Estados Unidos
In his chapter on Ariel Dorfman’s recent novel Americanos: Los pasos de Murieta, John Riofrio makes the compelling and innovative argument that in the Generation of ’72, and Dorfman’s work specifically, we witness a unique form of Latin American realism, one that sidesteps the post-modern naval-gazing and cynicism associated with the generations on either side of them. Neither uninitiated in the cerebral dicta of the post-1968 intellectual world nor the experiential reality of actually lived globalization, the Generation of ’72, for Riofrio, writes new foundational fictions, calling on allegory, long a tool in Latin American political collectives, to negotiate the tension between the national and the global, the regional and the Pan-American, the psychologically stabilizing and the traumatic.