McOndo

McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks from the Magical Realism (Realismo mágico) mode of narration, and counters it with the strong, ideologic associations of the cultural and narrative languages of the mass communications media, and with the modernity of urban living; the experience of town versus country, of McOndo vs. Macondo. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin (American) life in “the City”, an experience the opposite of the rural, “natural world” of Macondo, the archetypal “Latin American Country” presented in the literature of Magical Realism. Philosophically, the McOndo vs. Macondo intellectual opposition is to the latter's literary perpetuation of Latin America as an exotic place of exotic people, which presents the reader with “reductionist essential-isms that everyone in Latin America wears a sombrero and lives on trees”. Because not everyone wears huaraches and sports a machete in contemporary Latinoamėrica, McOndo literature shows it to be a place of many countries, peoples, and cultures, not the monolithic, “Spanish-speaking worlds” of the 19th-century dictator novel and the banana republic which preceded 20th-century modernization.

The realistic narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to the popular cultures of the U.S. and of Latin America as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Hispanoamėrica — thus the gritty, hard-boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization, of social class differences, of sex, gender, and of sexual orientation. Despite McOndo literature often being about the social consequences of political economy, the narrative mode usually is less overtly political than that of magical realist literature. The Bolivian-American academic Edmundo Paz-Soldán said that McOndo narrators “move with ease in a world of fast food and fast culture . . . they are the first generation of writers more influenced by mass media than by literary tradition.” Although initially associated with the Mexican Literatura de la generación del crack. (the Literature of the Crack Generation), which arose in the mid–1990s in counter-reaction to the literary Latin American Boom (1960s–70s), the writers of the McOndo literary movement tell the contemporary experiences of being a Latin American man and a Latin American woman in an urban (and suburban) world that is culturally dominated by the pop culture of the United States.

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