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

The oft-cited anecdote at the beginning of the infamous prologue to McOndo recounts how in 1994, the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where he and two other visiting Latin American authors were approached by a US editor to translate and publish some of their work.Despite the obvious popularity of Latino literature at the time, the editor's feedback would dash any illusions Fuguet may have entertained of Isabel Allende-like superstardom in the United States, as, unlike those of his compatriot, his stories were said to "carecer de realismo mágico" 1 and were rejected because they "bien pudieron ser escritos en cualquier país del Primer Mundo" (12). 2 It is this rejection, and the reasons given in this instance of editorial gatekeeping, that is said to have motivated Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez to publish their explicitly post-magical realist short story anthology McOndo in 1996 with Spanish publisher Grijalbo Mondadori.This article argues that Fuguet's next and final anthology, Se habla español: Voces latinas en USA (Spanish Spoken: Latino Voices in the USA), published some years later with the Miami branch of Alfaguara, should also be understood in a relationship of continuity and complimentary with McOndo and, indeed, this anecdote.In the Latin American context, magical realism is not immediately understood through its "deep linkages" to the literary style's "shared Euro-American traditions of fantasy" (Wilson 223), nor for that matter as the patrimony of the global postcolonial experience and "literary language of the emergent postcolonial world" (1), as Homi K. Bhabha would read it (Hart and Ouyang 1).While in a critical space the style and term have experienced a disembedding from Latin America's geography, cultures, and literature, in the publishing and popular sphere of the twentieth century they continued to be deeply associated, as the McOndo anecdote attests.This connotation, and especially its manifestation in foreign publishing industries, was

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