McOndo

Etymology The term McOndo derives from Macondo, the fictional town depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. The term was coined by Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in the 1990s, when they published the short-story anthology McOndo, playing with the terms Macondo, McDonald's, Macintosh, and condo. In 1994, the Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet 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. 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. 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. Hence, Fuguet concluded that, despite pretty people and pretty scenery, the contemporary Latin American city and world that he (Fuguet) inhabits, is too complicated for Magical Realism to grasp and effectively narrate. 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 Latino America 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–20th-century Magical Realist novelists, for whom political discourse was the raison d’être of being a public intellectual. 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." In the 21st century, contemporary Latin America is an historico–cultural hybrid of the 19th and the 21st centuries (cf. the dictator novel and the banana republic). ==Themes==

The thematic substance of McOndo is based upon its literary predecessors, yet its representations of the experience of being 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. 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. The city and urban space 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. 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 Macintosh, that have up-dated the romanticised banana republic 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. 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 modernity 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" and its diaspora. 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. Quotidian life The short stories in the McOndo anthology depict the daily lives of the urban Latin American characters. ==Notable writers==

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. ==Media==

Books McOndo by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, is an anthology of short stories of new Latin American literature which was first published in Spain in 1996. 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" 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 Empire of Dreams urban trilogy by Giannina Braschi attacks Magic Realism as a literary dementia that propagates negative stereotypes of Latin American people. The protagonist of the section, "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 capital 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." United States of Banana novel offers a scathing critique of neoliberal economic and social reforms. 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." Cuerpos Errantes: Literatura Latina y Latinoamericana en Estados Unidos, by Laura Loustau, 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'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." De Macondo a McOndo, by Diana Palaversich, documents Latin American literature from after the 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. "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. 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 Fuguet 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 Palaversich is a short commentary and criticism of the McOndo movement. Comics Road story: Una novela gráfica by Gonzalo Martínez and Alberto Fuguet is part of a larger volume of short stories by Fuguet. It is a graphic interpretation of the story of a Chilean man trying to find himself in the middle of the barren landscapes of the border between the US and Mexico. It was published in 1961 in [Santiago, Chile] Joakim Lindengren and Giannina Braschi co-created the graphic novel of United States of Banana. Film In the genre of art films, photographer Michael Somoroff directed a series of short films based on Giannina Braschi's United States of Banana in 2011. ==Influences==

In Latin American literature, the realistic representation of urban (city–suburban) life, and of popular culture began in the 1960s, with La Onda, a Mexican literary movement whose writers realistically presented 20th-century life in the City — where most Mexicans lived and worked — because pastoral (rural) Mexico was past, gone with the wind of industrial modernization; its influence upon McOndo was stylistic. In the event, the cultural (generational) non-conformity inherent to the music of bands and singers such as The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, gave form (thought and action) to the cultural, societal, and generational discontents of Mexican young people — from every Mexican social class — to openly rebel against limiting tradition. Consequent to that great foreign-culture influence, the Mexican Middle class began to intellectually, then culturally, associate with the Hippie social movements of the U.S. and Europe. Mexican artists subsequently developed a national counter culture, based upon an amalgamation of foreign and domestic rock music, literature, language, and fashion, an example of which was the rock concert Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro (11 September 1971); a time that Prof. Eric Zolov said "was a new transnational and trans-cultural era". 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. The writers were published under the library title Literatura de La Onda (Literature of The Wave), by the Joaquín Mortiz publishing house. La Onda literature focused upon the contemporary Mexican-identity cultural representations of 20th-century youth culture (language, music, fashion, etc.) produced by the mass communications media, and their cultural impact upon México and being mexicano, and being mexicana. The fiction was provocatively written, meant to provoke a response, and literary critics obliged the writers, calling the literatura de La Onda anti-literary literature; nonetheless, it proved popular as an alternative literature to the national literary canon established by tradition. Notable works from La Onda include Gazapo, by Gustavo Sainz, about the contradictory, volatile world of adolescence; and De Perfil (Profile View), by José Agustín, about the life of an indifferent student, and the adolescence he endures. Despite being a literary precursor to McOndo, the La Onda literary movement was particular to its Mexican time, place, and purpose. Unlike McOndo literature, the initial "Life in the City" alternative literature of La Onda then progressed to blending High culture with Low culture in addressing the demands of Mexican national social movements seeking to eliminate the hierarchy created by modernity. 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. ==Critics and supporters==

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." He further accused McOndo Movement literature of preoccupation with the Self, rather than with the contemporary 21st-century culture it superficially presents, and he styled McOndo originator Alberto Fuguet a "sell-out to American culture, a spoiled product of globalization, and an irresponsible countryman." The Bolivian critic Centa Reck, faults the McOndo narrative style for replacing the Macondo jungle flora, fauna, and rural landscape, with the McOndo urban "wild jungle of cell phones, McDonald’s, shopping malls, drugs, and an unintelligible slang." The Chilean novel, The Movies of My Life (2003), by Aberto Fuguet, depicts a grim boarding school metaphor of Pinochet's Chile — a disappeared pro-Salvador Allende cousin and a mean grandmother (in the style of Madame Defarge, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859), capture the societal terror of the military government régime of General Augusto Pinochet. University of Los Angeles Prof. Verónica Cortínez, said that McOndo is about free thematic exploration and stylistic expression: "The McOndo writers reject the idea that Latin American writers need to ascribe to certain topics, or ways of being." ==See also==