Alberto Fuguet: “I like to explore things that are taking place as we speak” By Catalina Forttes Zalaquett
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Although writer and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet lives and writes in Santiago de Chile, he has never quite left California. Its sunny valleys, pastel bungalows, saturated freeways, airports and motels not only appear in his literature but are an integral part of his personal history. His visiting professorship at UCLA during Spring quarter of 2008 was a homecoming. It is fitting that a Chilean writer, raised in Encino, California would end up sharing his experiences with students who are in many ways similar to what Fuguet would have become had his family not returned to Chile during his early teenage years. Alberto Fuguet acquired international visibility in 1996 when he labeled his contemporaries as the McOndo generation. This name, used as the title of a pan-American short story anthology for writers born after 1962, relocates the symbolic origin of a Latin American literary imagination in the core of the South American megalopolis where McDonald’s, Macintosh computers and condos make up an important part of everyday experience, far from the luscious literary jungles where patriarchs never die. The new enfant terrible of Latin American letters, who under the title “Is Magical Realism Dead?” metaphorically killed his literary fathers, made the cover of Newsweek in 2002 as one of the fifty Latin-Americans who had set out to change the Latin American cultural landscape. More than 10 years after the coinage of McOndo, Fuguet has revisited the concept with the input of both undergraduate and graduate students at UCLA. When asked about the ideas behind the conception
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of his courses, he replied that, in the same way in which it is impossible for him to write about things that are not interesting to him, the challenge was to make the courses both attractive to the students and himself. “The graduate class was on McOndo,” commented Fuguet, “I’m supposed to be its founder, but since I have heard so much against this idea I decided to confront the shorthand versions of McOndo. Together with the students we were able to sketch out a map of a 21st Century Latin America where McOndo is more a sensibility than a list of writers and pop culture an inescapable reality. The undergrad class was also an eye opening experience. We decided to check on representations of Los Angeles and find out how much of Blade Runner we could find by touring the city, and if it is as “Latin” as we assumed. I like to explore things that are taking place as we speak.” As for his experience as a teacher, he admits to having discovered a side of academia that throws new light on his earlier experiences. “It has been great to see that there is no enemy or conspiracy theory,” said Fuguet, alluding to a conflictive history with academics “As an author one is both in awe and paranoid about academia. In the past I have disagreed so many times with scholarly writing that I have altogether stopped reading theses or papers on myself or on others. However, it seems to me that the guard is changing, and I was truly and positively surprised with the grad students. The students I met seem to know that there is more to life than books, and that in turn, books have so much to do with life. Also, it was my first time teaching, and now as an insider, I confess I’m less scared of it.” Sharing Fuguet´s enthusiasm for the topics worked out in the courses graduate student Sarah Older Aguilar commented, "In Fuguet's seminar we were able to explore contemporary Latin-American fiction and cinema that is somewhat 'off the beaten path.' It has been a unique opportunity to question and redefine the contours of McOndo with one of the founders of this literary territory, and Fuguet was always ready for a lively debate!” As students we thrived on his lively teaching style, his fresh and insightful grasp of the present, and his witty movement from highbrow culture to the palpitations of everyday life. Susannah Rodriguez Drissi, a graduate student, puts it boldly, “Fuguet? Yes. He’s a freak—he made UCLA a different place, like Smallville was a different place, after the meteor shower. He will be missed—the way Elvis is missed after he leaves the building, cachai?”