Is Latin America Resisting?

authoritarianism and Imperialism through “Thank You Mr. President” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Abstract

This work aims to analyze two classics of magical realism in the Latin American region, “The Lord President”, by Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Astúrias, and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, written by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Márquez, seeking to relate the trajectory of the authors, as well as their respective works, with the political-social context experienced. In this sense, we propose an analysis of the content and context of their productions, using as tools concepts such as “voluntary servitude” by the Frenchman Étienne de La Boétie and the “superman” by Friedrich Nietzsche, in addition to the use of socio-anthropological foundations, based on the collaboration of the thought of intellectuals such as Darcy Ribeiro, Octavio Ianni, Eduardo Galeano and Claude Levi-Strauss. It can be concluded that such literary productions were fundamental as an allegorical denunciation of the contradictions of modernization and Western progress, where the region resists in its own way a past that still insists on being present, and where this, while not overcome, is incorporated into the reality of the current Latin identity.