Payno y Flores, Manuel (1810–1894)

Manuel Payno y Flores (b. 21 June 1810; d. 4 November 1894), Mexican government official and novelist. Son of treasury official Manuel Payno y Bustamante and cousin of President Anastasio Bustamante, Payno y Flores was a native of Mexico City.

As public servant, Payno is most remembered as the treasury minister who negotiated the 1850 settlements of the foreign (14 October) and internal debts (30 November). However, his subsequent service was equally, if not more, significant. Because he was implicated in the coup that overthrew President Ignacio Comonfort in January 1858, Payno never again held the post of treasury minister. He nevertheless remained an active participant in discussions of fiscal matters, particularly those concerning the foreign debt. He wrote major tracts on the debt settlements that provoked the English-French-Spanish invasion of December 1861 and on the internal debt, and produced the only accounting of the expenditures of the imperial government. His views often formed the intellectual rationale for the policies of the Juárez government on those issues.

Beginning in the 1830s, Payno wrote for the daily press. In 1845–1846, he published the first of his two costumbrista novels, El fistol del diablo, which detailed the everyday life of the period. In the 1870s, he wrote important school texts on Mexican history, geography, and law. Near the end of his life, while consul for the Mexican government in Spain, he published his masterpiece, Los bandidos del Río Frío (1889–1891), full of descriptions of local color and famous people. He died in San Ángel, D.F.

See alsoComonfort, Ignacio; Literature: Spanish America; Mexico: 1810–1910.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is to date no major biographical study of Manuel Payno. Readers can find some information on his life in Barbara A. Tenenbaum, "Manuel Payno y los bandidos del erario mexicano," in Historia Mexicana 54 (1994). See also Alejandro Villaseñor y Villaseñor, "Preface," in Manuel Payno y Flores, Novela cortas (1901).

Additional Bibliography

Glantz, Margo. Del fistol a la linterna: Homenaje a José Tomás de Cuéllar y Manuel Payno en el centenario de su muerte, 1994. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coordinación de Humanidades, 1997.

Peloso, Vincent C., and Barbara A. Tenenbaum, eds. Liberals, Politics, and Power: State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

                              Barbara A. Tenenbaum