McOndo
Encyclopedia
McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks from the dominant Magical Realism (Realismo mágico) mode of narration, and counters it with the strong, ideologic
associations of the cultural and narrative languages of the mass communications media
, and with the modernity of urban living; the experience of town versus country, of McOndo vs. Macondo. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin (American) life in “the City”, an experience the opposite of the rural, “natural world” of Macondo
, the archetypal “Latin American Country” presented in the literature of Magical Realism. Philosophically, the McOndo vs. Macondo intellectual
opposition is to the latter's literary perpetuation of Latin America
as an exotic place of exotic
people, which presents the reader with “reductionist essential-isms that everyone in Latin America wears a sombrero and lives on trees”. Because not everyone wears huaraches and sports a machete in contemporary Latinoamėrica, McOndo literature shows it to be a place of many countries, peoples, and cultures, not the monolithic, “Spanish-speaking worlds” of the banana republic
and the dictator novel
that preceded modernization.
The realistic
narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to the popular culture
s of the U.S. and of Latin America as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Hispanoamėrica — thus the gritty, hard boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization
, of social class
differences, of sex, gender
, and of sexual orientation
. Despite McOndo literature often being about the social consequences of political economy
, the narrative mode usually is less overtly political than that of magical realist literature. The American academic Edmundo Paz-Soldán said that McOndo narrators “move with ease in a world of fast food and fast culture . . . they are the first generation of writers more influenced by mass media
than by literary tradition
.” Although initially associated with the Mexican “Literatura de la generación del crack” (the Literature of the Crack Generation
), which arose in the mid–1990s in counter-reaction to the literary Latin American Boom
(1960s–70s), the writers of the McOndo literary movement tell the contemporary experiences of being a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban (and suburban) world that is culturally dominated
by the pop culture of the United States.
In the history of Latin American literature
, in the late 1960s, from the fictional place-name Macondo
— the rural locale of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967), by Gabriel García Márquez
— derived the terms Macondismo and Macondo, which denoted a magical realist literary movement and a narrative genre. In time, the popularity of stories occurred in rural Macondo began to creatively limit Latin American writers who wrote about urban life in the Latin American city. To free themselves from the creative limitations imposed by the literary and financial success of the Latin American Boom
and Macondismo, the McOndo writers reneged the Boom and denounced el Realismo mágico (Magical Realism) as a cultural caricature; and, in counter-reaction, they published literature that realistically
presented the experiences of being a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban-suburban world that is culturally dominated
by the popular culture
of the United States.
Coinage
In the late 1990s, the Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet
and Sergio Gómez published the short-story anthology McOndo
(1996), the title of which conflated “McDonald’s” with Macondo, the real with the fictional; Fuguet’s coinage, McOndo denotes a “a world of McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos”. In comprehending literature about the Latin American experience without magical-realist narrative technique, the book title McOndo evolved into the McOndo literary-movement name. The etymologic
and typographic
evolution of the term, from “McOndo” to McOndo to McOndo, from short-story narrative to book-title to literary movement, derived from McOndo as a pun of Macondo. Although pronounced alike, the terms are ideologically unalike, because McOndo literature counters the narrative mode of Macondismo — which required every Latin American novelist to locate stories in the colourful tropical jungle locales where reality
and magic occur naturally and equally. Hence, the phonic and typographic resemblances of “McOndo” to “McDonald’s” (the global consumer business), narratively denote and connote the totality of the urban and popular cultures as the existential
context of the social effects of consumerism
upon the peoples of Latin America in the course their national and societal modernizations
.
participated in an international writing workshop at the University of Iowa, where he submitted for publication a short story
to the Iowa Review magazine; he expected prompt acceptance, translation (to English), and publication, because Latin American writers then were an intellectual
vogue in trendy U.S. mainstream culture. Yet, upon reading the novelist Fuguet's submitted short story, the Iowa Review editor, taken aback by the realism
and no magic, dismissed it as “not Latin American enough . . . [because] the story could have taken place right here, in [North] America.” Two years later, in 1996, in retort to the American editorial rebuffing of realist fiction from and about Latin America, Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in Spain published McOndo (1996) a short-story anthology of contemporary Latin American literature. The McOndo anthology comprised 17 stories by Latin American and peninsular Spanish writers, all men whose literary careers began in the 1990s, all of the generation born in the late 1950s. The McOndo writers ideologically
distanced themselves from Magical Realism because they said it inaccurately represented contemporary Latin America
— which, in the 1990s, comprised “shopping malls, cable television, suburbs, and pollution” — because literature had progressed beyond the banana republic
Latin America of the dictator novel
and Magical Realism; the culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The McOndos present the cultural effects and consequences upon Latin American societies of global commerce's erasure of cultural demarcations (among nations
and countries), and the consequent cultural homogenization. In an essay, Fuguet criticized the creative limitations that are the “picturesque locale and exotic
characters” that publishers grew to expect of Latin American writers — because of the folkloric Macondo stereotype. Citing the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas
, the literary world (publishers and critics) expected Latin American novelists to tackle only two themes: (i) economic underdevelopment
and (ii) cultural exoticism
. Hence Fuguet concludes that, despite pretty people and pretty scenery, the contemporary Latin American city–world he (Fuguet) inhabits, is too complicated for Magical Realism to grasp and narrate. In the event, Sergio Gómez and Fuguet’s publication of the McOndo (1996) anthology served a two-fold end: (i) the Fuguet “Introduction” as literary manifesto
, and (ii) the supporting anthology of contemporary urban Latin American fiction; the Latin experience of town versus country.
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, during the mid–1990s, simultaneous to McOndo coalescing as a literary movement, La generación del crack (The Crack Generation
— Jorge Volpi
, Ignacio Padilla
, Eloy Urroz
, Pedro Ángel Palou, and Ricardo Chávez-Castañeda) presented Mexican realist
literature flouting the Magical Realism strictures of the Latin American Boom
; their ideologic advocacy emphasised that every writer find a voice, not a genre. Their initial publication was the Manifiesto Crack (Crack Manifesto, 1996) published a month earlier than the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology; the literary manifestos proved ideologically sympathetic. Nonetheless, despite shared ideologic antipathy to Magical Realism, McOndo and The Crack Movement were unalike; Edmundo Paz-Soldán observed that McOndo is “a moment in the celebration of the creative mixture of high- and popular- culture”, whilst The Crack Movement has “proposed a sort of élitist re-establishment of values.” Literary-world gossip postulates that the anti–magical militancy of McOndo and The Crack Movement derives more from commercial jealousy than from artistic divergence; nonetheless, the criticism might have been ideologically motivated by the international success that allowed magic realist fiction to establish the exotic
Macondo as the universal image of Latin America; hence, who controls the novel market controls the cultural image of Latinoamérica that the globalized world perceives.
As a literary movement, McOndo then included like ideologies of literature and technique with which to communicate the experience of being Latin American in McOndo. Yet, the McOndos are quasi-apolitical, unlike the mid–twentieth-century Magical Realist novelists, for whom political discourse was the raison d’être of being a public intellectual
. Nevertheless, the twenty-first-century modernity of McOndo orients it away from utopian Left-wing ideology (national identity
, imperialism
, colonialism
, et cetera) to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics that include “a global, mixed, diverse, urban, twenty-first-century-Latin America, bursting on TV; and apparent in music, art, fashion, film, and journalism; hectic and unmanageable.” In the 21st century, contemporary Latin America is an historico–cultural hybrid of the 19th and 21st centuries (cf. dictator novel
, banana republic
). In the event, the writers of the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology took their discrete literary paths; Alberto Fuguet noted that “divergence, for certain, was expected, for McOndo was not a deal, nor a treaty, nor a sect.” Later, some McOndos reneged their literary militancy against Magical Realism; Edmundo Paz Soldán observed that “today, it is very clear, for many of us, that it is naïve to renounce such a wonderful tradition of political engagement on the part of the Latin American writer”.
a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban (city–suburban) world pervaded by U.S. pop culture
, are in direct opposition to the politically-metaphoric, rural narratives used as political discourse by the Latin American Boom
generation of writers, especially the magical-realists. Moreover, some novelists left their patrias (fatherlands), for the detached (foreign) perspective unavailable in the homeland. Resultantly, as exiles are wont to do, they idealized their patrias and wrote pithy novels of a land that should have been — yet always was there . . . in the exiled writer's memory; thus the well-crafted fiction did not portray the contemporary national reality that had displaced the country (patria) he departed.
Unlike the magical realist writers, the McOndos wrote “here-and-now!” fiction, about the 21st-century world they inhabit, and which surrounds them, and the homogenizing cultural-identity messages of pervasive mass communications media
; to be Latin in an Anglo culture. Because contemporary Latin America is a cultural conflation of the 19th and 21st centuries, the McOndos substantive and technical divergence from Magical Realism (style
, narrative mode, etc.) voided their predecessor traditions. Alberto Fuguet explains, “I feel [that] the great literary theme of ‘Latin American identity’ (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of ‘personal identity’ (who am I?).” Whilst rejecting the resultant stereotype “Latin American Literature” derived from Magical Realism, the McOndos nonetheless respect the man; “I’m a really big fan of Márquez, but, what I really hate is the software he created, that other people use . . . they turn [narrative fiction] into more of an aesthetic [exercise] instead of an ideology. Anybody who begins to copy One Hundred Years of Solitude turns it into kitsch
.”
name, and the Macondo
place name, (the locale of One Hundred Years of Solitude
, 1967). Each variant term has a contemporary cultural denotation for consumerism
, for “banana republic
”, and for dictator novel
literature; each denotes the cultural distortion of Hispanophone societies, by commercial globalization
and the psychological flattening that U.S. English-language pop culture
impinges upon the cultures native to Latin America; nevertheless, this Anglo cultural hegemony
is not exclusive to Latin American literatures, but also occurs in Europe, e.g. the Spanish science fiction film Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997), by Alejandro Amenábar
.
McOndo literature partly arose to counter the world's uncritical perception of Magical Realism as the definitive literature from and about the societies and cultures of the Latin American countries, especially the novels of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez
. McOndo novels and short stories transcend such rural limitations by examining, analysing, and comprehending the power dynamics among the Anglophone U.S. and the Hispanophone countries where “American” cultural hegemony
maintains its politico-economic hegemony — by importing, to the subject countries, the political economy
concept and business-practice of the McJob
.
McOndo fiction reports this contemporary, lived urban experience of such an economically unidirectional, Gringo business–Latin labour “work relationship”; of what it is to be a Latin American man and a Latin American woman employed in a McJob in an unmagical city in an unmagical country pervaded with foreign consumerism
and its irreconcilable discontents. Furthermore, unlike Magical Realism fiction, McOndo fiction reports the social consequences, at home (in Latinoamérica) and abroad (in el Norte) of this Anglo–Latin relationship; the exemplar book is the McOndo
(1996) short-story anthology.
To the world, McOndo writers present the contemporary Latin America that no longer is “Macondo” the exotic land of exotic
people presented in the literature of Magical Realism. Despite some remaining banana republic dictatorship façades, the McOndo writer accepts the de facto geopolitical
reality of the integration of continental Latin America as a subordinate unitary economy of the globalized economic order. As an artist, then, his or her moral responsibility is communicating to the “globalized world” that the “new” (contemporary) Latin America is McOndo, not Macondo, and that its cultures are hybrid cultures — of headphones and baseball caps, not sombreros and machetes. Many McOndo writers, U.S.A. city-born men and women (chicano
, hispanic
, Latino
, et al.), did not live the rural idyls of magical realist fiction, hence, they see Macondo
realistically, not romantically, and write about urban life.
, Latin personal identity, and the consequences of their representation or non-representation of urban space; the City is an image that molds the viewer. From said connections derive politically engaged stories of lived experience and created Latino and Latina identities; thus the coinage Urban space denotes and connotes the physical and virtual locales of a life of mistaken identity that cities have become for Latin Americans.
In McOndo narratives, cities and city life are realistically
portrayed as places and circumstances rendered virtual (“non-places”) by the technologies of the Internet, cellular telephones, and cable television; virtual space has supplanted physical space in the city. To wit, the writer Ana María Amar Sánchez said that cities have become interchangeable, homogeneously indistinguishable from each other, especially when seen from a distance, whilst riding in a speeding automobile travelling a highway en route to a shopping center; seen so, the city appears virtual, an image in the screen of a computer or a television set.
Unlike Magical Realism, most McOndo stories occur in cities, not the rural world of Macondo
; realism, not metaphor, is the mode
. McOndo shows the contemporary, 21st-century Latin America of Spanglish
hybrid tongues, McDonald’s
hamburguesas, and computadoras Mactintosh, that have up-dated the romanticised banana republic
worlds of the Latin American Literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the book Rosario Tijerras by Jorge Franco, sex is one of the most prominent themes. Various sexual acts are described quite graphically and in such vast and descriptive detail; acts of prostitution, graphic and disturbing rape, pedophilia, as well as the sharing of sexual partners. Franco's attention to detail and ability to create such graphic sex scenes makes his novel the perfect example of sex and sexuality as a theme in McOndo literature.
McOndo realism
plainly depicts the violent nature of Latin American cultures, thus, crime and criminals are reported, but not judged. Characters wield and use pistols and knives, are violent and practice or suffer rape and murder; direct description communicates Latin urban reality that oblique Macondo
metaphor does not. In the article “Breaking Free — Colombian Writers Get Personal”, Andrea Montejo said: “Indeed, the violence that has, for several decades, shaken the country’s major cities, is at the heart of such best-selling novels as [Fernando] Vallejo
’s La Virgen de los sicarios
[Our Lady of the Assassins, 1993], and [Jorge] Franco’s Rosario Tijeras
[1999]. Although very different in their stylistic approaches, both portray the harsh reality of an underworld riddled with drug lords, merciless hit men, and the over-abundance of easy money — all of which have come to be associated with Colombian literature. The latest batch of writers is well aware of their country’s reality, but they have refrained from portraying it in similar terms”.
In the Macondo
rural Latin America, violence is occasional, not normal, thus, it could be romanticised; in the McOndo urban Latin America, violence is normal, not occasional — especially in the Mexican and Colombian varieties of McOndo literature. Colombia’s history of rich criminals yielded rich novels describing the psychologic and sociologic foundations of the criminal underworld born from a static, hierarchic society; the social impetus of class
and caste
. Such works include the Pablo Escobar
rags-to-riches biography Pablo Escobar: auge y caída de un narcotraficante, (Pablo Escobar: Rise and Fall of a Narcotrafficker, 2002), by Alonso Salazár, about the best-known Colombian drugs lord of the cocaine world of the 1980s; and Rosario Tijeras, by Jorge Franco, about a woman who progresses from being a criminal’s girlfriend to being an accomplished sicaria (assassin), whereby, she establishes her social
, sexual, and economic equality
in the sexist
, macho
drugs underworld of Medellín in the 1980s.
in the middle of a great pre-modern ocean. The collision between tradition
and modernity interests me.” These traits of contemporary Latin American life are directly related to the globalization
caused, in great part, by economic, political, and social influence of the U.S. In every way, this emphasis on the separation of wealth [from social responsibility] is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of life in contemporary Latin America.” Hence, mass poverty, which is a fundamental political matter in every country of the Third World, is a common theme in the McOndo literature that shows Latin American cities as decrepit, and composed of cramped barrios of houses, huts, and shacks. (See: the novel Rosario Tijerras).
, and the perspectives of the literature about contemporary Latin American life depict a urban McOndo, not rural Macondo. The world of the 21st-century Latin American lacks legends and magic, McOndo narrates the world of high technology, computers, and global business franchises.
, Giannina Braschi
, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Hernán Rivera Letelier
, Jorge Franco
, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
, Pia Barros, Sergio Gomez
Among the most prominent and distinguished is the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet who won the Premio de Novela Dashiell Hammett. Fuguet is also credited for the creation of the term McOndo which began as a play on the name of Macondo, a town from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the term became known as a relief to the Macondoism that required all aspiring Latin American writers to set their tales in tropical jungles where the magical and real happily coexist.
and Sergio Gomez
, is an anthology of short stories of new Latin American literature which was first published in Spain in 1996. The authors distance themselves from the magical realism genre claiming that it is no longer representative of the situation of modern Latin America and that as they do not live in the same world as the likes of Gabriel García Márquez they should not be expected to write on the same material.
Cortos by Alberto Fuguet
examines the complexity of the cultural exchange between north and south in an emotionally charged narrative. “It is a collection of stories which discuss the American phenomenon at its height with characters who search to reinvent themselves as well as find their own identity in their battle against a quarrelsome reality.”
Peliculas de Mi Vida also by Alberto Fuguet
“is a novel about cinema and about how the movies that we see become part of who we are” The main character, Beltrán Soler, is on a plane ride home when all of a sudden fifty films that were greatly influential to him in adolescence and childhood come to his mind. He reconstructs his history with memories of the movies and the events and people surrounding the cinema and realizes how much these films have come to impact who he is.
The urban trilogy "Empire of Dreams" by Giannina Braschi
vehemently attacks Magic Realism as a literary dementia that propagates negative stereotypes of the Latin American people. The lead character of the mock novela, "The Intimate Diary of Solitude" is Mariquita Samper, a Macy's makeup artist, who shoots to kill the narrator of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for exploiting intimacy and solitude.
"Yo-Yo Boing!" by Giannina Braschi
chronicles with a violent tempo and sardonic wit the day-to-day realities of millions of Latin American immigrants living in New York, which is portrayed as the Darwinist capitol of Latin America. The novel unfolds as a hybrid structurally and linguistically; it is written in a mesh and flow of Spanish, English, and Spanglish.
"United States of Banana" by Giannina Braschi
foretells the disintegration of the United States due to obsessive capitalism: “Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees
, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce
. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of [democracy]] break loose and unleash the dogs of war. Separation—divorce—disintegration of subject matters that don’t matter anymore—only verbs—actions. Americans will walk like chickens with their heads cut off.”
Rosario Tijeras
, by Jorge Franco
, commences with the shooting of protagonist Rosario Tijeras, herself; the narrator is Antonio. From Rosario's bedside in hospital, he narrates her story: Rosario's friendship with him (Antonio); her love story with Emilio; and her life as a sicaria (contract killer). This novel about the violence of 1980s Medellín, Colombia, is “an important addition to literature in the Latin American social realist
tradition, and the author’s fluid and vibrant prose will surely capture readers of all backgrounds.”
El Rey de la Habana by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
“is the story of a young adolescent who lets loose on the streets of La Habana in the 90s.” In the style of ‘dirty realism’, the novel discusses such topics as poverty and prostitution, and depicts people who have hit rock bottom who have nowhere to turn. “It is the voice for those without a voice.”
Pablo Escobar
by Alonso Salazar delves into the life of Pablo Escobar through unpublished testimonials of family, friends and enemies. It depicts how Colombia became an empire of drug trafficking and focuses specifically on Escobar, both hated and adored for his past.
Critical studies
Latin American Literature and Mass Media, by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo, is an article anthology in four parts: “Revisions“, “Mass Culture“, ”Narrative Strategies in our Fin de siglo”, and “The Digital Wor(l)d”, that “examines Latin American literature in the context of a complementary audiovisual culture dominated by mass media, such as photography, film, and the Internet.”
Cuerpos Errantes: Literatura Latina y Latinoamericana en Estados Unidos, by Loustau Laura Rosa, studies the narrative systems of Latin American literature and Latina literature in the U.S., concentrating upon the novels and poems of Giannina Braschi
. The subject is the displacement of people, and the consequent process of continual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of one’s identity — cultural, national, writer’s, that occurs upon crossing either a physical or a metaphoric border; the themes are geographic, national, linguistic, psychologic, textual, corporal, historical, and cultural displacements. Loustau Laura Rosa’s pithy précis is: “In this project we study the narrative and poetic systems, as if they are cultural representations, of Latin American [literature] and Latina literature in the United States.”
De Macondo a McOndo, by Diana Polversich, documents Latin American literature from after the Latin American Literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, to the rise of neo-liberalism. Describing, in context, the literary genres that explicitly discussed controversial topics, such as homosexuality in a macho
culture, and the dirty realism of McOndo, the contemporary Latin American world.
Puerta al tiempo: literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX, by Maricruz Castro Ricalde is a panorama of Latin American literature of the 20th century, comprising authors such as María Luisa Bombal, Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, providing context via stylistic and thematic diversity.
are both commentaries by the author on the modernization of Latin American and Latina culture today as well as on the departure from magical realism to Mcondo that has occurred - greatly due to his steps into publicizing the changing attitudes of Latin American authors. He states that "The quaint, folkloric sensibility of magical realism has given way to a gritty, urban frenetic-ism in fiction, music, and film."
Macondo y otros mitos by Diana Polversich is a short commentary and criticism of the McOndo movement and some of its well known authors such as Fuguet.
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
associations of the cultural and narrative languages of the mass communications media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, and with the modernity of urban living; the experience of town versus country, of McOndo vs. Macondo. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin (American) life in “the City”, an experience the opposite of the rural, “natural world” of Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
, the archetypal “Latin American Country” presented in the literature of Magical Realism. Philosophically, the McOndo vs. Macondo intellectual
Intellectualism
Intellectualism denotes the use and development of the intellect, the practice of being an intellectual, and of holding intellectual pursuits in great regard. Moreover, in philosophy, “intellectualism” occasionally is synonymous with “rationalism”, i.e. knowledge derived mostly from reason and...
opposition is to the latter's literary perpetuation of Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
as an exotic place of exotic
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
people, which presents the reader with “reductionist essential-isms that everyone in Latin America wears a sombrero and lives on trees”. Because not everyone wears huaraches and sports a machete in contemporary Latinoamėrica, McOndo literature shows it to be a place of many countries, peoples, and cultures, not the monolithic, “Spanish-speaking worlds” of the banana republic
Banana republic
In political science, the pejorative term Banana Republic denotes a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions , which is ruled by a plutocracy, a small, self-elected, wealthy group who exploit the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy...
and the dictator novel
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
that preceded modernization.
The realistic
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to the popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
s of the U.S. and of Latin America as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Hispanoamėrica — thus the gritty, hard boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
, of social class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
differences, of sex, gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
, and of sexual orientation
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
. Despite McOndo literature often being about the social consequences of political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
, the narrative mode usually is less overtly political than that of magical realist literature. The American academic Edmundo Paz-Soldán said that McOndo narrators “move with ease in a world of fast food and fast culture . . . they are the first generation of writers more influenced by mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
than by literary tradition
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
.” Although initially associated with the Mexican “Literatura de la generación del crack” (the Literature of the Crack Generation
Crack Movement
The Crack Movement or literature of the Crack generation , describes a literary movement in Mexico that began in the mid-1990s. It was initiated by a number of young Mexican authors who broke with literary conventions in what is thought to have been a reaction to the Latin American Boom...
), which arose in the mid–1990s in counter-reaction to the literary Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
(1960s–70s), the writers of the McOndo literary movement tell the contemporary experiences of being a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban (and suburban) world that is culturally dominated
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
by the pop culture of the United States.
History
Etymology
BackgroundIn the history of Latin American literature
Latin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
, in the late 1960s, from the fictional place-name Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
— the rural locale of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
(1967), by Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
— derived the terms Macondismo and Macondo, which denoted a magical realist literary movement and a narrative genre. In time, the popularity of stories occurred in rural Macondo began to creatively limit Latin American writers who wrote about urban life in the Latin American city. To free themselves from the creative limitations imposed by the literary and financial success of the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
and Macondismo, the McOndo writers reneged the Boom and denounced el Realismo mágico (Magical Realism) as a cultural caricature; and, in counter-reaction, they published literature that realistically
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
presented the experiences of being a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban-suburban world that is culturally dominated
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
by the popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
of the United States.
Coinage
In the late 1990s, the Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
and Sergio Gómez published the short-story anthology McOndo
McOndo (book)
McOndo is the 1996 literary anthology that spawned the McOndo movement.Around 1994, Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet participated in an International Writer's Workshop which took place at the University of Iowa. There Fuguet attempted to present a short-story to the Iowa Review for publication...
(1996), the title of which conflated “McDonald’s” with Macondo, the real with the fictional; Fuguet’s coinage, McOndo denotes a “a world of McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos”. In comprehending literature about the Latin American experience without magical-realist narrative technique, the book title McOndo evolved into the McOndo literary-movement name. The etymologic
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
and typographic
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
evolution of the term, from “McOndo” to McOndo to McOndo, from short-story narrative to book-title to literary movement, derived from McOndo as a pun of Macondo. Although pronounced alike, the terms are ideologically unalike, because McOndo literature counters the narrative mode of Macondismo — which required every Latin American novelist to locate stories in the colourful tropical jungle locales where reality
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
and magic occur naturally and equally. Hence, the phonic and typographic resemblances of “McOndo” to “McDonald’s” (the global consumer business), narratively denote and connote the totality of the urban and popular cultures as the existential
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
context of the social effects of consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
upon the peoples of Latin America in the course their national and societal modernizations
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
.
Origins
By the 1980s, Latin American novelists were progressing past Magical Realism; yet, the McOndo Movement did not coalesce as literature and constitute itself until the middle of the 1990s. In 1994, the Chilean novelist Alberto FuguetAlberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
participated in an international writing workshop at the University of Iowa, where he submitted for publication a short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
to the Iowa Review magazine; he expected prompt acceptance, translation (to English), and publication, because Latin American writers then were an intellectual
Intellectualism
Intellectualism denotes the use and development of the intellect, the practice of being an intellectual, and of holding intellectual pursuits in great regard. Moreover, in philosophy, “intellectualism” occasionally is synonymous with “rationalism”, i.e. knowledge derived mostly from reason and...
vogue in trendy U.S. mainstream culture. Yet, upon reading the novelist Fuguet's submitted short story, the Iowa Review editor, taken aback by the realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
and no magic, dismissed it as “not Latin American enough . . . [because] the story could have taken place right here, in [North] America.” Two years later, in 1996, in retort to the American editorial rebuffing of realist fiction from and about Latin America, Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in Spain published McOndo (1996) a short-story anthology of contemporary Latin American literature. The McOndo anthology comprised 17 stories by Latin American and peninsular Spanish writers, all men whose literary careers began in the 1990s, all of the generation born in the late 1950s. The McOndo writers ideologically
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
distanced themselves from Magical Realism because they said it inaccurately represented contemporary Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
— which, in the 1990s, comprised “shopping malls, cable television, suburbs, and pollution” — because literature had progressed beyond the banana republic
Banana republic
In political science, the pejorative term Banana Republic denotes a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions , which is ruled by a plutocracy, a small, self-elected, wealthy group who exploit the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy...
Latin America of the dictator novel
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
and Magical Realism; the culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The McOndos present the cultural effects and consequences upon Latin American societies of global commerce's erasure of cultural demarcations (among nations
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and countries), and the consequent cultural homogenization. In an essay, Fuguet criticized the creative limitations that are the “picturesque locale and exotic
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
characters” that publishers grew to expect of Latin American writers — because of the folkloric Macondo stereotype. Citing the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright who despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and then rebelled against the Cuban government.- Life :...
, the literary world (publishers and critics) expected Latin American novelists to tackle only two themes: (i) economic underdevelopment
Underdevelopment
Underdevelopment is a term often used to refer to economic underdevelopment, symptoms of which include lack of access to job opportunities, health care, drinkable water, food, education and housing...
and (ii) cultural exoticism
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
. Hence Fuguet concludes that, despite pretty people and pretty scenery, the contemporary Latin American city–world he (Fuguet) inhabits, is too complicated for Magical Realism to grasp and narrate. In the event, Sergio Gómez and Fuguet’s publication of the McOndo (1996) anthology served a two-fold end: (i) the Fuguet “Introduction” as literary manifesto
Manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...
, and (ii) the supporting anthology of contemporary urban Latin American fiction; the Latin experience of town versus country.
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, during the mid–1990s, simultaneous to McOndo coalescing as a literary movement, La generación del crack (The Crack Generation
Crack Movement
The Crack Movement or literature of the Crack generation , describes a literary movement in Mexico that began in the mid-1990s. It was initiated by a number of young Mexican authors who broke with literary conventions in what is thought to have been a reaction to the Latin American Boom...
— Jorge Volpi
Jorge Volpi
Jorge Luis Volpi Escalante is a Mexican author best known for his 1999 novel En busca de Klingsor. Volpi was born in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology at the University of Salamanca in Spain...
, Ignacio Padilla
Ignacio Padilla
Ignacio Padilla is a noted Mexican novelist and short story writer whose works have been translated into several languages. Padilla helped found the "Crack Movement" along with fellow Mexican writers Eloy Urroz, Jorge Volpi, and Pedro Angel Palou as a means for Mexican authors to find their own...
, Eloy Urroz
Eloy Urroz
Eloy Urroz is a Mexican writer. He is currently a professor at The Citadel and College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1996...
, Pedro Ángel Palou, and Ricardo Chávez-Castañeda) presented Mexican realist
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
literature flouting the Magical Realism strictures of the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
; their ideologic advocacy emphasised that every writer find a voice, not a genre. Their initial publication was the Manifiesto Crack (Crack Manifesto, 1996) published a month earlier than the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology; the literary manifestos proved ideologically sympathetic. Nonetheless, despite shared ideologic antipathy to Magical Realism, McOndo and The Crack Movement were unalike; Edmundo Paz-Soldán observed that McOndo is “a moment in the celebration of the creative mixture of high- and popular- culture”, whilst The Crack Movement has “proposed a sort of élitist re-establishment of values.” Literary-world gossip postulates that the anti–magical militancy of McOndo and The Crack Movement derives more from commercial jealousy than from artistic divergence; nonetheless, the criticism might have been ideologically motivated by the international success that allowed magic realist fiction to establish the exotic
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
Macondo as the universal image of Latin America; hence, who controls the novel market controls the cultural image of Latinoamérica that the globalized world perceives.
As a literary movement, McOndo then included like ideologies of literature and technique with which to communicate the experience of being Latin American in McOndo. Yet, the McOndos are quasi-apolitical, unlike the mid–twentieth-century Magical Realist novelists, for whom political discourse was the raison d’être of being a public intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
. Nevertheless, the twenty-first-century modernity of McOndo orients it away from utopian Left-wing ideology (national identity
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
, imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, colonialism
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
, et cetera) to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics that include “a global, mixed, diverse, urban, twenty-first-century-Latin America, bursting on TV; and apparent in music, art, fashion, film, and journalism; hectic and unmanageable.” In the 21st century, contemporary Latin America is an historico–cultural hybrid of the 19th and 21st centuries (cf. dictator novel
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
, banana republic
Banana republic
In political science, the pejorative term Banana Republic denotes a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions , which is ruled by a plutocracy, a small, self-elected, wealthy group who exploit the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy...
). In the event, the writers of the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology took their discrete literary paths; Alberto Fuguet noted that “divergence, for certain, was expected, for McOndo was not a deal, nor a treaty, nor a sect.” Later, some McOndos reneged their literary militancy against Magical Realism; Edmundo Paz Soldán observed that “today, it is very clear, for many of us, that it is naïve to renounce such a wonderful tradition of political engagement on the part of the Latin American writer”.
Themes
The thematic substance of McOndo is based upon its literary predecessors, yet its representations of the experience of beingExistentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban (city–suburban) world pervaded by U.S. pop culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
, are in direct opposition to the politically-metaphoric, rural narratives used as political discourse by the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
generation of writers, especially the magical-realists. Moreover, some novelists left their patrias (fatherlands), for the detached (foreign) perspective unavailable in the homeland. Resultantly, as exiles are wont to do, they idealized their patrias and wrote pithy novels of a land that should have been — yet always was there . . . in the exiled writer's memory; thus the well-crafted fiction did not portray the contemporary national reality that had displaced the country (patria) he departed.
Unlike the magical realist writers, the McOndos wrote “here-and-now!” fiction, about the 21st-century world they inhabit, and which surrounds them, and the homogenizing cultural-identity messages of pervasive mass communications media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
; to be Latin in an Anglo culture. Because contemporary Latin America is a cultural conflation of the 19th and 21st centuries, the McOndos substantive and technical divergence from Magical Realism (style
Style (fiction)
In fiction, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character, theme, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.-Fiction-writing modes:...
, narrative mode, etc.) voided their predecessor traditions. Alberto Fuguet explains, “I feel [that] the great literary theme of ‘Latin American identity’ (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of ‘personal identity’ (who am I?).” Whilst rejecting the resultant stereotype “Latin American Literature” derived from Magical Realism, the McOndos nonetheless respect the man; “I’m a really big fan of Márquez, but, what I really hate is the software he created, that other people use . . . they turn [narrative fiction] into more of an aesthetic [exercise] instead of an ideology. Anybody who begins to copy One Hundred Years of Solitude turns it into kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
.”
Global commerce
As novelistic dialogue, book-title, and literary movement name, McOndo evokes the McDonalds corporateCorporation
A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
name, and the Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
place name, (the locale of One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
, 1967). Each variant term has a contemporary cultural denotation for consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
, for “banana republic
Banana republic
In political science, the pejorative term Banana Republic denotes a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions , which is ruled by a plutocracy, a small, self-elected, wealthy group who exploit the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy...
”, and for dictator novel
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
literature; each denotes the cultural distortion of Hispanophone societies, by commercial globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
and the psychological flattening that U.S. English-language pop culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
impinges upon the cultures native to Latin America; nevertheless, this Anglo cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
is not exclusive to Latin American literatures, but also occurs in Europe, e.g. the Spanish science fiction film Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997), by Alejandro Amenábar
Alejandro Amenábar
Alejandro Fernando Amenábar Cantos is a Spanish- Chilean film director. Amenábar was born in Santiago, Chile to a Spanish mother and Chilean father, but the family moved to Spain just one year after his birth...
.
McOndo literature partly arose to counter the world's uncritical perception of Magical Realism as the definitive literature from and about the societies and cultures of the Latin American countries, especially the novels of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
. McOndo novels and short stories transcend such rural limitations by examining, analysing, and comprehending the power dynamics among the Anglophone U.S. and the Hispanophone countries where “American” cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
maintains its politico-economic hegemony — by importing, to the subject countries, the political economy
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
concept and business-practice of the McJob
McJob
McJob is slang for a low-paying, low-prestige dead end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement...
.
McOndo fiction reports this contemporary, lived urban experience of such an economically unidirectional, Gringo business–Latin labour “work relationship”; of what it is to be a Latin American man and a Latin American woman employed in a McJob in an unmagical city in an unmagical country pervaded with foreign consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
and its irreconcilable discontents. Furthermore, unlike Magical Realism fiction, McOndo fiction reports the social consequences, at home (in Latinoamérica) and abroad (in el Norte) of this Anglo–Latin relationship; the exemplar book is the McOndo
McOndo (book)
McOndo is the 1996 literary anthology that spawned the McOndo movement.Around 1994, Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet participated in an International Writer's Workshop which took place at the University of Iowa. There Fuguet attempted to present a short-story to the Iowa Review for publication...
(1996) short-story anthology.
To the world, McOndo writers present the contemporary Latin America that no longer is “Macondo” the exotic land of exotic
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
people presented in the literature of Magical Realism. Despite some remaining banana republic dictatorship façades, the McOndo writer accepts the de facto geopolitical
Geopolitics
Geopolitics, from Greek Γη and Πολιτική in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale....
reality of the integration of continental Latin America as a subordinate unitary economy of the globalized economic order. As an artist, then, his or her moral responsibility is communicating to the “globalized world” that the “new” (contemporary) Latin America is McOndo, not Macondo, and that its cultures are hybrid cultures — of headphones and baseball caps, not sombreros and machetes. Many McOndo writers, U.S.A. city-born men and women (chicano
Chicano
The terms "Chicano" and "Chicana" are used in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. However, those terms have a wide range of meanings in various parts of the world. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement, mainly among Mexican Americans, especially in the movement's...
, hispanic
Hispanic America
Hispanic America or Spanish America is the region comprising the American countries inhabited by Spanish-speaking populations.These countries have significant commonalities with each other and with Spain, whose colonies they formerly were...
, Latino
Latino
The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...
, et al.), did not live the rural idyls of magical realist fiction, hence, they see Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
realistically, not romantically, and write about urban life.
The city and urban space
McOndo fiction shows the connections and relations among the mass communications mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, Latin personal identity, and the consequences of their representation or non-representation of urban space; the City is an image that molds the viewer. From said connections derive politically engaged stories of lived experience and created Latino and Latina identities; thus the coinage Urban space denotes and connotes the physical and virtual locales of a life of mistaken identity that cities have become for Latin Americans.
In McOndo narratives, cities and city life are realistically
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
portrayed as places and circumstances rendered virtual (“non-places”) by the technologies of the Internet, cellular telephones, and cable television; virtual space has supplanted physical space in the city. To wit, the writer Ana María Amar Sánchez said that cities have become interchangeable, homogeneously indistinguishable from each other, especially when seen from a distance, whilst riding in a speeding automobile travelling a highway en route to a shopping center; seen so, the city appears virtual, an image in the screen of a computer or a television set.
Unlike Magical Realism, most McOndo stories occur in cities, not the rural world of Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
; realism, not metaphor, is the mode
Mode (literature)
In literature, a mode is an employed method or approach, identifiable within a written work. As descriptive terms, form and genre are often used inaccurately instead of mode; for example, the pastoral mode is often mistakenly identified as a genre...
. McOndo shows the contemporary, 21st-century Latin America of Spanglish
Spanglish
.Spanglish refers to the blend of Spanish and English, in the speech of people who speak parts of two languages, or whose normal language is different from that of the country where they live. The Hispanic population of the United States and the British population in Argentina use varieties of...
hybrid tongues, McDonald’s
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...
hamburguesas, and computadoras Mactintosh, that have up-dated the romanticised banana republic
Banana republic
In political science, the pejorative term Banana Republic denotes a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions , which is ruled by a plutocracy, a small, self-elected, wealthy group who exploit the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy...
worlds of the Latin American Literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sex and sexual orientation
In accordance with the contemporary world in which it takes place, the McOndo literary movement addresses the themes of sex and sexuality in a rather modern and unapologetic way. Sex scenes tend to be described and explained realistically and are so detailed in some cases that they reach the point of coming off as vulgar. Sex is not a theme that is unnecessarily romanticized. Furthermore, consistent with McOndo's contemporary and postmodern foundations, gender roles and homosexuality are not ignored as relevant themes in modern society. While these roles and definitions are not shown or explained concretely, they are introduced and portrayed as real contemporary issues that also deal with the conflicts of identity that are ever present in modern Latin America.In the book Rosario Tijerras by Jorge Franco, sex is one of the most prominent themes. Various sexual acts are described quite graphically and in such vast and descriptive detail; acts of prostitution, graphic and disturbing rape, pedophilia, as well as the sharing of sexual partners. Franco's attention to detail and ability to create such graphic sex scenes makes his novel the perfect example of sex and sexuality as a theme in McOndo literature.
Crime and violence
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
plainly depicts the violent nature of Latin American cultures, thus, crime and criminals are reported, but not judged. Characters wield and use pistols and knives, are violent and practice or suffer rape and murder; direct description communicates Latin urban reality that oblique Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
metaphor does not. In the article “Breaking Free — Colombian Writers Get Personal”, Andrea Montejo said: “Indeed, the violence that has, for several decades, shaken the country’s major cities, is at the heart of such best-selling novels as [Fernando] Vallejo
Fernando Vallejo
Fernando Vallejo Rendón is a novelist, filmmaker and essayist, born in Colombia. He obtained Mexican nationality in 2007.Vallejo was born and raised in Medellín, though he left his hometown early in life...
’s La Virgen de los sicarios
Our Lady of the Assassins (novel)
Our Lady of the Assassins is a semi-autobiographical novel by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo about an author in his fifties who returns to his hometown of Medellín after 30 years of absence to find himself trapped in an atmosphere of violence and murder caused by drug cartel warfare...
[Our Lady of the Assassins, 1993], and [Jorge] Franco’s Rosario Tijeras
Rosario Tijeras
Rosario Tijeras is a Colombian film based on the book of the same name written by Jorge Franco. The film was released in Colombia in 2005. In that same year the film had its North American premiere at the American Film Institute festival in Hollywood. The film also was nominated for a Goya Award...
[1999]. Although very different in their stylistic approaches, both portray the harsh reality of an underworld riddled with drug lords, merciless hit men, and the over-abundance of easy money — all of which have come to be associated with Colombian literature. The latest batch of writers is well aware of their country’s reality, but they have refrained from portraying it in similar terms”.
In the Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
rural Latin America, violence is occasional, not normal, thus, it could be romanticised; in the McOndo urban Latin America, violence is normal, not occasional — especially in the Mexican and Colombian varieties of McOndo literature. Colombia’s history of rich criminals yielded rich novels describing the psychologic and sociologic foundations of the criminal underworld born from a static, hierarchic society; the social impetus of class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
and caste
Caste
Caste is an elaborate and complex social system that combines elements of endogamy, occupation, culture, social class, tribal affiliation and political power. It should not be confused with race or social class, e.g. members of different castes in one society may belong to the same race, as in India...
. Such works include the Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug lord. He was an elusive cocaine trafficker and rich and successful criminal. He owned numerous luxury residences, automobiles, and even airplanes...
rags-to-riches biography Pablo Escobar: auge y caída de un narcotraficante, (Pablo Escobar: Rise and Fall of a Narcotrafficker, 2002), by Alonso Salazár, about the best-known Colombian drugs lord of the cocaine world of the 1980s; and Rosario Tijeras, by Jorge Franco, about a woman who progresses from being a criminal’s girlfriend to being an accomplished sicaria (assassin), whereby, she establishes her social
Social equality
Social equality is a social state of affairs in which all people within a specific society or isolated group have the same status in a certain respect. At the very least, social equality includes equal rights under the law, such as security, voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and the...
, sexual, and economic equality
Gender equality
Gender equality is the goal of the equality of the genders, stemming from a belief in the injustice of myriad forms of gender inequality.- Concept :...
in the sexist
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
, macho
Machismo
Machismo, or machoism, is a word of Spanish and Portuguese origin that describes prominently exhibited or excessive masculinity. As an attitude, machismo ranges from a personal sense of virility to a more extreme male chauvinism...
drugs underworld of Medellín in the 1980s.
Poverty, caste, and social class
The realistic presentation of the disparity between the rich and the poor of a society, and realistic depictions of poverty are fundamental to the McOndo literature that shows how the introduction of high technology gadgets and contemporary public infrastructure to the poor societies of Latin America result in a greater contrast between First-world wealth and Third-world poverty. Paz-Soldán explained that “In Bolivia there exist small islands of modernityModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
in the middle of a great pre-modern ocean. The collision between tradition
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
and modernity interests me.” These traits of contemporary Latin American life are directly related to the globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
caused, in great part, by economic, political, and social influence of the U.S. In every way, this emphasis on the separation of wealth [from social responsibility] is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of life in contemporary Latin America.” Hence, mass poverty, which is a fundamental political matter in every country of the Third World, is a common theme in the McOndo literature that shows Latin American cities as decrepit, and composed of cramped barrios of houses, huts, and shacks. (See: the novel Rosario Tijerras).
Quotidian life
The short stories in the McOndo anthology depict the daily lives of the urban Latin American characters. The theme of la vida cotidiana, quotidian life, is true to realismLiterary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
, and the perspectives of the literature about contemporary Latin American life depict a urban McOndo, not rural Macondo. The world of the 21st-century Latin American lacks legends and magic, McOndo narrates the world of high technology, computers, and global business franchises.
Notable writers
Writers of the McOndo literary movement include: Alberto FuguetAlberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
, Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Hernán Rivera Letelier
Hernán Rivera Letelier
Hernán Rivera Letelier is a Chilean novelist. Until the age of 11 he lived in the Algorta saltpeter mining town. When it was closed down, he and his family moved to Antofagasta, where his mother died. His siblings went to live with his aunts. He stayed in Antofagasta, alone, until he was about 11....
, Jorge Franco
Jorge Franco
Jorge Franco was a Portuguese Olympic fencer. He competed in the team sabre event at the 1952 Summer Olympics.-References:...
, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, born in 1950 , is a Cuban novelist.-History:Gutiérrez grew up in Pinar del Río and began to work selling ice cream and newspapers when he was eleven years old. He was a soldier, swimming and kayak instructor, agricultural worker, technician in construction, technical designer,...
, Pia Barros, Sergio Gomez
Sergio Gómez
Paulo Sergio Gómez Sánchez , better known as Sergio Gómez, was a Mexican singer who was the founder and lead vocalist of the duranguense group K-Paz de la Sierra.-Biography:...
Among the most prominent and distinguished is the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet who won the Premio de Novela Dashiell Hammett. Fuguet is also credited for the creation of the term McOndo which began as a play on the name of Macondo, a town from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the term became known as a relief to the Macondoism that required all aspiring Latin American writers to set their tales in tropical jungles where the magical and real happily coexist.
Books
McOndo by Alberto FuguetAlberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
and Sergio Gomez
Sergio Gómez
Paulo Sergio Gómez Sánchez , better known as Sergio Gómez, was a Mexican singer who was the founder and lead vocalist of the duranguense group K-Paz de la Sierra.-Biography:...
, is an anthology of short stories of new Latin American literature which was first published in Spain in 1996. The authors distance themselves from the magical realism genre claiming that it is no longer representative of the situation of modern Latin America and that as they do not live in the same world as the likes of Gabriel García Márquez they should not be expected to write on the same material.
Cortos by Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
examines the complexity of the cultural exchange between north and south in an emotionally charged narrative. “It is a collection of stories which discuss the American phenomenon at its height with characters who search to reinvent themselves as well as find their own identity in their battle against a quarrelsome reality.”
Peliculas de Mi Vida also by Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
“is a novel about cinema and about how the movies that we see become part of who we are” The main character, Beltrán Soler, is on a plane ride home when all of a sudden fifty films that were greatly influential to him in adolescence and childhood come to his mind. He reconstructs his history with memories of the movies and the events and people surrounding the cinema and realizes how much these films have come to impact who he is.
The urban trilogy "Empire of Dreams" by Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
vehemently attacks Magic Realism as a literary dementia that propagates negative stereotypes of the Latin American people. The lead character of the mock novela, "The Intimate Diary of Solitude" is Mariquita Samper, a Macy's makeup artist, who shoots to kill the narrator of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for exploiting intimacy and solitude.
"Yo-Yo Boing!" by Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
chronicles with a violent tempo and sardonic wit the day-to-day realities of millions of Latin American immigrants living in New York, which is portrayed as the Darwinist capitol of Latin America. The novel unfolds as a hybrid structurally and linguistically; it is written in a mesh and flow of Spanish, English, and Spanglish.
"United States of Banana" by Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
foretells the disintegration of the United States due to obsessive capitalism: “Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees
New York Yankees
The New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the The Bronx, New York. They compete in Major League Baseball in the American League's East Division...
, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...
. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of [democracy]] break loose and unleash the dogs of war. Separation—divorce—disintegration of subject matters that don’t matter anymore—only verbs—actions. Americans will walk like chickens with their heads cut off.”
Rosario Tijeras
Rosario Tijeras
Rosario Tijeras is a Colombian film based on the book of the same name written by Jorge Franco. The film was released in Colombia in 2005. In that same year the film had its North American premiere at the American Film Institute festival in Hollywood. The film also was nominated for a Goya Award...
, by Jorge Franco
Jorge Franco
Jorge Franco was a Portuguese Olympic fencer. He competed in the team sabre event at the 1952 Summer Olympics.-References:...
, commences with the shooting of protagonist Rosario Tijeras, herself; the narrator is Antonio. From Rosario's bedside in hospital, he narrates her story: Rosario's friendship with him (Antonio); her love story with Emilio; and her life as a sicaria (contract killer). This novel about the violence of 1980s Medellín, Colombia, is “an important addition to literature in the Latin American social realist
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
tradition, and the author’s fluid and vibrant prose will surely capture readers of all backgrounds.”
El Rey de la Habana by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, born in 1950 , is a Cuban novelist.-History:Gutiérrez grew up in Pinar del Río and began to work selling ice cream and newspapers when he was eleven years old. He was a soldier, swimming and kayak instructor, agricultural worker, technician in construction, technical designer,...
“is the story of a young adolescent who lets loose on the streets of La Habana in the 90s.” In the style of ‘dirty realism’, the novel discusses such topics as poverty and prostitution, and depicts people who have hit rock bottom who have nowhere to turn. “It is the voice for those without a voice.”
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug lord. He was an elusive cocaine trafficker and rich and successful criminal. He owned numerous luxury residences, automobiles, and even airplanes...
by Alonso Salazar delves into the life of Pablo Escobar through unpublished testimonials of family, friends and enemies. It depicts how Colombia became an empire of drug trafficking and focuses specifically on Escobar, both hated and adored for his past.
Critical studies
Latin American Literature and Mass Media, by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo, is an article anthology in four parts: “Revisions“, “Mass Culture“, ”Narrative Strategies in our Fin de siglo”, and “The Digital Wor(l)d”, that “examines Latin American literature in the context of a complementary audiovisual culture dominated by mass media, such as photography, film, and the Internet.”
Cuerpos Errantes: Literatura Latina y Latinoamericana en Estados Unidos, by Loustau Laura Rosa, studies the narrative systems of Latin American literature and Latina literature in the U.S., concentrating upon the novels and poems of Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
. The subject is the displacement of people, and the consequent process of continual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of one’s identity — cultural, national, writer’s, that occurs upon crossing either a physical or a metaphoric border; the themes are geographic, national, linguistic, psychologic, textual, corporal, historical, and cultural displacements. Loustau Laura Rosa’s pithy précis is: “In this project we study the narrative and poetic systems, as if they are cultural representations, of Latin American [literature] and Latina literature in the United States.”
De Macondo a McOndo, by Diana Polversich, documents Latin American literature from after the Latin American Literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, to the rise of neo-liberalism. Describing, in context, the literary genres that explicitly discussed controversial topics, such as homosexuality in a macho
Machismo
Machismo, or machoism, is a word of Spanish and Portuguese origin that describes prominently exhibited or excessive masculinity. As an attitude, machismo ranges from a personal sense of virility to a more extreme male chauvinism...
culture, and the dirty realism of McOndo, the contemporary Latin American world.
Puerta al tiempo: literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX, by Maricruz Castro Ricalde is a panorama of Latin American literature of the 20th century, comprising authors such as María Luisa Bombal, Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, providing context via stylistic and thematic diversity.
Journalism
Magical Neoliberalism and I am not a magic realist by Alberto FuguetAlberto Fuguet
Alberto Fuguet de Goyeneche is a popular Chilean writer, journalist, film critic and film director who rose to critical prominence in the 1990s as part of the movement known as the New Chilean Narrative. Although he was born in Santiago, he spent his first 13 years of life in Encino, California...
are both commentaries by the author on the modernization of Latin American and Latina culture today as well as on the departure from magical realism to Mcondo that has occurred - greatly due to his steps into publicizing the changing attitudes of Latin American authors. He states that "The quaint, folkloric sensibility of magical realism has given way to a gritty, urban frenetic-ism in fiction, music, and film."
Macondo y otros mitos by Diana Polversich is a short commentary and criticism of the McOndo movement and some of its well known authors such as Fuguet.