Abstract
Los bandidos de Río Frío, by Manuel Payno, is a novel about life in México in the fist half of the 19th Centhury; the plot takes place in a time in which our country was not yet constituted as a nation, it was only a project and it was being built in takes, little by little, through passion, interests, laws and beliefs. Between 1836 and 1861 literates, historians and editors were dedicated to articulating a nation, and Payno is found among them. This is why his work can be seen not only from the literary perspective, but also as a book in which the author makes use the novelistic genre to show a true mural cartography.