McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks with the magical realism mode of narration, and counters it with languages borrowed from mass media.[1] The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin American life, in opposition to the fictional rural town of Macondo.[2]
Initiated by Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in the 1990s, the movement claims to serve as an antidote to the Macondo-ism that demanded[by whom?] of all aspiring Latin American writers that they set their tales in steamy tropical jungles in which the fantastic and the real happily coexist.[citation needed]
The realistic narratives of McOndo literature refer and allude to popular culture as lived in the cities and suburbs of contemporary Latin American cities—thus the gritty, hard-boiled depictions of poverty and crime, of the local economic consequences of globalization, and of social class and identity differences. Despite McOndo literature often depicting the social consequences of political economy, the narrative mode is usually less political than that of magical realism.