at arm’s length. Among the many themes encompassed in Pedro Páramo, Prieto often finds himself drawn to its depiction of fate. “I personally find this very affecting, as I am intrigued by how my own blood carries the traumas and joys of those who came before me,” says Prieto. “Against the backdrop of Mexico’s rugged landscape, Rulfo explores how his protagonists search for their place in this world and the next, hoping for forgiveness of their sins, but never quite finding it.”

Unlike other film adaptations of Latin American literary works, in which there have been little involvement from Latin American talent and where the story is told in English, these two projects have bet on authenticity by enlisting talent from the books’ respective countries. 

“For decades, it’s been many people's dream to adapt it,” says García of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s an ambitious thing to do when a book is so beloved and so revered around the world.” García, also an executive producer on the series, is pleased with the production’s decision to shoot in Colombia and keep the dialogue in its original Spanish. 

Although director Alex García López had read One Hundred Years of Solitude as a teenager and again in his 20s, when he embarked on directing this TV adaptation, he read it again both in Spanish and English. “Aware that Netflix has millions of subscribers worldwide, I wanted to understand how this story worked in another language,” he explains. 

Director Mora, who has now read the book more times than she can count, believes the true measure of a text’s richness is that it allows the reader to find new meaning within
its lines each time it’s revisited. “True art is the kind that moves you, raises new questions, and reveals new layers every time you come back to it,” she says. “That makes a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude and García Márquez’s work so complex and powerful.” Mora admits she was afraid to take on the project when she was initially approached due to its magnitude. But Mora’s interest in exploring the novel’s universal themes through the specificity of García Márquez’s narration helped her overcome that hesitation.

When Mora speaks about the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel’s kinship with Pedro Páramo becomes even more evident. “We encounter people condemned to solitude, unable to love, unable to create community,” she says. “We witness the complex unraveling of progress, violence, power, beauty, melancholy. These tragedies belong to Macondo as much as they do to the rest of the world.”

Central to One Hundred Years of Solitude is the village of Macondo: “An innocent utopia where everyone treats each other well is recognizable even from a biblical standpoint,” says García López. Of course, there are external obstacles — politics, the church, superstition, human desire — that make the concept of a perfect place unachievable. In Macondo, Mora explains, magical realism operates as a poetic coping mechanism for the characters and the reader to withstand life’s tragedies: “Although Macondo is such a particular place that comes to life with so much detail and sensibility, it also ends up being the place that interweaves all human passion and complexity.” 

There is an eeriness that the adaptations of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pedro Páramo capture onscreen, immersing audiences in a sensorial experience distinct from that of reading the books. Mora explained that while the team worked tirelessly to highlight the depth of what García Márquez penned, cinema and literature are different languages of expression. She hopes that rather than comparing the two, viewers can take each iteration of the story on its own terms. “It’s important to acknowledge that the audiovisual language cannot compete with the image that each reader constructs,” Mora said. ”We have assumed the risk of adapting the work with a lot of care and responsibility, but the book will remain the book.”