page_title: McOndo
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: McOndo / History / Etymology / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Ignacio Padilla en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara (México) 2005.
context_page_description: McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks with the magical realism mode of narration, and counters it with languages borrowed from mass media. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin American life, in opposition to the rural Latin America of Macondo.
  Initiated by Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in the 1990s, the movement serves as an antidote to the Macondo-ism that demanded of all aspiring Latin American writers that they set their tales in steamy tropical jungles in which the fantastic and the real happily coexisted.
  The realistic narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to popular culture as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Latin American cities—thus the gritty, hard-boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization, and of social class and identity differences. Despite McOndo literature often depicting the social consequences of political economy, the narrative mode is usually less political than that of magical realism.
context_section_description: In the 1980s, Latin American novelists had progressed past Magical Realism; yet the McOndo literary movement did not coalesce as literature, nor constitute a genre, until the mid-1990s. 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. Yet, upon reading the novelist Fuguet's submitted short story, the Iowa Review editor, taken aback by the realism and no magic, dismissed it as "not Latin American enough . . . [because] the story could have taken place right here, in [North] America." Two years later, in 1996, in retort to the U.S. editorial rebuffing of realist fiction from and about Latin America, Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in Spain published McOndo (1996) a short-story anthology of contemporary Latin American literature. 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. The McOndo writers ideologically distanced themselves from Magical Realism, because it misrepresented contemporary Latin America — which, in the 1990s, comprised "shopping malls, cable television, suburbs, and pollution" — because literature had progressed beyond the banana republic Latin America of the dictator novel and of the Magical Realism genre; the cultures of the 19th and of the 20th centuries.
  The McOndos presented the cultural effects and consequences of global commerce upon Latin American societies, of the erasure of cultural demarcations (among nations and countries), and the consequent reduction of identity that is cultural homogenization. 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. In the event, Sergio Gómez and Fuguet's publication of the McOndo (1996) anthology served a two-fold end: (i) the Fuguet "Introduction" as literary manifesto, and (ii) the supporting anthology of contemporary urban Latin American fiction; the Latin experience of town versus country.
  Meanwhile, in Mexico City, during the mid–1990s, whilst McOndo coalesced as a literary movement, "La generación del crack" (The Crack Generation — Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Eloy Urroz, Pedro Ángel Palou, and Ricardo Chávez-Castañeda) presented Mexican realist literature flouting the Magical Realism strictures of the Latin American Boom; their ideologic advocacy emphasised that every writer find a voice, not a genre. Their initial publication was the Manifiesto Crack (Crack Manifesto, 1996) published a month earlier than the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology; the literary manifestos proved ideologically sympathetic. 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 allow
caption: The Crack Generation: Ignacio Padilla, Revuelta magazine, 2005 Guadalajara Book Fair, in Mexico.
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