The Latin American literary Boom of the 1960s produced some of the century's most formally ambitious fiction. Gabriel García Márquez channeled magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Carlos Fuentes employed polyphonic narration in The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963) invited readers to rearrange its chapters, transforming the novel into a participatory puzzle. They shared a common ambition: to fuse European Modernist technique with Latin American experiences, creating narratives at once local and universal. Yet the Boom's success generated a suffocating legacy. By the late 1970s, younger writers confronted a landscape so dominated by their predecessors that the path forward demanded revolt instead of mere innovation.

The post-Boom generation's responses took several distinct forms. In 1996, the Mexican novelists Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla cofounded the Crack movement, whose manifesto called for demanding, structurally complex novels freed from regional exoticism. Their fiction deliberately abandoned Latin American settings, relocating to Europe and imaginary geographies. That same year, the Chilean Alberto Fuguet co-edited the McOndo anthology, embracing North American pop culture and the urban realities of a globalized continent (Fuguet and Gómez, McOndo, Mondadori, 1996). Both positioned themselves against the Boom's perceived tropicalism, yet as the novel's Introduction observes, "these were programmatic rebellions, and it showed" (xiii). They remained largely reactive, defined more by what they rejected than by what they created.

Infrarealism, founded in Mexico City in 1975 by the Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño and the Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, represented a rawer, more volatile break. Unlike Crack or McOndo, the Infrarealists were poets on literature's margins, not novelists positioning themselves within the publishing industry. Their 1976 manifesto, Déjenlo todo, nuevamente (Leave It All, Again), urged writers to abandon the coffeehouse, follow Rimbaud's example, and embrace vagrancy, spontaneity, and risk. They championed fragmentation and polyphony as ethical imperatives instead of formal strategies, insisting that literature should be indistinguishable from lived experience. Where the Boom writers had constructed grand, architecturally unified narratives, the Infrarealists preferred the collage, the interrupted testimony, and the chorus of contradictory voices. As one character describes the movement's ethos, its adherents walked backward, "gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown" (7). This paradoxical orientation captures Infrarealism's central tension: Deep reverence for literary tradition fused with a compulsive need to demolish it. The visceral realists of The Savage Detectives function as a mirror to the Infrarealist movement.

Of all the Boom writers, Cortázar occupied a unique position in this rebellion. Bolaño acknowledged a debt to Cortázar alone among the older generation, drawn to his formal play, his bohemian sensibility, and his vision of literature as a communal enterprise. The circle of expatriate intellectuals in Hopscotch, who gather in Parisian cafés to debate philosophy and art, prefigured the Infrarealists' own collectives and their conviction that literary communities could function as engines of aesthetic revolution. Yet where Cortázar's experiments retained a cosmopolitan elegance, Infrarealism pushed toward deliberate roughness, embracing the unfinished, the marginal, and the ephemeral as markers of authenticity instead of just signs of failure.