Eligio Garcia and his contribution to the new urban narrative in Colombia

This dissertation analyzes the work of Eligio Garcia (1947-2001), participant in a new form of literary expression: the urban narrative, characteristic of the late 1960s and 1970s. In Colombia this initiative came from provincial writers of the middle class. The author's novel and short stories are situated in Cartagena, Colombia, where Eligio Garcia grew up and considered himself a native. He recreates a city in transition from the vantage point of a new generation, new immigrants, a new power structure and new neighborhoods in this once heroic city. His Cartagena has nothing to do with the colonial city of viceroys and inquisitors, saints and slaves, pirates and buccaneers. The raw material for his short stories comes from the boxer, the baseball player, the society woman gambler and the mourners at the funeral of a young student. Adolescents on the threshold of adulthood, killing time daily, are the protagonists of his novel.; The city is ever-present in its multiple, fragmented aspects. The writers of the boom, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in particular, grew up in a rural Colombia. For Eligio Gabriel, the youngest of his siblings, life is urban. Twenty years separate them.; Eligio Garcia highlights the lives of ordinary people, using appropriate language, with occasional expressions from the Caribbean coast. His characters have a decided lack of credibility in official history---so important in Cartagena---and in the representatives of the governing classes. This writer takes the masks off key historical figures and their mythical deeds, reducing them to human proportions.; The boom introduced a Latin America with its own literary esthetic, ideals and idiosyncrasies, as an integral part of the world, not merely a region of the exotic and underdeveloped. It is a continent where people live and die, love and hate, create and destroy---people with stories worth telling. Their voices are heard in the urban narrative of Eligio Garcia and their stories are as current today as when they were written. Eligio Garcia captures the essence of an era while transcending historical boundaries to explore the humanity common to us all.