Curly Velasquez: Borders shape our reality.

If you're born on this side, you pay in pesos and get a passport with an eagle on it. If you're born on this side, you pay in dollars and get a passport also with an eagle on it. 

But before the US-Mexico border looked like this, it looked like this [vertical border between east and west]. Before that, this [Mexico takes up more of the west].

And before that, there's "United States" and "Mexico" didn't exist. 

So borders aren't exactly permanent. They can and do change and get crossed both in life and in literature. 

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

[Theme music]

Where you are affects who you are. And for many Latin American authors, moving across borders has shaped their identity, sparked their imagination, and inspired them to push literary borders, too. 

Like during the boom era of the 1960s and 70s, which we talked about in a previous episode, many Latin American writers went into exile in Europe. They fled dictatorships or political persecution, either by force or bu choice. 

One of them was Julio Cortázar. Frustrated with Argentina's government, he booked it to Paris and, living far from his home country, inspired him to break the mold. 

Take his 1963 novel, Rayuela, or Hopscotch. It starts out as a story about an Argentine lost in Paris and his relationship with Lamaga, the OG manic pixie dream girl. 

And it's divided into 3 sections. From the Other Side takes place in Paris. From This Side is set in Argentina. And, From Diverse Sides, well, this section he calls expendable. Just skip it if you eant. 

But this is not my first literary mind game, Julio. I know that you know that I'm going to want to know what happens there. 

The novel comes with a tablero de direcciones — table of instructions — that gives ud two options.

You can read in the usual linear way, or you can follow the number chart that will have you hopping between all 155 chapters out of order.

Except instead of reaching the end, you'll bounce between chapters 58 and 131 forever. And ever and ever and ever and ever and forever. 

[Colonial Curly reads on. Curly gets jumpscared]

Whoa. Okay. Infinite hopscotch. Somehow both zany and meticulous. 

It's no wonder that Rayuella gets described as an antinovella, a novel that deliberately defies our expectations of what a novel should be, or as a book that requires lector cómplice — reader as accomplice, because it invites us to actively participate in how the story gets told. 

[Gasps] Irresistible! I love being in cahoots. 

Not only is the book's structure super experimental, it really wilds out with the words, too.

Córtasar leans into an Argentine variant of Spanish, and he uses an invented language he calls glíglico, for a scene where "she tordled her hurgales" until they reach "the slobberdigging raimouth of the orgumion".

I tordle my hurgales in 1997 and I have never been the same. But at its heart, the novel isn't about slobberdigging. It's about the experience of leaving behind everything you once knew. 

If I could sum up the novel in one scene, it's this one: 

A character named Talita living in Argentina gets talked into walking across a rickety bridge between 2 buildings.

High above the street, Talita starts feeling sick and keeps saying she wants ti go back. But as she's out there in the middle, her friends are like, "Keep going! You're almost there!"

And Talita says, "Anything is better than being out here like this, in between the two windows."

Which, sure, you could read as a normal reaction to being 50 ft on the air. But you could also read it as a metaphor for the unease of being in between two places. You can't easily go back there, but you're not fully here. You're sort of in the middle. 

And that's real. I felt like that myself, like when I'm not Latino enough for the Latino, but too ethnic for the white folk, and suddenly I don't fit in anywhere. 

And for some, carrying around a hyphenated identity, like Salvadorean-American feels heavy, like being split between two places, except neither exactly feels like home. 

So a number of Latin American cultures have embraced terms that focus on who they are, rather than tje countries they're supposedly split between. 

Like in the 1960s and 70s, some Americans of Mexican descent started embracing the term Chicano, reclaimed word for Mexican-American that had previously been used as an insult. With that, they flipped the idea of being divided between 2 places and said, "Actually, we belong to both."

El Muimto, also called the Chicano movement, celebrated Chicanismo as an expression of cultural pride, while pushing for social change and civil rights after decades of discrimination.