The Movies of My Life; or, a Bridge to North America

Abstract

In 1996, when the expansion of Spanish capital in Latin America was in full bloom, two manifestos shook the Spanish American literary world. Published within one month of each other and literally from the two extremes of the region, Mexico and Chile, “Manifesto Crack” (published in August) and “Presentación del país McOndo” (“Introduction to McOndo country”; published in September), the introduction to the short-story anthology McOndo, seemed to herald a new generation of writers who, in the most traditional of literary gestures, rejected earlier literary traditions. United by chronology and by an explicit animosity to Magical Realism, the Crack writers (Jorge Volpi, Pedro Ángel Palou, Ignacio Padilla, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda) and the McOndo group (led by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, but frequently seen as also incorporating the authors included in the anthology) were considered by many as seizing the torch forcibly from the hands of the boom writers.¹ The linking of these two in de pen dent movements is explicitly accepted by Padilla, who writes that the “McOndo anthology and the Crack manifesto, and everything that’s happened recently with the new Latin American novel ... were natural phenomena” (137).² Despite this frequent association of the two groups of writers, a closer analysis of the literary production, the founding manifestos, and the career of the movements’ main writers exhibit significant differences.