Surrealism in Latin America

Surrealism has an extensive and fruitful but fragmented presence in Latin America, where it has also aroused considerable antagonism. It has been accused of neo-colonialism, of being too fantastic or not fantastic enough, too irrational or not irrational enough. Two of Latin America’s most influential twentieth-century writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Carpentier, were particularly hostile. Latin America was the site for the most direct political effect Surrealism ever had: the revolution in Haiti that followed the series of lectures Breton gave in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Surrealism was influential among the avant-gardes which began to turn the focus away from modernity and the West and towards the cultural complexity of the new nations. There was an explosion of avant-garde magazines in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, and through these Surrealism began to filter in. The first review explicitly announcing its adherence to Surrealism was the aptly named Que.