Se Habla Español as “McOndo 2.0”: Post-Magical Realist Anthologies in Latin America

The Pan-Hispanic short story anthology McOndo (1996), edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, was among the most visceral and polemic rejections of magical realism in Latin America. The McOndo prologue presented a contemporary, globalized, and hybrid metaphor for Latin America—McOndo—in response to what the editors deemed to be an outdated, stereotypical, and reductionist vision of Latin America monopolized by magical realism: macondismo. This article examines how Se habla español: voces latinas en USA (2000), Alberto Fuguet’s third and final anthology which he edited with fellow McOndo author Edmundo Paz Soldán, is linked to McOndo. The links and complementarity between these anthologies are so strong that Se habla español can be considered a direct continuation of McOndo, or a McOndo 2.0. I argue that Se habla español implicitly builds on McOndo, as much through a shared concern with Latin America’s production in creative discourses, as in the fact the anthology was envisaged by the editors as directly overcoming and remediating the controversies caused by McOndo. Though many complementary elements can be uncovered in the prologues of the two anthologies, the stories in Se habla español can also be examined internally and comparatively in how they serve to confirm McOndo’s prognosis that this generation was indeed a post-magical realist one. Also, close reading can uncover extraliterary commentaries in a few specific stories, which nevertheless problematize the claims and intentions of the anthology itself. By taking into view not only the textual and paratextual material through close reading, but also its immediate reception and its eventual critical production, we can compare Se habla español’s trajectory to McOndo’s. Both anthologies experienced an initial critical backlash and could be evaluated as commercial failures. However, whereas, with time, McOndo’s once controversial claims have been gradually considered some of the most central characteristics of this generation’s literary production, Se habla español has similarly come to represent a defining and emergent moment for Latin American authors writing in Spanish in the United States. Se habla español has even been considered in criticism as the beginning of a new wave of Latin American narrators in the United States publishing in Spanish, known as the New Latino Boom or nuevo latino boom.

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