Los bandidos de rio frio, the famous Mexican “costumbrista” novel set in the decades prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, has been considered the outstanding production of its author, Manuel Payno y Flores (1810–1894). Critics of Spanish American literature frequently have dissected the work for merits and defects primarily from a literary standpoint, although many of them have called attention to its unusual sociological-historical elements. Professor J. R. Spell has ranked it, along with other novels of Payno, the best social presentation of Mexico through a fiction medium since Francisco J. Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento, while Antonio Castro Leal has stated that “the spectacle is so rich and varied that it may well be said that the novel is the painting of an entire epoch.”
