Reimagining Contemporary Latin American Cities

In 1972 Italian writer Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a catalog of imaginary cities that presents an archetype of the city from which all possible cities may be deduced. This model of the city can help us to reflect both on a particular city and on all cities at once, for as Cal vino reminds us in his renowned work, cities are spaces where we exchange not only commodities but also words, desires, and memories. In recent years, contemporary Latin American cities have also become distinctive places where a wide range of exchanges has taken place. While a sense of dis belief and skepticism regarding the implementa tion of progress and modernization has called into question the most basic premises of its political and economic policies, Latin American cities have created a setting for the trading of both literal and metaphorical dreams. No longer are they a part of nations striving toward collective justice or some degree of egalitarianism; rather, over the last two decades, they have come to constitute an atomized urban space in which the impoverished majority are preoccupied with the basic needs of personal survival. In response to this changing urban land scape, new Latin American literary representa tions of the city have emerged. These narratives progress? ^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^H the very progress ? are postmodern ^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^H disenchantment. Nos^^^^^^^^^HB^^^ttfljlM talgia and above ^^^^^^^^^^H^^BmBMMNI urban violence emerge V^MPHMBHSHNHMP^^ as the most illustrative 11^1*-^_ . V~-~-r and recurring aspects -r^rr^rr^ '.^^^^^S' >:^m of these recent literary works. On the one hand, some authors have cho sen to fictionalize real cities such as Bogota (Jorge Franco's Rosario Tijeras [1999]), Buenos Aires (Cesar Aira's Villa [2001]), Medellin (Fernando Vallejos's La Virgen de los Sicarios [1994]), and Rio de Janeiro (Paulo Lins's Cidade de Deus [1997]). On the other hand, other writers have devised nonexistent, wholly imaginary cities. These include Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, Venezuelan Jose Balza, Colombian Hector Abad Faciolince, and Cuban Jose Antonio Ponte. Imaginary cities can be found in Balza's novel Percusi?n (1982), Belli's Waslala (1996), Abad Faciolince's Angosta (2004), and Ponte's short story Un arte de hacer ruinas (2000; An art of making

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