Curly Velasquez: In 1930s Argentina, a young boy grew up going to his local movie theatre — sitting in the same seat, 5 nights a week, for 10 years. 

It was there, in front of the silver screen, from a seat perfectly shaped to his pompis, that he gell in live with the grammar of it all. 

And di you know who that little boy turned out to be? Ricky Martin. 

OK fine, the boy turned out to be a beloved novelist. I was just making sure you were paying attention. 

Hi! I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature. 

[Theme music]

Does art imitate life? Or does life imitate art? These are some of my favourite questions because there's no one way to answer them.

Arr and life imitate each other in countless ways that span the entire globe and all of human history. 

And literature is no exception. It's influenced by history, politics, science — even other kinds of art. And onthe flipside, literature influences life and culture right back.  

So today, we'll zoom in and look at one very special relationship: the one between film and literature. 

You've probably seen your share of book-to-screen adaptations — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But it's not a one-way street. What's often considered far less is the way that movies show up in books. 

Which brings to me to that little boy in the theatre. His name was Manuel Puig. And he went on to become a huge name in Latin American literature... after his filmmaking career flopped. 

But despite switching from film to books, he found a way to meld the two: by infusing his love for cinema into many of his novels. 

It's time for the Curly Notes. 

[Curly Notes]

Puig's novel El beso de la mujer araña — the Kiss of the Spider Woman — is set in 1970s Buenos Aires and tells the story of two men sharing a prison cell: 

Valentin, a political prisoner, and Molina, a gay man arrested for corrupting a minor. And it sort of resembles a screenplay, in that its written mostly in dialogue. 

Aside from their dismal situation, the two men don't have much in common. So to pass the time, Molina recounts his favourite Hollywood movies to Valentin. 

And, like a movie cuts between scenes, Puig weaves these stories with scenes of the men's daily lives in prison, and their growing closeness. 

For Molina and Valentin, films become an escape from their confinement. And Puig really believed in this ability of films to help us transcend reality. 

He told a New York Times reporter that movies "help you to not go crazy. You see another way of life. It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope".

And he was speaking from experience. Like Molina, Puig was a gay man who turned to movies for inspiration and relief from his homophobic upbringing and culture. 

As a child, he dressed up as the Hollywood starlets he adored — an activity his father punished him for. But for Puig, movies and novels were about even more than escapism — they were also about change, real social change in the real world. 

Kiss of the Spider Woman was published in 1976, the same year that he left Argentina in exile — and it was immediately censored by the military dictatorship it boldly critiqued.

The Uruguayan-American author Caro De Robertis writes that Kiss of the Spider Woman was the first Latin American novel to "directly link political liberation with the dignity of queer love.

"Two men in a room... talking to each other, becomes a microcosm of a dialogue that the culture desperately needs to have with itself, without which no one will be free."

And to tie it all in a bow, Kiss of the Spuder Woman has been adapted to film — twice! 

And, total humblebrag, my friend Tonatiuh was in the remake with J-Lo.

But Puig was far from the only Latin American author to take meaning and inspiration from movies. 

In fact, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez started a whole pop culture inspired movement in the 90s. 

The story behind it? It's brilliant! But it's also... petty. My favourite combination. 

Back in the 1970s, a genre called magical realism put Latin American literature on the map. Readers around the world — and the publishing gatekeepers who decided which books would get translated and sold in their countries — couldn't get enough of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude and the way that Gabriel García Márquez infused the ordinary with the magical. 

But by the 1990s, the magical realism label was weighing heavily on Latin American writers. It painted only one image of Latin America, and it was how they were all expected to write. 

Fuguet ran into this conflict head-on. As the story goes, he received a pretty brutal rejection from a US editor who dismissed his work because it didn't engage with magical realism, shunned Márquez, and challenged the idea that, in Latin American literature, everyone wears sombreros and lives in trees."