The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945

The diverse peoples, languages, and cultures of the region today called Latin America and the Caribbean share a colonial legacy. Spain and Portugual ruled the region for approximately three centuries and other European nations have exercised a colonial presence. Taking into account its indigenous, African, and Iberian cultural heritages, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has eschewed the very term Latin America and identified this vast region as “Indo-Afro-Ibero America.” The numerous indigenous languages and cultures (literally hundreds, from Mapuche in Chile to Nahuatl in Mexico), the several African languages and cultures, and the several Western European languages and cultures (principally from Spain and Portugal, but including French, English, and Dutch) make the vast region that—for lack of a better term—we call Latin America and the Caribbean patently heterogeneous.

The colonial legacies that are important and still live topics of the Latin American and Caribbean novel today are also diverse in themselves. The colonial legacy from Spain has produced the writing of novels in the Spanish language in over twenty nations as well as Puerto Rico and the Unites States. Writing in Spanish, novelists from Mexico to Chile are still assessing the colonial legacy from Spain, some of whom have returned to the medieval roots of their “mother” language. The colonial legacy from Portugal is still being written about in the Portuguese language in Brazil, both in historic research and historical novels. France’s colonial legacy is extant in the three “departments” they still govern in the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana) and where novelists such as Maryse Condé write “Caribbbean” novels in French about their African and colonial identities, among other topics related to the colonial past. The colonial legacies of Great Britain and Holland are also the focus of fiction being written in English and Dutch in nations such as Jamaica and Suriname, among other parts of the Caribbean, often called the West Indies, where English and Dutch are spoken and written. Novelists such as Erna Brodber, who writes in English in Jamaica, and Astrid Roemer, who writes in Dutch in Suriname, are testimony to this part of the European legacy of colonialism.

Writers such as Carlos Fuentes in Mexico and Diamela Eltit in Chile, as well as many of their cohorts, have addressed a variety of issues related to these colonial legacies, some of which have been addressed in subtle and complex novels. In the broadest of terms, however, Latin American and Caribbean writers have addressed the colonial legacy in three general areas: in novels about the wars of independence (mostly dealing with nineteenth-century Enlightenment thought as well as the early nineteenth-century political conflicts themselves), in novels about about the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), and in novels about the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

The literature about the independence period is vast, for numerous contemporary novelists have felt the need to reassess that key period of nation building in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, novelists such as Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the novel El general en su laberinto (1989, The General in His Labyrinth) on a prominent political figure of the independence, Simón Bolívar, were interested in rewriting the history of the foundation of the Latin American nations. Numerous historical novels about the nineteenth century have been written—reassessments of the empirical history, of Enlightenment thought, and of nineteenth-century foundational fictions that had proposed other versions of the period’s history. These novels question, for example, whether or not the political independence of these nations represented an authentic cultural and economic independence. They also question the values of the old aristocracies that tended to remain in power after the political independence from Spain, Portugal, and the other European powers with interests in Latin America. The Argentine Ricardo Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial (1979, Artificial Respiration) returns to the roots of Argentine nationhood in the nineteenth century, as he reviews in depth the nation’s cultural and political history.

The literature about the Mexican Revolution is as vast as the literature of independence and the foundational fictions of the nineteenth century. The Mexican Revolution was a broad-based rebellion against not only the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz but also a reaction against the old elite—the same families that had ruled Mexico since the colonial period. From Mariano Azuela’s classic novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo (1915, The Underdogs) to the modern fictional critique of the postrevolutionary political establishment in Fuentes’s modern classic, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz), an entire series of novels were published in Mexico to create the genre called the novel of the Mexican Revolution. These novels cast a critical eye on not only the old regime surviving the regime of Porfirio Díaz, but also tended to portray the revolution itself as a chaotic conflict lacking the firm ideological clarity that the same political forces (and official historians) have attempted to portray it as having.

The other major disruption of the colonial legacy was the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and it also produced a vast literary response that took several directions. The Cuban Revolution produced a set of novels about Cuban society, politics, and culture before, during, and after the revolution. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, for example, offered a nostalgic reflection on life in Havana immediately before the revolution in his novel Tres tristes tigres (1967, Three Sad Tigers). On the other hand, Jesus Díez’s Las iniciales de la tierra (1989, The initials of the land) is a historical work that explores the adventure of the Cuban Revolution and the efforts to construct a new nation in the 1960s.

The Cuban Revolution has also indirectly produced a substantive set of novels of exile and fiction of cheísmo (celebrating Ernesto “Che” Guevara) dealing with guerrilla insurgency. Writers such as the Peruvian Edmundo de los Ríos, whose novel Los juegos verdaderos (1968, The real games) deals with youthful political rebels who follow a Che Guevara–type guerrilla warfare path. Cuban writers from different generations, such as Reynaldo Arenas, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Zoé Valdés, have written very different kinds of novels relating the experiences of Cuban exiles. Valdés is the youngest of the three, and her novels of the 1990s mostly set in Paris, a parody some of the clichés of exile fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, such as nostalgia for the homeland that is so common in fiction by writers in exile.

The colonial legacy of rule by elites, unequal distribution of wealth, and different forms of racial and gender discrimmination have survived well into the twentieth century in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most novels written since 1945 deal with this legacy in one way or another. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Latin American and Caribbean novel often present the social world in Manichean terms. Even the classic novels of the 1920s—La vorágine (1924, The Vortex) by the Colombian José Eustacio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra (1926, Don Segundo Sombra) by the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes, and Doña Bárbara (1929, Doña Barbara) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos—portrayed characters as stereotypes, little moral ambiguity, and a simplistic view of Latin American reality as “civilization” versus “barbarisim.” These classic works, nevertheless, were canonized in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s.

Among the early twentieth-century exceptions to this generalization, the avant-garde movements centered in cities such as Buenos Aires and Mexico City promoted modernist aesthetics and what they generally considered more “universal” approaches to storytelling. Writers such as the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier were involved with these same avant-garde movements in Europe, and in the 1940s Asturias and Carpentier began publishing fictions that reflected the interests of European avant-garde and modernist aesthetics.

In the 1940s and 1950s Latin American novelists began to successfully synthesize the long-standing sociopolitical commitment of the writer concerned with the colonial legacy and the new modernist aesthetics. Indeed, these writers of the 1940s and 1950s—Asturias, Carpentier, Agustín Yáñez, Clarice Lispector, Juan Rulfo, and others—were as politically committed as they were dedicated to the idea of writing a new national literature that would be both modern (which meant a variety of things) and universal (which also had numerous understandings).

The political scenario in the mid-1940s was as varied in Latin America and the Caribbean as its uneven socioeconomic development and its often unstable democracies. The end of World War II was of far less significance in Latin America than it was in Europe and the United States, although there were repercussions in some areas of the Hispanic world. In France’s DOM (overseas departments) of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guayana, the blacks who had participated in the European war now demanded more rights; the end of the war marked the growth of the négritude in much of the Caribbean. In Brazil the end of WWII marked the end of the neofascist government of Getúlio Vargas, who had headed the Estado Novo since the early 1930s.

The series of military dictatorships that had plagued several Central American states during the first half of the century finally waned in one of the parts of the region in 1945 in Guatemala, with the end of General Ubico’s government, the establishment of democratic elections, and the reestablishment of the political rights and other freedoms of most democracies. The election of progressive Jacobo Arbenz in 1953, however, resulted in a reaction by local elites, who, in conjunction with the U.S. government (and U.S. airplanes dropping bombs on urban areas of Guatemala), demolished the short-lived democracy and reestablished favorable operations for the United Fruit Company. Years later a Guatemalan writer who had been a young child when his nation was attacked, Arturo Arias, wrote a novel of the experience, Después de las bombas (1979, After the Bombs).

In Argentina Juan Domingo Perón rose to power with massive popular support in the mid-1940s. In 1945 the military pressured him to resign from his positions as vice president and minister of labor, but he not only remained in power with ample popular support, he also took control of the nation in 1946, offering power to the working class and taking privilege from the upper-middle sectors by nationalizing the banks, urban transportation, the train system, and public services. This crucial and controversial period of Argentine history has been amply documented in novels published since the 1950s and in La novela de Perón (1985) by Tomás Eloy Martínez.

After World War II, Peru seemed to be on a democratic path, with the designation of Luis Bustamente y Rivero as president in 1945, but by 1948 a coup by General Manuel Odría resulted in a nearly decade-long authoritarian regime (1948–1956). Mario Vargas Llosa was a student during this period and later wrote the novel Conversación en La Catedral (1969, Conversation in The Cathedral) as his account of the brutal government in power during those years. In this elaborate portrayal of life in Peru in the 1950s, Vargas Llosa presents a sinister regime that perpetrates the most perverse aspects of the colonial legacy.

The 1940s were unstable years in Colombian and Venezuela. In Colombia the assassination of the Liberal Party’s populist candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, resulted in massive civil unrest, violence in the streets, and many deaths in Bogotá. This instability and decade-long conflict between the two traditional parties (the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party) led to the civil war of the 1950s (1948–1958) identified as La Violencia. The literary response to this conflict was the production of a large number of novels (over a hundred) published from the 1950s to the 1970s dealing with La Violencia. Most of them were detailed, bloody descriptions of questionable sociological or literary value, but some of the more accomplished novels from this war are Gabriel García Márquez’s La mala hora (1962, In Evil Hour), Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s El día señalado (1963, The signaled day), and Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal’s Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1972, Condors do not bury every day). In Cóndores no entierran todos los días Alvarez Gardeazábal told horrorific stories from his own youth, when he awoke in the morning to see cadavers on the streets of his hometown in the Valle del Cauca (the town of Tuluá)—a night’s work by the professional assassins of the Conservative Party who were called pájaros (“birds”). In Venezuela President Rómulo Gallegos, a well-respected writer, was deposed from his presidential role after a few months, and this coup was a predecessor to the authoritarian government of Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s. Colombian Gabriel García Márquez worked in Venezuela as a journalist during this period and claims that one of the numerous models he used for writing his novel about the prototypical dictator, El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch), was based on his experience living under the government of Pérez Jiménez. Several Venezuelan novelists have fictionalized this period, including Miguel Otero Silva.

One of the most stable regimes in Latin America during the post-WWII period was in Mexico, where the PRM (Partido Revolucionario Mexicano, or Mexican Revolutionary Party) that had evolved since the early-century Mexican Revolution became the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). President Miguel Alemán led the PRI government in the early 1950s to what was described by some political and economic observers as the “Mexican Miracle,” although critics of the regime point to the severe social and economic inequities that persisted in Mexico into the 1950s and beyond. In Mexico, as in most Latin American nations, there was a mass movement from the rural areas to the city, and Mexico City followed a path of rapid growth in the entire post-WWII period. Carlos Fuentes attempted to capture the essence of this new urban life in one of the first urban novels to be published about this period in Mexico, La región más transparente (1958, Where the Air Is Clear). In this novel Fuentes was also highly critical of the new ruling class presiding over the Mexican Miracle.

In the 1940s and 1950s, then, writers such as Asturias, Carpentier, García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, Fuentes, and a host of others drew upon the venerable tradition of the Latin American writer as social critic, as voice of its indigenous traditions, its historic past and political present and its vast and heterogeneous cultures. In addition, these writers were interested in employing modernists aesthetics (including those of Jorge Luis Borges) to establish the groundwork for the new Latin American novel of the post-1945 period.

As the writers of the 1960s Boom—Fuentes, García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa—surveyed the political scene of Latin America in the early 1970s, the situation was dismal. A military dictatorship had been in power in Brazil since 1964, military governments were entrenched in Argentina, Uruguay, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay, and General Augusto Pinochet had just overthrown the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende in 1973. As a response, these writers of the Boom and others decided to use the pen, writing novels dealing with real and fictionalized dictators to unmask the operations of not only the dictators that dominated Latin America at that moment but other strongmen who were part of the historic experience of these writers, such as two from the 1950s, General Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and General Rojas Pinilla of Colombia. García Márquez had lived in both Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, so he had firsthand experience with such regimes.

The result was a series of novels about dictators, political authority, and the operations of power, from Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (1974, Reasons of State) and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca to Mario Vargas Llosa’s more recent La fiesta del chivo (2000, The Feast of the Goat).

The early masterpiece of the dictator novel was Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (1946). Asturias had lived a good portion of his life under dictatorships in Guatemala. He was born in Guatemala in 1899, the year after Manuel Estrada Cabrera orchestrated the assassination of the extant president of Guatemala, ruling for two decades. Estrada Cabrera immediately militarized public education and passed a law to assure his control over workers. He signed a contract allowing the United Fruit Company into Guatemala under exceptionally favorable conditions, and his government made other deals that favored foreign investment, often to the detriment of local business interests and Guatemalan workers. Given the repression Asturias’s family suffered under the Estrada Cabrera regime, his parents moved out of the capital to a rural area when Asturias was still a young boy. There Asturias was in close contact with the local Mayan population and learned to speak Quiché. His interest in indigenous cultures continued for the rest of his life and eventually became an important part of his fiction, including the novel El Señor Presidente.

In high school in Guatemala City, Asturias was a student activist against the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, which finally ended in 1920 when the National Assembly declared him mentally incompetent; he responded by ordering his soldiers to bomb the city. Nevertheless, the opposition did manage to imprison the dictator, ending his regime. Asturias began writing a short story in 1922 about the horrifying experience of living under the Estrada Cabrera regime; over a process of many years this story evolved into the novel El Señor Presidente. The novel itself does not name the dictator or refer to specific years; much of the focus, however, is on the machinations of Estrada Cabrera in the year 1916, with the torture and politically motivated jailings of the sort that Asturias himself had suffered as a student. In 1923 Asturias was forced into political exile in Europe, where he continued writing his novel. While in Great Britain and France, he studied topics such as Mayan culture, thus developing a more academic understanding of the people he had seen as a child.

After the military dictatorships of Generals José Orelana and Lázaro Chacón in the 1920s, Guatemala’s legacy of authoritarian rule continued in the 1930s under General Jorge Ubico. Under his regime, opposition political activity was tightly controlled and the practice of forced labor was institutionalized. Asturias returned from Europe in 1933 to work with the political opposition to Ubico. Nevertheless, during this dictatorship Asturias was not able to publish his novel, though he continued writing and did finally publish it in 1946. Although directed mostly against the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, El Señor Presidente is really an amalgam of the consecutive repressive regimes in Guatemala during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The background to the writing of El Señor Presidente and the lengthy process of writing it is one telling example of how the excesses of authoritarianism rule can inform the production of Latin American dictator novels. In Paraguay Augusto Roa Bastos went into political exile because of the regime of Alfredo Stroessner, but his novel Yo, el Supremo (1977, I the Supreme) is the result not only of the excesses of this dictatorship but also of the author’s research on the legendary nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator Dr. Francia. In this novel Roa Bastos’s fictionalized rewriting of Paraguay’s political history includes lengthy footnotes taken from historical documents on Dr. Francia’s regime.

For Mario Vargas Llosa, the military dictatorship of Odría was a prototype of the most sinister aspects of the abuse of power, as he fictionalized this experience in Conversación en La Catedral. But Vargas Llosa continued writing about the uses and abuses of authority in novels such as Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1974, Pantoja and His Special Service) and La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World). Later in his career, however, he decided to research one of the classic dictatorships of Latin America—the regime of Batista in the Dominican Republic. Vargas Llosa’s lifetime commitment to questioning authoritarian regimes culminated in one of the masterpieces of the dictator novel, the lengthy La fiesta del chivo.

The novel of exile or diaspora became prominent in Latin America during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Brazil, and the southern cone region of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. But the novel of exile has an important literary response to adverse political, social, and cultural conditions since WWII. From the 1940s to the 1990s, from George Lamming to the Cubans Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy to Reynaldo Arenas and Zoé Valdés, Caribbean novelists have been writing in exile. Lamming went into exile from Barbardos to Great Britain in the early 1950s, then writing of his experience and that of the community of West Indies intellectuals in London. By the 1990s many of these writers, such as the Chilean Antonio Skármeta, the Argentine Mempo Giardinelli, and the Brazilian Antonio Callado, had returned to their homelands and resumed their roles as committed intellectuals.

The conditions that motivate the diaspora vary: many writers in the Caribbean region have felt compelled to insert themselves in the cultural life of the metropole in order to improve their already limited possibilities of intentional dialogue and publication. Most novelists who write in French, English, and Dutch began their careers by publishing their first novels in Europe—France, Great Britain, and Holland. On the other hand, writers such as the Argentine Giardinelli and the Chileans Skármeta and Ariel Dorfman, as well as the Brazilian Callado, had already established publication credentials in their homelands and went into exile to avoid political repression, possible imprisonment, and even death under regimes with records for assassinating oppositional intellectuals. Some writers, such as the Mexican Federico Patán and the Chicano Rudolfo Anaya, have chosen what might be called an inner exile of remaining in their homelands and writing about different types of psychological dislocation. In both cases, however, the writer lives in a state of relative alienation from a dominant culture: Patán lives in Mexico as a Spaniard in exile; Anaya lives in New Mexico where he writes as a minority figure in the Unites States.

The novel of exile or diaspora has generally dealt with issues of displacement, cultural conflict, and nostalgia for the nation left behind, often presenting an idealized version of the nation remembered. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the writings of Skármeta and Giardinelli, these were common topics, as they had been for George Lamming when he wrote of the experience of exile in London in the 1950s. Many of these novelists have written of their experience and memories from their homeland; Reynaldo Arenas, for example, has published dramatic stories of repression and imprisonment in Cuba. Similarly, Lêdo Ivo of Brazil has written a novel about life in the city of Maceió (Brazil), Ninho de cobras (1973, Snake’s Nest) that is basically a representation of conditions under the heavy-handed government of Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and 1940s. Since the novel was published under the later military dictatorship of Brazil, readers have found parallels between the two, for Maceió is a town of violence and corruption. The Haitian case is somewhat different than much of the Caribbean and Latin America. The dictatorship of the Duvaliers (1956–1987) did result in the exile of a large number of writers and intellectuals.

In the 1990s—after several decades of exile fiction—Latin American writers have been reluctant to continue conventional approaches to displacement and cultural conflict. Cuban American Roberto Fernández, Cuban Zoé Valdés (writing in France), and Argentine Tununa Mercado (writing in Argentina after lengthy exile in Mexico) have all written texts that might be called postexile in the sense that they reject these topics and reflect critically on exile literature itself. Writing in the United States, Fernández has been just as satirical of idealized nostalgia for Cuba as has been Zoé Valdés writing about the Cuba she left behind in her youth.

Many Latin American novelists have written in exile without addressing exile issues directly. This is the case of the Cuban Cabrera Infante (who writes in Great Britain), the Cuban Severo Sarduy (who wrote in Paris until his death), the Argentines Flavia Company and Clara Obligado (both of whom write in Spain), and the Brazilian Silviano Santiago. Santiago’s novel Stella Manhattan (1985) deals with exile from its setting in New York, although it covers a broad range of topics confronted by the generation in political exile from Brazil, including the vitality of leftist guerrillas and issues of gender. A group of academics have spent the better part of their adult lives as scholars in the United States and have had parallel careers as novelists, including Fernando Alegría, Lucía Guerra, and Alicia Borinsky. These novelists, although they have written, technically speaking, in exile, do not directly address their positions as exile writers. Rather, they use their experience in Latin America and the United States to tell their stories. Lucía Guerra, for example, has researched the life of a bicultural celebrity figure and written Las noches de Carmen Miranda (2002, The nights of Carmen Miranda).

Some writers did not have the option of exile from political repression or chose to remain in their homelands of social inequity in the post-WWII period. Many novelists chose exile as a response to some of the most repressive authoritarian regimes, such as the dictatorships of Pinochet in Chile (1973–1989), the Duvaliers in Haiti (1956–1987), and the “Process of National Reorganization” in Argentina (1976–1983). Some authors, however, did survive these regimes while remaining in the country, publishing books while many of their colleagues were censored, imprisoned, or murdered. Three such were were Diamela Eltit in Chile, Frankétienne in Haiti, and Ricardo Piglia in Argentina. In order to do this, they wrote subtle fictions of resistance—works so patently experimental or densely allegorical that the regimes did not interfere with the publication of these novels. Writers such as Ignacio Solares in Mexico and Adriano González León in Venezuela did not write under such severe conditions, but their works, too, could be considered fictions of resistance—subtle critiques written within the political establishements they were criticizing. Unlike writers who have assumed a position of “inner exile”—a state of distanced alienation from society—these writers of resistance are active participants in society, but in an oppositional way.

Eltit studied literature in Santiago during the 1970s during the dictatorship of Pinochet. Consequently, she belongs to the generation of writers who began writing in an inner exile situation within Chile; during the 1980s Eltit collaborated with young writers and artists to create a cultural scene of resistance to the military dictatorship. These writers and artists created innovative forms of popular theater, street happenings and visual arts that worked against the power structure without provoking direct confrontation. Her collaborators included young intellectuals with a broad range of literary and artistics interests such as Pedro Lemebel. Eltit’s fiction is often read as political allegory, and she has spoken of “scenes of power,” as well as ideology in essays and interviews, making her work a lengthy reflection on theory, politics, and literature. Eltit’s most experimental novel is Lumpérica (1981, E. Iluminata), a work with no linear plot or anything comparable to a sequence of actions that might be constructed as a plot. Rather, it consists of a series of fragments and situations located in a plaza near Santiago. The experimental uses of space and language suggest an analysis of the historic roots of the Spanish language as a language of repression. Her novel Por la patria (1986, For the nation) is perhaps her fiction of resistance most directly comparable to the work of writers such as Frankétienne and Ricardo Piglia, for here she interrogates the roots of political power as it relates to language. Frankétienne was one of the few Haitian writers not to emigrate during the father-son Duvalier dictatorship of three decades in Haiti, nor to be imprisoned for his writing. In 1957 François Duvalier (also known as Papa Doc) began his twenty-nine-year rule of terror (supported by his brutal Tonton Macoutes), which continued after Papa Doc’s death in 1971 when his son Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited the regime. Frankétienne is recognized for being the first writer to publish a novel in Haitian Creole in a nation where the standard had been to publish fiction in French; Dézafi (1975, Challenge), which is set during the Duvalier dictatorship, deals with the peasants in a small rural community. The impoverished and hopeless inhabitants of two villages suffer from hunger and fear, leading to a bizarre series of events. For writers of the Caribbean, language itself can be a political statement. For Frankétienne, political resistance to the Duvalier regime was writing Dézafi in Haitian Creole, followed by a novelistic experiment in the same language that might be called a lyrical essay, Ultravocal (1972, Spiral). Its fragmented, visionary, and tormented style not only defies the genre of the novel but seems to be an appropriate expression for the tortured existence of his island nation.

Writers of resistance from the southern cone region include Ricardo Piglia, Sylvia Molloy, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Luis Gusmán. They are as radical in their progressive politics as they are experimental in their approaches to writing. The fiction of Piglia is one of the most significant in Latin America since the early writings of Julio Cortázar. Piglia has published over five books of fiction, but these “fictions” can be read as meditations as well as political essays. Piglia’s fiction is a major rewriting of Argentine history and literature just as the writing of Carlos Fuentes and Diamela Eltit is a reworking of much Latin American literature and history. Piglia has joined Fuentes and Eltit in search of the origins of the language and culture of the Americas: Eltit’s investigation into the “mother language” in Por la patria has its equivalent in Piglia’s questioning of the “father language” in Respiración artificial.

Respiración artificial opens with the question “Is there a story?” and then keeps the reader intrigued for the remainder of the novel, even though the action is minimal. This novel eventually becomes a lengthy meditation on Argentine cultural and political history. Near the end, the question arises in this novel—written during the military dictatorship—of how to speak the unspeakable. The multiple mediated narratives constantly evoke this question, always avoiding speaking the unspeakable, which would be the contestatory language against the military dictatorship in Argentina when Respiración artificial was written and published.

Molloy, Pizarnik, and Gusmán are the authors of subtle fictions that testify not only to resistance but also to the heterogeneity of postmodern writing in Argentina. Molloy’s En breve cárcel (1981, Certificate of Absence) returns to the postmodern origins of Borges, the Borges who offers reflections on fictional texts, questioning the stability of the text itself. It is a self-conscious feminist work that defends its marginality and refuses to comply with the expectations of many readers. Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1971, The Bloody Countess) has been read as a revisiting of the Dracula story in a postmodern world in which neither the truth of the moral or of the immoral are factors, for it recreates a fictional world in which morality is not an issue. More informed readings, however, point to a historical female Bluebeard—the Countess Báthory—and argue convincingly that Pizarnik does emphatically deal with moral issues. Gusmán’s fourth novel, En el corazón de junio (1983, In the heart of June) sets forth a series of enigmas. Nevertheless, like Artifical Respiration, it attempts to speak the unspeakable.

Postmodern writers of the southern cone region write from the periphery of a periphery. The fiction of writers such as Eltit and Piglia questions the truth industry of much first world writing. Some writers of the post-Boom who wrote in exile faced the same issue of political repression but employed other strategies as a response; they tend to be less obscure and more accessible to their readers.

The fictions of the Mexican Ignacio Solares and the Venezuelan Adriano González León were written under regimes that projected institutionalized images of democracy and freedom of expression; neither Mexico nor Venezuela in the 1970s and 1980s was governed under a military dictatorship. Consequently, writers within these nations wrote fictions of resistance with the relative security of being safe from arrest. Mexican journalists and writers tend to understand the subtle limits of critique that the Mexican state will tolerate; the PRI is known to permit freedom of expression with limits well understood by the media industry. In the 1960s, when Adriano González León wrote País portátil (1968, Portable nation), guerrilla warfare was spreading throughout Latin America as a reponse to the social and economic equity of most Latin American societies, following the model of the Cuban Revolution.

Like Solares, Adriano González León has written all of his work within the borders of his nation. País portátil deals with urban revolutionaries in Caracas in the 1960s; it also expands to provide a larger sense of the city as well as the historical background to the protagonist’s relatives, the Barazarte family. The basic present of the novel covers a span of a few hours, but the family story covers generations. Changes in time and narrative voice make this an intense story of tradition, political commitment, and urban guerrilla activity.

In summary, the fictions of resistance in Latin America, as written by novelists such as Eltit, Frankétienne, Piglia, and others, are representative of the unique ways in which Latin American writers have responded to military and authoritarian regimes. In addition, writers such as Solares and González León have novelized critiques that reveal the operations of governments that have committed abuses with respect to human rights, the distribution of wealth, democratic ideals, and the like.

Since the 1980s, women’s writing and feminist fiction have become an increasingly important part of the Latin American scene. The groundwork for this flowering of women’s writing in Latin America, however, was laid in the previous decades by such prominent women writers as the Chilean María Luisa Bombal and the Argentines Marta Brunet and Beatriz Guido. These three novelists wrote most of their important work before 1945 and were followed by modern writers who set the stage for the 1980s, such as the Mexicans Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro as well as the Brazilian Clarice Lispector. Each of these writers has also been increasingly recognized by scholars and readers of the literatures of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The most widely read Latin American woman writer of the 1970s and 1980s was Isabel Allende; she is universally recognized among scholars and critics for her first novel, La casa de los espíritus (1982, The House of the Spirits). Several other women writers, however, were equally or more productive, although they did not enjoy the commercial success of Allende. Among the women writers with established reputations in Latin America and the Caribbean were Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, Rosario Ferré, Luisa Valenzuela, Diamela Eltit, Albalucía Angel, Fanny Buitrago, Ana María Shua, Alicia Borinsky, Julieta Campos, Carmen Naranjo, Cristina Peri Rossi, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Armonía Sommers. These women have been associated with several tendencies in Latin American fiction, from the post-Boom and exile writing to feminist and postmodern novels.

In addition, Brazilian writers Clarice Lispector, Helena Parente Cunha, Lya Luft, Hilda Hilst, and Nélida Piñón, as well as the Caribbean writer Maryse Condé and U.S. Latina novelists Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Margarita Cota-Cardenas entered into a significant dialogue with the Latin American novel. Many of these writers set forth a specifically feminist project: writing in 1981, Brazilian writer Marina Colosanti has pointed to women as inheritors of earlier traditions and forgers of new ones. Helena Parente Cunha and Lispector from Brazil, as well as Chilean Diamela Eltit and Argentine Sylvia Molloy were well aware of this dual role. Women writers of the 1970s and 1980s were more sophisticated in their use of narrative technique and more affirmative about feminist issues than were writers of previous generations. They tend to use a variety of discourses (journalistic, instructional, legal) and in the process raise questions about the viability of the genre of the novel itself. Many of these women wrote for considerable portions of their careers while facing either political repression or exile.

Fanny Buitrago was generally less interested in innovation and feminist theory than Angel, Molloy, or other feminists. Buitrago has published a consistent body of fiction since the 1960s. She writes with an emphasis on oral tradition and modernist aesthetics. Her main interests are human relationships, and her characters tend to be isolated, abandoned, and constrained by social mores. Her most complex work is Cola de zorro (1970, Fox’s tail), a family story, but not of the traditional sort. The three major characters in this work are connected by a man of mythical proportions. Buitrago’s novels Los pañamanes (1979, The island men) and Los amores de Afrodita (1983, Aphrodite’s loves) demonstrate her interest in stories that are accessible to a broad reading public, yet without the clichés of commercial literature. Los amores de Afrodita can be read as a volume of short stories, and similar volumes appeared throughout Latin America.

The fiction of Elena Poniatowska, Luisa Valenzuela, and Rosario Ferré has not been commercial enough to compete in sales with writers such as Allende and not experimental enough to be associated with postmodern writers. Nevertheless, these three novelists do have feminist interests, and their fiction is significant. Poniatowska’s early writing was nonfiction, but she has published several novels more recently. From 1968 to 1990 she published the testimonios (testimonial novels) Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969, Here’s to You, Jesusa) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1971, Massacre in Mexico), the collection of short stories De noche vienes (1979, You come at night), the epistolary novel Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978, Dear Diego), and the novel La “Flor de Lis” (1988, The flower of Lis). Hasta no verte Jesús mío is an oral history of a washerwoman. The plot of her later work, La “Flor de Lis” parallels Poniatowska’s own life: the protagonist is from an aristocratic family background, emigrates from France to Mexico City, and eventually comes to understand the social and political realities of her adopted nation. In Poniatowska’s work, the documentary spirit is constant, as is her search for social justice in Mexico.

Although she shares Poniatowska’s interest in testimonio, Luisa Valenzuela has dedicated more of her career strictly to writing fiction. Valenzuela is just as political as Poniatowska, as is particularly evident in her work Cola de lagartija (1983, Lizard’s tail). In this work, a character named Luisa Valenzuela confronts the chaotic process of writing and the increasingly absurd political and social world around her.

Rosario Ferré, Julieta Campos, Sandra Cisneros, Alejandra Pizarnik, Cristina Perri Rossi, Elizabeth Burgos, and Domitila Barrios published a heterogeneous array of works ranging from modernist fiction to testimonio narrative. Burgos is known for her collaboration with Rigoberta Menchú in their coauthored narrative of political struggles in Guatemala, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1976, I, Rigoberta Menchú). Menchú relates the customs of her Native American people in a small farming community and the loss of her family members. This documentation of the excesses of the government became a polemical work in the 1990s. Barrios published two books of literatura testimonial, providing an account of her life in “Si me permiten hablar…” (1976, “If you’ll let me speak”). Her religious experience with a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses and her growing political awareness, political commitment, and political activity inform much of this testimonio. She also offers an eyewitness description of massacres in the mines. Her book Aquí, también, Domitila (1985, Here, too, Domitila), is a narrative about a hunger strike to protest the imprisonment of political prisoners.

Many women writers from Venezuela and Latina writers from the United States have been generally unknown beyond their respective national borders. Some scholars, nevertheless, have brought to the forefront the fiction of Venezuelan women writers, such as Milagros Matos-Gil, Ana Teresa Torres, and Laura Antillano. Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas have made innovative contributions to the novel as Latina writing in the United States, exploring themes of race and gender. These three writers in the United States question racism in Anglo-American society, while Castillo’s The Mixquihuala Letters (1986) deals with internalized racism among Latinas. The connections between this novel and the Latin American novel written in Spanish are explicit. For example, Castillo states at the beginning of the novel that she writes “in memory of the master of the game, Julio Cortázar.” Writing in the mode of Cortázar in Hopscotch, she indicates to the reader that “it is the author’s duty to alert the reader that this is not a book to be read in the usual sequence. All letters are numbered to aid following any one of the author’s proposed options.” Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet (1985) is an innovative novel with respect to language, for this work both incorporates multiple languages and is a reflection on language. Cisneros’s highly successful The House on Mango Street (1984) is a series of vignettes about a young girl growing up in a Latino section of Chicago. This is the most celebrated of Cisneros’s works, all of which deal with gender and race.