McOndo, Magical Neoliberalism and Latin American Identity

I begin this chapter with an anecdote told by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez in their 1996 collection of stories, McOndo: A young Latin American writer obtains a scholarship to participate in an International Writer’s Workshop at a well-known university in the United States. Upon arrival he notes that in the US ‘lo latino esta hot’ (anything latino is considered hot stuff) and that the Spanish departments and literary supplements ‘estan embalados con el tema’ (are feverishly climbing onto this bandwagon) (Fuguet and Gomez, 1996: 9). So great is the craze that, on hearing that three young Latin American writers have been spotted wandering around the campus only a few blocks away from his office, the editor of a prestigious journal hurriedly arranges a literary lunch-party for them with the aim of putting together a special number dedicated to the latino phenomenon. Cool, the writers think, we’re going to get published in America (and in English!), and for the simple reason that we’re latinos who write in Spanish and were born in Latin America. Yet the editor and the three young writers are soon disappointed. Come the end of the semester, the editor rejects two of the three submissions, complaining, to the writers’ dismay and disbelief, not that they lack verisimilitude, but that they lack any trace of ‘magical realism’, and that they could have been written anywhere in the First World (Fuguet and Gomez, 1996: 9–10).1 This anecdote should alert us to the currency of ‘Magical Realism’ both within commercial and academic circuits where the label functions simultaneously as a positive marker of essentialised difference and as the yardstick against which the novelty of more recent Latin American writing is – by way of a curiously enduring litotes – negatively defined. As Stephen Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang note, since 1925, when Franz Roh coined the term ‘Magischer Realismus’ to denote a post-Expressionist aesthetic, and since its political reinscription by the Boom in the 1960s, magical realism has become globalised to the point that it now represents, in Homi K. Bhabha’s words, ‘the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world’ (quoted in Hart