This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

This chapter argues that thinking about Roberto Bolaño in the context of journalism and mass culture means recognizing how mainstays of globalized twentieth-century journalistic communication – photographic realism, reportage with a pretension of objectivity, investigative journalism – as well as discourses about literature, have circulated differently in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Explores in particular the convergences and divergences between Latin American and Spanish crónicas and North American New Journalism in Bolaño’s fiction and in his own newspaper writing, the essay argues that Bolaño’s portrayal of the daily cultural and political contexts one confronts in the newspaper reflects his suggestion that readers are always exiles, and that they produce a commentary on seeing as both a journalistic practice and a metaphor for social understanding. Bolaño draws on, but also rewrites, the history of literary journalism in a wider Atlantic world, even as he comments on the superficiality of mass media and culture. Discussing Bolaño’s engagement with cronistas such as Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Carlos Monsiváis, and Pedro Lemebel, the chapter includes discussions of 2666, Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño’s short stories, and articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines in Spain and Chile.