Wikipedia
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 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.
McOndo is the 1996 literary anthology that spawned the McOndo movement.
Around 1994, Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet participated in an International Writer's Workshop which took place at the University of Iowa. There Fuguet attempted to present a short-story to the Iowa Review for publication. As the works of Latino authors were very popular at the time, Fuguet believed his chances of getting his works translated and published were quite high. However, upon reading Fuguet's work, the editor was convinced that the lack of magical realist or fantastical components in the narrative made it seem as if, "the story could have taken place right there in [North] America." Consequently, the story was rejected on the grounds that 'it was not Latin American enough'. In response to the rejection of North American editors, a short-story anthology was compiled dawning the title McOndo. Edited and introduced by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, the anthology of new Latin American literature was first published in Spain in 1996. The work compiled 17 short stories written by authors, all of whom were from either Latin America or Spain. All of the contributors were males who had primarily commenced their literary careers in the 1990s and all were born after the late 1950s. The contributing authors distanced themselves from the magical realism genre as they believed it did not correctly represent modern Latin America, which in the 1990s was full of "shopping malls, cable television, suburbs, and pollution". Alternately, the authors wished to focus on the erasure of nations, borders and geographical identities as a result of expanding transnational networks while exploring the effects of globalization on economy and culture. In one essay, Fuguet railed against the picturesque, exotic stereotypes that the publishing world had come to expect of Latin writers, citing well-known Cuban author-exile Reinaldo Arenas's pronouncement that the literary world expected Latin American novelists to tackle only two themes: underdevelopment and exoticism. Fuguet wrote that he does not deny that there are picturesque, colourful, or quaint aspects to Latin America, but that the world he lives in is too complicated and urban to be bound by the rules of magical realism. In the end, the primary focus of the anthology was the introduction, which was considered to be more in the vein of an essay rather than a literary work.