Generacion Emergente (Spa) (Emerging Generation)

Luis Zapata

Zapata's professional training is in medieval French literature, but he has made a major contribution to Mexican literature during the past decade in writing openly gay fiction. Adonis Garcia (1979), still his most famous novel, is the picaresque chronicle of a solidly bourgeois but rebellious Mexican youth, who leaves his family and, in order to survive, turns to street prostitution in Mexico City. However, once in the city, the confluence of wealthy, jaded Mexicans, creative and intellectual Bohemians, and adventurous tourists transforms Garcia. No longer a male prostitute who does not consider himself a homosexual, he achieves the beginnings of a gay identity---a process that is central in Zapata's subsequent writings. Zapata brings to his narratives an excellent sense of the transformations taking place in Mexico (whose capital is often viewed as paradigmatically postmodern). He explores the intersection of popular culture and outmoded bourgeois ideologies and has an accurate ear for the capital's many expressive cadences, including the speech of the millions of newly immigrant provincials. Because of both his commitment to countercultural discourses and his multi-leveled urban settings, Zapata is a key figure in contemporary Mexican fiction and, along with Puig, one of Latin America's most prominent gay writers.