McOndo
[citation needed] The realistic narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to popular culture as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Latin American cities—thus the gritty, hard-boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization, and of social class and identity differences.
[6][7] The McOndo anthology comprised seventeen stories by Latin American and peninsular Spanish writers, all men whose literary careers had begun in the 1990s; each was of the generation born in the late 1950s.
[6][8] 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) the celebration of economic underdevelopment and (ii) cultural exoticism.
[3] Meanwhile, in Mexico City, during the mid-1990s, whilst McOndo coalesced 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.
"[9][11] Literary-world gossip postulates that the anti–magical militancy of McOndo and The Crack Movement derives more from commercial jealousy than from artistic divergence;[12] 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 Latino America that the globalized world perceives.
[15] Nevertheless, the 21st-century modernity of McOndo orients it away from utopian Left-wing ideology (national identity, imperialism, colonialism, et cetera) to the politics of the 20th century, which 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.
"[3][16] 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".
"[4] 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 .
"[18] As novelistic dialogue, book title, and literary movement name, McOndo evokes the McDonald's corporate name and the place name Macondo, the locale of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
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.
Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper and Giannina Braschi's United States of Banana explore how first world banking priorities wreak havoc on Latin American cultures.
McOndo fiction shows the connections and relations among the mass communications media, Latin personal identity, and the consequences of their representation or non-representation of urban space; the city is an image that molds the viewer.
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.
Hence, mass poverty, which is a fundamental political matter in every country of the developing 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.
[4] The most prominent and distinguished writers of the McOndo literary movement are: Alberto Fuguet, Giannina Braschi, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Hernán Rivera Letelier, Jorge Franco, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Pia Barros, Sergio Gómez.
Fuguet, a leader of the movement, is credited for coining 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.
[7] The authors criticize the genre of Magic realism 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.
"[23] Películas 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"[24] 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.
The Empire of Dreams urban trilogy by Giannina Braschi attacks Magic Realism as a literary dementia that propagates negative stereotypes of Latin American people.
Loustau's pithy précis is: "In this project we study the narrative and poetic systems, as if they are cultural representations, of Latin American and Latina literature in the United States.
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.
[31] "Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America" by Jerónimo Arellano sheds light on the rise and fall of the Boom generation through popular sentiments that are recalibrated by McOndo writers Sergio Gomez, Alberto Fuget, and Giannina Braschi.
[32][33] 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.
[44] The adolescent angst novels La Tumba (The Tomb, 1964) and De Perfil (Profile View, 1966), by José Agustín, stylistically announced a new generation of novelist, writing in the contemporary popular idiom of society, presenting stories of life as lived.
[15] Whereas the McOndo literary movement focused its modernism to address the societal effects upon Latin America of the political economy of the amalgamation of culture (identity) and capitalism.
[15] The Chilean writer Ricardo Cuadros said that McOndo irreverence for Latin American literary tradition, its thematic–stylistic concentration upon the pop culture of the United States, and the literatures’ apolitical tone, are dismissive of the literary ideas, writing style, and narrative techniques of the generation of Latin American writers (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, Fuentes, et al.) who lived under, opposed, and (occasionally) were repressed by dictators.
In the New York Times newspaper article "New Era Succeeds Years of Solitude" Cuadros said that "Alberto Fuguet makes a caricature out of Latin American literature, which is very rich and complex, and which comes from a very painful literary process.
