What Makes the Latin American Boom

What makes the Latin American Boom

Latin American literature encompasses the national literatures of South and Central America, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and parts of the West Indies. It has a diverse history filled with brilliant authors’ writings in a variety of genres, starting in the Pre-Colombian period and working all the way up to modern day. Over the years, Latin American literature has developed a rich and complex diversity of themes, forms, and styles. During the second half of the 20th century, it rose to particular prominence globally due to the success of the Latin American Boom movement and the style known as magical realism.

Base on research, the 1960s and 1970s were decades of political turmoil all over Latin America. In this period, the political and diplomatic climate, strongly influenced by the dynamics of the Cold War, formed the background for the work of the Latin American Boom’s writers. It also defined the context in which their radical ideas had to operate. What mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Latin America was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which promised a new age. In an interview with the Academy of Achievement in 2006, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes said: “We didn’t come out of nothing; we came out of a very rich tradition. That tradition coincided with interest in Latin America, worldwide interest, because of the Cuban revolution. The Cuban revolution brought Latin America into focus after a long period of dictatorships and ignorance of what was going on. So there was this leader, Fidel Castro, and a lot of attention on Latin America — and who are the writers in Latin America? It happened to be us. It could have been another generation that had preceded us, or a generation yet to come. We coincided with a historical event, which was the Cuban revolution, and with the Alliance for Progress and Kennedy and a whole new interest in Latin America. So that is the publicity of the affair. I think we also wrote good books, naturally. If not, we wouldn’t be talking here. But the publicity moment was very good, and the books were good as well, so it was a very felicitous moment for our literature.” (eHow, Carlos Fuentes). Coinciding with historical events, good books published in good moment make the Boom in Latin American literature.

 The Latin American Boom was a flourishing of literature, poetry and criticism when writers from this region used their work to reflect the reality in a way that had not happened previously. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. The Boom's major representatives include Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) and Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-).

 Gabriel García Márquez was born in the small town of Aracataca and grew up in the home of his grandparents. Here, his future identity was shaped by the stories of his grandfather who was a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century, and those of his highly superstitious grandmother who spoke of ghosts and omens as natural parts of life. G.G.Márquez is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He is the first Columbian winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. One of the prominent novels of Márquez is One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). It is often used as the sample for magical realism, a style where fiction and reality become blurry and what is considered paranormal becomes ordinary. The novel tells the story of seven generations in the same family from the fictitious town of Macondo. The readers get to meet a lot of characters which reflect different aspects of Latin American history and society.

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 to Argentinian parents with whom he lived in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four. Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch (1963).

Carlos Fuentes was born on November 11, 1928 and began to publish in the 1950s. His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely. His 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed. Other important works include Where the Air Is Clear (1959), Aura (1962) and Terra Nostra (1975). Fuentes not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also a critic and publicist of Spanish America. He once said that "the so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past.”