The colonial legacy, the 1960s Boom, and the international popularity of magical realist novelists have been the most widely recognized phenomena associated with the Latin American and Caribbean novel. In the mid-1940s the appearance of a series of now classic modernist novels signaled a change in the direction of Latin American fiction that preceded the popular novels of magical realism—the most widely recognized phenomenon associated with Latin American and Caribbean fiction. Following the lead of Borges and foreign modernists, these novelists of the 1940s rejected conventional and realist modes of writing, as well as the limits of much regionalist writing that had predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Major novels that signaled this change in Latin America were Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coracão selvagem (1944, Near the Wild Heart), Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente, Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1947, The Edge of the Storm), Graciliano Ramos’s Insônia (1947, Insomnia), Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres (1948), and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949, The Kingdom of This World). Yáñez’s Al filo del agua is still read in Mexico as a classic novel of modernist technique and of the repressive Mexican society that was typical before the Mexican Revolution of 1914–1917. Lispector, Asturias, Ramos, Marechal, and Carpentier have become national cultural icons and canonical writers of contemporary Latin America.
Borges’s volume of short fiction, Ficciones (1944), was a key predecessor to this flourishing of the Latin American novel, for in this volume he reaffirmed the right of invention and the central role of imagination that had been often overlooked or ignored since the writings of the romantics. Indeed, the vast majority of Latin American novelists felt an obligation to imitate sociopolitical reality rather than engage in pure invention. In the stories of Ficciones, such as “The Secret Miracle” and “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges took innovative and inventive approaches to time and space, openly challenging the very tenets of traditional realist-naturalist fiction.
With the appearance of the fiction of Asturias, Yáñez, Ramos, José Lins do Rêgo, and Carpentier, Latin American and Caribbean writers exercised the right of invention and employed stratagems commonly associated with modernist narrative: fragmented structure, multiple points of view, innovative use of language, interiorization, the use of neologisms, and the like. In the Latin American case these technical innovations came via European and North American modernists, particularly Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, and Faulkner. The Latin American writers also participated in a shift of what was considered important in human experience and worthy of novelizing. In the 1950s many writers advocated these ideas, proposing the modernization and universalization of their respective national literatures in cultural magazines such as Mito in Colombia, Sardio in Venezuela, Orígenes in Cuba, and the Revista Mexicana de Literatura in Mexico.
Yáñez, Ramos, Marechal, Lins do Rêgo, and Carpentier were not as explicitly political in their novels as Asturias in El Señor Presidente, but they were equally interested in creating universal experience. In Al filo del agua Yáñez uses a multiplicity of strategies to recreate the experience of living in small-town, rural Mexico at the end of the repressive regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz; near the end of the book, the Mexican Revolution is breaking out. Ramos’s collection of stories Insônia included modernist strategies as well, but Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres is a lengthy and far more ambitious urban exploration of Greco-Roman classical mythology. In it Marechal explores psychological states, as does Do Rêgo in Eurídice. El reino de este mundo is Carpentier’s rethinking and novelization of Latin American cultural issues—mostly related to national identity—that were in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s.
The 1950s produced some major modernist novels by authors such as Juan Rulfo, Lygia Fagundes Telles, David Viñas, Alejo Carpentier, and Miguel Otero Silva. A new generation of novelists, headed by Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, also began publishing their first fiction in the 1950s. Many of these writers were fascinated by Faulknerian modes of writing fiction, and Rulfo, Viñas, and García Márquez were among the most committed neo-Faulknerians: they used specific regional settings to tell universal human stories. Using the region of Jalisco, Mexico, as his setting, Rulfo creates the mythical town of Comala in his novel Pedro Páramo (1955, Pedro Paramo). García Márquez’s La hojarasca (1955, Leafstorm) offers multiple points of view in the Faulknerian mode to relate universal human dramas of conflict and death. Juan Carlos Onetti was also a follower of Faulkner, although his novel La vida breve (1950, The Brief Life) is primarily a novel of existential anguish along the lines of the writings of Oreamuno and Cardoso.
Many novelists of the 1950s were engaged in a decade-long cultural debate about identity and modernization in the Americas. Carpentier had been theorizing about Latin American culture and its relationship to Europe for several years when he published El reino de este mundo and Los pasos perdidos (1953, The Lost Steps). The latter is a story of a return to origins, for the protagonist takes a trip down the Orinoco River that takes him back in time to the life of his youth and of primitive times. In both novels Carpentier explores issues of Latin American identity, and this exploration was part of a broader dialogue in the Caribbean as set forth by Francophone writer Aimé Césaire of Martinique.
The new generation of writers (born mostly in the 1920s and 1930s) was interested in modernizing Latin American culture by drawing on European and American modernist literary practices, their own cultural heritage, and a commitment to social change that was their response to the colonial legacy. Most of them were devoted followers of Jean Paul Sartre, whose theories of the engagé writer were cited from Mexico to Argentina. In Mexico this new generation was headed by Carlos Fuentes, who cofounded and codirected the Revista Mexicana de Literatura along with Emmanuel Carballo. With this journal Fuentes and his cohorts (known in Mexico as the Generation of Medio Siglo, the mid-century generation) intended to modernize and universalize Mexican culture. In Colombia the magazine Mito served a similar function, and the young writer Gabriel García Márquez was a collaborator with Mito, as was Alvaro Mutis. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean groups of writers with similar interests founded magazines and journals to promote their ideas.
Fuentes, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa also began writing fiction in the 1950s. Fuentes began his career with a volume of short stories with Mexican themes, but written in an inventive and fantastic mode, Los días enmascarados (1954, The masked days). His first novel, La región más transparente, revealed Fuentes’s interest in modernizing Mexican literature and the Latin American novel. Using as a model such urban works as Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and Doblin’s Berlinalexanderplatz, Fuentes created a vast panorama of Mexico City. Here and in La muerte de Artemio Cruz Fuentes employed the complete gamut of narrative strategies associated with literary modernism. In both novels he also delves into the history of Mexico as a key to understanding the present. García Márquez was equally interested in modernist strategies in his first novel, Leafstorm, clearly written in a Faulknerian mode. Cortázar and Vargas Llosa were mostly involved with short fiction in the 1950s, although Cortázar did publish his first novel, Los premios (The Winners) in 1958.
The 1950s witnessed similar movement toward modernization among writers throughout the Hispanic world. David Viñas of Argentina and Juan Carlos Onetti of Uruguay were among the most Faulknerian, as evidenced in the multiple narrators and use of space in Viñas’s Cayó sobre su rostro (1955) and Onetti’s La vida breve. In Brazil, Jorge Amado, João Guimarães Rosa, and Carlos Heitor Cony were writing with a growing awareness of modern literature in the West. Amado was yet to produce his major works, but Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) is a monumental work that incorporates Brazilian history, anthropology, indigenous cultures, and myth as well as impressive linguistic innovation. In the Hispanic U.S., one of the early novels to be recognized in the Chicano novelistic tradition was Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal.
International recognition of the new fiction of Latin America took the form of the Boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. The most celebrated figures of this Boom were Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar. The Chilean José Donoso was often associated with the group, and several other writers of the same generation, such as the Mexican Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, the Colombians Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Héctor Rojas Herazo, the Venezuelan Salvador Garmendia, the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Argentine Manuel Puig, and the Brazilians Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Osmin Lins, Maria Alice Barroso, Carlos Heitor Cony, and Assis Brasil published novels comparable in quality to the major works of the Boom. In addition, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of Chicano novelists, headed by Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, and Rudolfo Anaya, began publishing novels that some scholars associated with the Boom.
The most recognized and now classic novels of the Boom were Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (1963, The Time of the Hero), Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963, Hopscotch), and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude). Each of these works had considerable impact throughout the Hispanic world both in creating a broader readership for Latin American literature and in influencing later generations of writers. Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero was a polemical work in Peru and a best seller throughout Latin America. It tells a story considered scandalous in Peru: institutional corruption and devious sexual behavior pervade a military school well known in Lima. Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz was an innovative technical experiment, because of its use of three narrative points of view, as well as work highly critical of the Mexican political establishment and their allies in the United States. The most experimental of all the novels of the Boom, however, was Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a book that offers the reader several possible readings. The most heralded of the novels of the Boom was García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian’s magical realist tour de force that tells both a family story and the history of Latin America from its foundations to the twentieth century.
José Donoso had already published some fiction in the 1950s when he befriended Carlos Fuentes, the eventual spokesperson of the Boom, in the early 1960s. Donoso did not assume the political positions that characterized the four central figures of the Boom, but his ambitious and lengthy novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1969, The Obscene Bird of the Night) brought him considerable notoriety during the heyday of the Boom. It is a surreal experiment in which the reader must struggle to discern between dream and reality; characters change in character and identity.
Unlike Donoso, Salvador Garmendia and Manuel Mejía Vallejo did not associate with the writers of the Boom nor did they participate in their jetset lifestyle. For most of their writings careers, they remained in their respective homelands and were minimally recognized abroad. Nevertheless, they both published novels of quality similar to much of the writing of the Boom. Garmendia had been associated with the Sardio group in Venezuela in the 1950s, and published his early fiction during this period. His novels Los pequeños seres (1959, The little beings) and Los habitantes (1961, The inhabitants) were introspective and small-scale works dealing more with human relationships than the vast historical works of Fuentes and García Márquez. Mejía Vallejo’s El día señalado consists of two story lines: one told by a third-person omniscient narrator dealing with a priest in a small town of Colombia and another told by a character who arrives at the town to commit an act of revenge. Both stories relate to the period of civil war in 1950s Colombia referred to as La Violencia.
At the margins of the Boom in Brazil, Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Autran Dourado, Carlos Heitor Cony, and Assis Brasil were all publishing novels in the 1960s. Amado’s Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1969, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) is a now classic fantasy love story in the Latin American canon and Lispector’s A Paixão Segundo G. H. (1964, The Passion According to G.H.) is an intimate work focusing on the existential anguish of an individual woman. Dourado’s A barca dos homens (1961, A ship of men) is a work heavily laden with symbols and multiple voices of characters in intense relationships. A mirror image of these novels was a masculine version of individual angst in a limited space, centering on the forty-year-old male protagonist in Carlos Heitor Cony’s Antes, o Verão (1964, Before, the summer). Two Mexican writers whose early fiction appeared in the 1960s on the margins of the Boom were Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro. Castellano’s Oficio de tinieblas (1962, Dark services) and Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963, Memories of Days to Come), like El día señalado, are novels of political violence with cultural implications in the development of the themes. These Mexican writers were concerned with women, feminist issues, and political persecution in many of their works. Indeed, they were pioneer feminists of Latin America who wrote ambitious modernist novels comparable in narrative technique to the most accomplished fiction of the Boom.
The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by the flourishing of a heterogeneous and compelling novelistic production. The cumulative effect of the work of novelists such as the Chilean Isabel Allende, the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, and the Brazilians Nélida Piñón and Clarice Lispector ushered in a new era for women writers in Latin America. In addition to the phenomenal rise of women’s writing, scholars observed the appearance of a series of novels associated with a post-Boom of the Latin American novel. Other scholars, taking special note of the most radically innovative fiction, spoke of a now postmodern Latin American novel. The most significant cultural and political feature of this period was the rise of repressive military dictatorships in the 1970s and their fall in the late 1980s and 1990s. Since the 1980s, the human and cultural meaning of these dictatorships is still being accounted for by novelists. During the 1970s, in fact, enough Latin American writers published novels dealing with military regimes that the dictator novel became common usage.
Some Brazilian novelists publishing during this period, including Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, Autran Dourado, and Osman Lins, engaged in political, historical, and postmodern narratives comparable to those found among writers throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas. Lispector’s novels in this period were Uma apprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres (1969, Apprenticeships or the book of pleasures), Agua viva (1973, Live water), and A Hora da Estrela (1977, The Hour of the Star). The first of these three novels involves two individuals’ search for identity, and Lispector’s feminist concerns were increasingly evident. Jorge Amado continued his career as a novelist with Tereza Batista cansada de guerra (1972), a rewriting of popular cordel ballads, and Lins published the experimental Avalovara (1973, Avalovara). In Amado’s playful text he creates an authorial narrator who supposedly knew a legendary heroine personally; Lins’s experimental narrative offers the reader alternate structures and readings. Autran Dourado’s novels of the 1970s and 1980s were written from the best tradition of modernist fiction, often with Faulknerian overtones.
The Chicano novel—now in dialogue with the Latin American Boom—flourished during this period, which produced some of the most compelling Chicano novels yet to appear. The main figures were Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, Miguel Méndez, and Rudolfo Anaya. The coincidence of the Chicano political movement in the United States and the Boom of the Latin American novel were important factors for these Chicano writers, some of whom have spoken of their debts to the Latin American Boom novelists. Among the most notable of these dialogic novels were Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974, Pilgrims from Aztlán), and Hinojosa’s Klail City y sus alrededores (1975, Klail City Death Trip). These writers drew upon their own cultural history as Hispanics in the southwestern United States as well as Hispanic literary tradition, broadly conceived, to participate in a multicultural dialogue in the United States.
As was mentioned previously, in the ongoing discussions of the Latin American novel published since the 1960s Boom, some critics have referred to a post-Boom that represents, in effect, a continuation of the modernist project initiated in Latin America in the 1940s perpetuated by the writers of the Boom. Novelists such as Antonio Skármeta and Mempo Giardinelli do share generational attitudes that distance them from their immediate predecessors of the Boom. Nevertheless, their fiction represents a continuation of modernist aesthetics. These writers are by no means traditionalists; indeed, they employ the narrative strategies explored and refined by modernist writers since the 1940s. As such, Skármeta, Giardinelli, Allende, and a host of other Latin American storytellers belong to the tradition of the modernist novel—frequently adding a touch from their local tradition—be it orality, magical realism, or rewriting regional or national history.
The post-Boom represents a return to accessibility in the Latin American novel as well as more realism and pop elements that reflect a greater cultural autonomy and the revival of democracy in parts of the continent, according to Donald Shaw. Citing writers such as Skármeta, Shaw proposes that the assumptions made by the Boom writers—whether about literature or society—were directly contradicted in the next generation. Making reference to Giardinelli, Shaw emphasizes that the “extreme pessimism” characteristic of the Boom shifted to a new optimism in the post-Boom, although not all scholars uniformly agree that the Boom was necessarily so pessimistic. Giardinelli and others have also stated that their generation was defeated politically in Latin America, and that, consequently, they have lost much of the optimism conveyed by their earlier writing.
If the Boom was García Márquez’s political statement and his magical realism set in Macondo, many of the writers associated with the post-Boom were politically committed storytellers whose writing can be seen as a post-Macondo phenomenon: they write either with or against the storytelling vitality and magic realist approaches of García Márquez. Writers such as Isabel Allende and Luis Sepúlveda produced a fiction with many overtones and stylistic characteristics from García Márquez’s magical fictions. On the other hand, Colombian novelists such as Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal in El bazar de los idiotas (1974, The Bazaar of the Idiots) and Mario Tulio Aguilera Garramuno in Breve historia de todas las cosas (1975, A brief history of everything) have written parodies of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Several writers and critics have pointed to the importance of the testimonial and a closer attachment to empirical reality among post-Boom writers. Isabel Allende, for example, believes that her writing breaks from two of the basic tenets of the Boom: she is neither “detached” nor “ironic.” Several critics have argued that the Boom writers lacked a radical critique of society, embracing liberal solutions to mask their acceptance of the status quo. A more radical response to the political reality in Latin America was the post-Boom writing of Allende’s Of Love and Shadows (1984 in the original Spanish as De amor y de sombra), Skármeta’s La insurrección (1982, The Insurrection), and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco. Similarly, several critics have suggested the importance of testimonials in post-Boom narrative.
In contrast, in studies of post-Boom fiction in Mexico other critics attempt to avoid the reduction of the Mexican novel to only the more accessible works. These scholars take into account the writing of novelists such as Juan García Ponce, Angelina Muñiz, and Humberto Guzmán, whose experiments with fiction are complex and elusive. The more accessible writers of Mexican fiction in the 1970s and 1980s who could be associated with a post-Boom are Sergio Galindo, Armando Ramírez, Arturo Azuela, Luis Zapata, Vicente Leñero, Luis Spota, and Jorge Ibarguengoitia. Galindo continued his modernist writing into the 1980s, publishing Terciopelo violeta (Violet velvet) in 1985 and Otilia Rauda in 1986. Arturo Azuela also published novels with a broad historical scope, beginning with a family story, El tamaño del infierno (1973, The size of hell). He followed with the story of a town, Un tal José Salomé (1975, Some guy named José Salomé), and a work about his own generation in the 1960s and 1970s, Manifestación de silencios (1979, Protest of silences). In Chin-Chin el Teporocho (1972, Chin-Chin from the Teporocho neighborhood), Ramírez focuses on everyday life in a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City and recreates a parody of the popular literature of soap operas and comic books. La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (1974, The Princess of the Iron Palace) by Gustavo Sainz was a reaction against the complexities of the fiction of the Boom and also against the hermetic qualities of the young and experimental Onda group in Mexico. In this novel an unnamed female protagonist relates a humorous story of failed relationships, sexual misadventures, and crime.
In Brazil critics do not write of their novelists as part of the Spanish American “post-Boom.” Brazilian writers similar to the post-Boom in Spanish America, however, include novelists such as João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Márcio Souza, Autran Dourado, Oswaldo França Junior, and Carlos Heitor Cony. These writers tell linear stories, with interests ranging from rewriting the history of Brazil to mystery novels. They are among Brazil’s most accomplished storytellers in the second half of the twentieth century and enjoy a wide readership in Brazil as well as abroad.
The term post-Boom has been useful to distinguish some tendencies of fiction published after the 1960s Boom. On the other hand, it was increasingly evident among critics that the radically heterogeneous Latin American novel of the 1970s and 1980s corresponded in many ways to what was being called postmodern fiction in the West. By the 1980s, it became appropriate to describe some of the new novels—although certainly not all of them—with a term that captured exactly what they were: postmodern fiction. Thus there has been a growing acceptance of the idea of a postmodern novel in Latin America. If the writers identified with the post-Boom tended to follow modernist aesthetics, postmodern writers have demonstrated diverging interests. These new interests have been particularly evident since 1968, with the novels of Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, José Emilio Pacheco, Ricardo Piglia, Diamela Eltit, and others.
Jorge Luis Borges has already been mentioned in the context of the rise of the modern novel in Latin America. A key moment for postmodern fiction in Latin America was the publication of his Ficciones in 1944. Moreover, several stories in this volume, such as “The Library of Babel” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” can be seen as foundational texts for postmodern fiction of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. In them the boundary between the genres of fiction and the essay is blurred, opening the way for the fictionalized theoretical prose of writers such as Severo Sarduy, Ricardo Piglia, and José Balza. Borges’s stories also tend to emphasize language as a theme in itself, questioning its capacity to effectively articulate reality and human subjectivity.
After Borges, important contributions to the later publication of Latin American postmodern fiction were two lengthy and elaborate modernist texts: João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas and Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela. In Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa began experimenting with the possibilities of the unresolved contradictions that are typical of much postmodern fiction. Cortázar’s work in itself was not a fully elaborated postmodern work either, but its Morelli chapters at the end of the book were a radical proposal for postmodern fiction. In the late 1960s and 1970s the postmodern novel began to appear in Latin America, frequently under the signs of Borges, Guimarães Rosa, or Cortázar, and it was constituted by such experimental fictions as Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, Néstor Sánchez’s Siberia Blues (1967), Puig’s La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), and Lins’s Avalovara.
Many of the roots of postmodern fiction can be related to numerous sources in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nevertheless, the postmodern novel in Latin America is, to a large extent, a phenomenon that has frequently been in dialogue with Cortázar’s self-conscious experimentation in Hopscotch as well as the fictional character Morelli’s call for an “antinovel.” Another important factor in the rise of postmodern fiction since 1968 was the first generalized presence of Joyce in Latin American literature in the 1960s. Joyce’s entry into the general consciousness of the Latin American writer comes relatively late, and is not really noticeable until the appearance of works such as Hopscotch and Three Trapped Tigers.
A group of radically innovative novelists appeared on the Latin American literary scene in the 1970s and 1980s, including Diamela Eltit, Ricardo Piglia, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Héctor Libertella, Salvador Elizondo, Carmen Boullosa, Luis Arturo Ramos, José Balza, and R. H. Moreno-Durán. In their early writings, Libertella and Eltit were particularly interested in the type of linguistic innovations utilized by Sarduy. Seen in their totality, these postmodern writers and their cohorts offer radically diverse kinds of postmodernisms—perhaps a postmodern phenomenon in itself. Exponents of postmodern fiction in Brazil have been Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Roberto Drummond, Rubem Fonseca, Ivan Angêlo, and Flávio Moreira da Costa. Loyola Brandão’s Zero (1974) and Não verás país nenhúm (1981, And Still the Earth) are two of the most experimental and playful works of the period in Brazil.
The postmodern and transnational interests of the Latin American writer were evident in the 1990s, a period when the Latin American novel was a heterogeneous cultural manifestation of modernist, postmodern, post-postmodern, feminist, and gay fiction. These five modes overlap in many ways, frequently sharing a commitment not only to political and aesthetic critique but also the very subversion of the dominant discourses of power. Novelists still writing in a primarily modernist vein were associated in Latin America with the Boom and the post-Boom, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rosario Ferré, César Aira, Mempo Giardinelli, Isabel Allende, and Antonio Skármeta among them.
Laura Esquivel became one of the best-selling writers of the decade with her first novel, Como agua para chocolate (1990); in its English translation as Like Water for Chocolate this novel was received with considerable repercussions in the Americas throughout the 1990s. Postmodern writers such as Diamela Eltit, Alicia Borinsky, and Ricardo Piglia also continued publishing in the 1990s, as did a new generation of writers (born since 1955) that included novelists such as the Mexicans Jorge Volpi, Cristina Rivera-Garza, David Toscana, and Juan Villoro as well as the Brazilian Diogo Mainardi, the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán. Feminist, gay, and lesbian writers, who became quite visible in the 1980s, went on writing in the 1990s. In Brazil and elsewhere they were often called the generation of the 1990s.
In the 1940s and 1950s writers such as Borges, Fuentes, and Cortázar called for a radical modernization of the Latin American novel. Their voices were heard not only in Spanish America but throughout the Hispanic world, including the U.S. southwest and the Caribbean regions where French and English are the dominant tongues. The 1990s fiction of Chicano writers Sandra Cisneros, Américo Paredes, John Rechy, and Tomás Villasenor, as well as the Haitian Edwidge Danticat and the Puerto Rican Giannina Braschi, are testimony to the radical modernization that has indeed taken place throughout Latin America in the 1990s. By the 1990s, postmodern and feminist fiction, as well as other heterogeneous discourses, challenged the more commercial and popular versions of traditional realism and modernist fiction of the Americas and beyond.
At the end of the century, the youngest generation of writers, most of whom were born in the 1960s and began publishing in the 1990s, began assuming their roles as writers with a presence in the Latin American literary scene. Polemics arose in several countries about their positioning as part of the cultural and literary traditions, their relationship with their predecessors in the 1960s Boom, and the effects of globalization, among other topics. The young writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez of Chile and Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia have proposed an ambitious reconfiguration of the novelistic scene throughout Latin America to include their young group, which they designated as “McOndo” in opposition to what they saw as the international reading public’s desire for Latin American writers to reduce their writing to the now tired schemes of magical realism. In Mexico Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, and colleagues of this generation claimed to create a crack in the established literary hierarchies and declared themselves the “generation of the crack.” They use their numerous national and international literary prizes, as well as commercial success, as indicators of their cultural relevance. Similarly, in Brazil a new “generation of the 1990s” is claiming to supersede the grand figures of Brazilian letters. The success of these groups and the novels of the respective writers has been questioned by readers, writers, and critics. Nevertheless, writers of this generation, such as Bernardo Carvalho, Diogo Mainardi, Nelson de Oliveira, and Fernando Bonassi have given credence to the proposals that this new generation of the 1990s could well become a noteworthy group of writers in the near future. All have already published at least three books of fiction. Carvalho’s recent novel Nove Noites (2002, Nine nights) is an intriguing fictionalization of the life of an American anthropologist who did research in Brazil in the late 1930s and early 1940s and then committed a mysterious suicide.
The recent rise of novelists such as the Mexicans Cristina Rivera Garza, David Toscana, Ignacio Solares, Carmen Boullosa, and Luis Arturo Ramos, the Brazilians Milton Hatoum, Bernardo Carvalho, and João Gilberto Noll, the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, and the Chilean Diamela Eltit are testimony to the ongoing high quality of Latin American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many of these writers already have works published in translation beyond their national boundaries, and novels such as Cristina Rivera-Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar, translated as No One Will See Me Cry, which appeared in English in 2003, and David Toscana’s Estación Tula, translated as Tula Station, which appeared in English 2000, are two prominent examples of the strength of both the tradition and the innovation of the contemporary Latin American novel.