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.Amar Sánchez, 2001, 207 The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin American life, in opposition to the fictional rural town of Macondo.De Castro, 2008, 106
Initiated by Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in the 1990s, the movement claims to serve 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 coexist.
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.
History 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.Fuguet, 2001, 70
Origins In the 1980s, Latin American novelists had generally diverted from magical realism; yet the McOndo literary movement did not coalesce as literature, nor constitute a genre, until the mid-1990s.Hidalgo, 2001, 1 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 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.Hidalgo, 2001, 2Fuguet, 2001, 66 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.See also O’Bryen, Rory. 2011 [March]. 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.De Castro, 2008, 105 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", in De Castro, 2008, 106–07 whilst The Crack Movement has "proposed a sort of élitist re-establishment of values." Qtd. in De Castro, 2008, 107 Literary-world gossip postulates that the anti–magical militancy of McOndo and The Crack Movement derives more from commercial jealousy than from artistic divergence;De Castro, 2008, 108 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.De Castro, 2008, 109
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.Fuguet, 2001, 72 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.Hidalgo, 2001, 3 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."Fuguet, 2001, 69 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). In the event, the writers of the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology took discrete literary paths; Alberto Fuguet noted that "divergence, for certain, was expected, for McOndo was not a deal, nor a treaty, nor a sect." Later, some McOndos reneged their literary militancy against Magical Realism; Edmundo Paz Soldán observed that "today, it is very clear, for many of us, that it is naïve to renounce such a wonderful tradition of political engagement on the part of the Latin American writer".Arias, 2005, 141
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 a result, as exiles are wont to do, they idealized their patrias and wrote pithy novels of a land that should have been — yet always was there ... in the exiled writer's memory; thus the well-crafted fiction did not portray the contemporary national reality that had displaced the country (patria) he departed.
Unlike the magical realist writers, the McOndos wrote "here-and-now!" fiction, about the 21st-century metropolis they inhabit, and which surrounds them, and the homogenizing cultural-identity messages of pervasive mass communications media; to be Latin in an Anglo culture. Because contemporary Latin America is a cultural conflation of the 19th and 21st centuries, the McOndos substantive and technical divergence from Magical Realism (style, narrative mode, etc.) voided their predecessor traditions. Alberto Fuguet explains, "I feel [that] the great literary theme of ‘Latin American identity’ (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of ‘personal identity’ (who am I?)." Whilst rejecting the resultant stereotype "Latin American Literature" derived from Magical Realism, the McOndos nonetheless respect the man; "I’m a really big fan of Márquez, but, what I really hate is the software he created, that other people use . . . they turn [narrative fiction] into more of an aesthetic [exercise] instead of an ideology. Anybody who begins to copy One Hundred Years of Solitude turns it into kitsch."
Global commerce
As novelistic dialogue, book title, and literary movement name, McOndo evokes the McDonald's corporate name and the place name Macondo, the locale of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Each variant term has a contemporary cultural denotation for consumerism, for "banana republic", and for dictator novel literature; each denotes the cultural distortion of Hispanophone societies, by commercial globalization and the psychological flattening that U.S. English-language pop culture impinges upon the cultures native to Latin America; nevertheless, this Anglo cultural hegemony is not exclusive to Latin American literatures, but also occurs in Europe, e.g. the Spanish science-fiction film Open Your Eyes (1997) by Alejandro Amenábar.
McOndo literature partly arose to counter the world's uncritical perception of Magical Realism as the definitive literature from and about the societies and cultures of the Latin American countries, especially the novels of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. McOndo novels and short stories transcend such rural limitations by examining, analysing, and comprehending the power dynamics among the Anglophone U.S. and the Hispanophone countries where "American" cultural hegemony maintains its politico-economic hegemony — by importing, to the subject countries, the political economy concept and business practice of the McJob.
McOndo fiction reports this contemporary, lived urban experience of such an economically unidirectional, Gringo business–Latin American labour "work relationship"; of what it is to be a Latin American man and a Latin American woman employed in a McJob in an unmagical city in an unmagical country pervaded with foreign consumerism and its irreconcilable discontents. Furthermore, unlike Magical Realism fiction, McOndo fiction reports the social consequences, at home (in Latinoamérica) and abroad (in el Norte) of this Anglo–Latin relationship; the exemplar book is the McOndo (1996) short-story anthology.