Latin America journalism, throughout history, has been snugly knitted to the rich literature tradition of the region. In the 19th century - the century of the de-colonisation struggle with the Spanish crown - Latin American writers began experimenting with hybrid forms of narrative. It was a quest for new ways of story telling; a hybrid form - the crónica - where story telling became a parallel journey taken by the novelist impatient to engage his or her writing with the new post colonial conditions. Since these early days, the crónica - or the chronicle - was embraced with aesthetic commitment and ideological conviction by some of the most celebrated novelists in the region. In the crónica - paraphrasing Cuban poet Alejo Carpentier - the journalist and the novelist turn out to be the same person. The exponents of the new crop of Latin American journalistic crónica - the central theme of this paper - could well be described as a post-literary boom generation of writers who - like their predecessors of the 19th century - are impatient to engage their writing with the 21st century post dictatorship conditions. The new cronistas don't discard any stories, as long as they are part of the Latin American realism, in the sense of Zola's realism instead of García Márquez's magic realism. All of these stories have three literary nexuses; they read as fiction, they are true tales and they are overpoweringly socially progressive. This paper seeks to review, examine and perhaps propose pointers toward the conceptualization of the crónica, as a literary long form of journalism that has a distinctive Latin American diacritic, form and social undertaking.
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