Contemporary Ruins: Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Homero Aridjis, and the Latin American Anthropocene.

This article analyzes two dystopian novels about the environmental and political predicament of Latin American megacities during the height of neoliberalism, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Não verás país nenhum (1981) and Homero Aridjis's La leyenda de los soles (1993), examining how these novels show neoliberalism's erosion of the nation-state's democratic networks. These narratives lay bare the social and ecological costs of the rhetoric claiming that Brazilian and Mexican monumental modernity advanced through immense highways, nuclear reactors, and petrochemical plants, which have become neoliberal ruins. Through the long afterlife of the modern nation's abandoned megastructures, both novels describe the planet as carrying the material memory of extractive capitalism that these Latin American megacities lack. In doing so, they stand against utopian narratives of infrastructural urban development by focusing on their dystopian underside: the environmental destruction and histories of political violence upon which neoliberal globalization was founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]