desliz:

I really, really like this article on Mexican sf/fantasy, because it helps articulate how I use the genre myself. I am fundamentally incapable of writing a story where unrealistic things happen just because it’s fun to speculate. That’s my boyfriend’s passion, and I find absolutely no fault with it, but I can’t do it. It always comes back to reality, somehow, and the things that anger and upset me. One of Frida Kahlo’s more famous quotes is, “ I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” It sounds like artistic pretension, but I understand it. The fantastic is excellent shorthand for emotions and concepts that cannot be easily expressed otherwise. The omnipresence of the supernatural in Mexican/Mexican-American culture, and perhaps Latin America as a whole, is less about religiosity than a very specific way of dealing with colonialism, racism, machismo, poverty, and other such forces. I don’t have a better way of articulating it at the moment, but the article touches upon it fairly well, and I hope to make it out to the reading as well.

(via so-treu)