Early Life
Rulfo was born as Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno in Apulco, Jalisco (although he was registered at Sayula, Jalisco), in the home of his paternal grandfather. After his father was killed in 1923 and after his mother's death in 1927, his grandmother raised him in the town of San Gabriel, Jalisco. Their extended family consisted of landowners whose fortunes were ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War of 1926-1928, a Roman Catholic integralist revolt against the government of Mexico following the Mexican Revolution.
Rulfo's mother died from cardiac arrest in November 1927, when he was ten; his two uncles died a year later. Juan Rulfo had just been sent to study in the Luis Silva School, where he lived from 1928 to 1932. He completed six years of elementary school and a special seventh year from which he graduated as a bookkeeper, though he never practiced that profession. Rulfo attended a seminary (analogous to a secondary school) from 1932 to 1934, but did not attend a university afterwards ─ both because the University of Guadalajara was closed due to a strike and because he had not taken preparatory school courses. Instead, Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he first entered the National Military Academy, which he left after three months and then he hoped to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1936, Rulfo was able to audit courses in literature there because he obtained a job as an immigration file clerk through his uncle, David Pérez Rulfo, a colonel working for the government, who had also gotten him admitted to the military academy.
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