Del ornitorrinco a la radio ambulante: La nueva crónica latinoamericana en la era neoliberal

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021. There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines like Etiqueta Negra in Perú, Gatopardo and El Malpensante in Colombia, among others. This dissertation examines the texts of Mexican Juan Villoro, the Peruvian Gabriela Wiener, and the Argentinian Leila Guerriero, key authors from the neoliberal era. It establishes connections between the neoliberal policies pushed by financial organizations, later accepted and adapted by many Latin American societies, and the literary journalism written during this period. It explores how neoliberal perceptions of topics such as individualism, capitalism, or globalization are inscribed in those texts, and the different ways some of the authors decide, or not, to exercise criticism on a changing world and the series of problems introduced by the neoliberal narrative. It shows how some of these writers seem to accept and normalize the neoliberal discourse, presenting a world where entrepreneurship, new technologies, and individual achievement equal the idea of progress. Through the dissertation, there is also an exploration of how the communication technologies, mainly associated with the internet have pushed for a transition from the world of print literary journalism to the digital world and post textual formats such as podcasts and multimedia websites