Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude revolves around multiple generations of the Buendia family, founder of the city of Macondo. While geographically and temporally indeterminate, the fictional Macondo serves as a stage where architecture and urbanism are informed by real-life Latin American transformations in society and culture. On the other hand, that society and culture are also shaped by architectural and urban transformations. Through this back-and-forth, Garcia Marquez uses fiction to share commentary on Latin America’s open wounds: an ill-fated foundational hope, imported modernity, political instability, extractive intervention, historical erasure, and the production of collective loneliness — a crucial distinction from the English title’s ‘solitude,’ which implies choice and contemplation, whereas theFounding Narratives, Spanish ‘soledad’ carries the Hopes, and Desolations weight of abandonment and involuntary isolation.
Founding Narratives, Hopes, and Desolations
The saga begins with Jose Arcadio Buendia founding Macondo as a way of creating a nurturing settlement to raise his family and protect themselves from a painful past. This resembles Latin America’s first towns, created with a pre-urban social dream of autonomy, pioneerism, and utopia.
The escaping of a hurtful past is a shared feature with the first colonizers of the continent, who were anything but the rich people they’re idealized as. In a way, colonizers and Macondo’s first inhabitants ran from suffering only to find more of it, now with the added disappointment of lost hope, of the rupture of getting it right this time.
A series of false promises creates cities marked by desolation. They hoped for a secure place, where they could restart, live communally, and grow within an isolated environment. However, the hope of a promising foundation is not strong enough to sustain bodies in hardship: a lack of practical resources is combined with the absence of a national myth or project. Latin Americans were not raised on “the civilization of freedom” or “the heroes of the reconquista and the age of discovery”.
We exist as wounded testimonies of imposition, violence, exploitation – which win the battle over hopes of a fruitful trajectory.
A Miniature City: The Buendia House
As solid as the Buendia family may seem, their house reveals itself not as a fixed domestic shell, but a growing collage of new rooms, workshops, patios, corridors and programs. Space is shaped by social cycles – repurposing, adding, revealing, excluding –, while also shaping generations – Melquiades’ room, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s tree. As generations accumulate, the house becomes more labyrinthine, more crowded with people and history, and finally decayed and empty. This resembles how Latin American cities are built in layers of space that carry layers of unresolved past. Streets in irregular forms, buildings built on top of others, remains of demolitions, asphalt thrown on top of cobblestone: the city reveals layers sitting on top of others that cannot, however, hide the past of colonialism, slavery, military dictatorships, foreign interventions, revolutions and attempts. Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Brazilian sociologist and historian, argues in Raizes do Brasil that Brazilians build their cities as if they were rapidly throwing seeds at the soil and hoping they will grow, in constant additions that creates overlays of unresolved, visible sediments of the past. The eventual decline of Macondo and the Buendia house supports a larger claim of Garcia Marquez: spaces burdened by cyclical, unprocessed history become spaces of enclosure and loneliness.
An Out-of-Nowhere Modernity
The arrival of the gypsies marks the first break from the isolation of Macondo. Urban transformation occurs through imported objects and ideas; the promise of modernity is exciting, dazzling, and not organic.
The town’s isolation ends effectively with the arrival of the railroad. Macondo is now integrated with other cities: new demographics arrive, circulation is more intense, distances collapse. However, it is worth noting where Macondo is being connected to: the capital, and its capitalist interests. Latin American railroads symbolized modernity and integration – but smaller cities were being integrated into unequal economic orders, which benefited the export economy and external interests. Infrastructure, as promising as it was, is a channel for exploitation and dependency.
“Modernity” grew larger with the establishment of the Banana Company. An economic logic from the outside dominates Macondo; built space is made to serve corporate extraction rather than the dreams of communal life. “Globalization is not for everybody”, a famous quote by Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, explains what happens to public life both in Macondo and in Latin America: the foreign company’s presence creates stratification of the urban environment. Space is divided as unequally as wealth, and the town’s people, once unified by the foundational hope, are divided into groups. Class and power become architectural, the city is no longer civic space. A scenario like this could never produce solitude, but loneliness, as a nation once unified by pioneerism and hope is now split into segregated houses, empty corridors and rooms with nothing but an atmosphere of what-ifs.
A remarkable characteristic of Macondo’s modernization is its sudden appearance. The reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude is surprised by modern arrivals that come, in lack of other words, out of nowhere. This mirrors how modernity happened to Latin America: it was a standardized, capitalist, external project imposed on a peculiar context. Since locals were not the ones to dream and plan their own modernity, the modernity that migrated to their territory didn’t align with their interests and traits. This discrepancy between promise, reality, and dream daily ruptures the immaterial skeleton that could sustain the Latin American people.
Apart from the labor exploitation, we were made to distance ourselves from each other by the imposed, stratified modernity, leaving us lonely for the last one hundred years.
A Crisis of Memory: The Insomnia Plague and Historical Remembrance
A famous passage of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the insomnia plague, where the inhabitants could not fall asleep and, due to sleep deprivation, they began losing memory. Noticing that the memory loss was progressive, they started distributing signage around town, labeling objects and spaces, their names, uses and histories. This represents an endeavor to ensure that future selves and generations would not forget what spaces and objects meant to those who used them in the past, as space doesn’t reveal its non-material connotations.
This movement resembles late 20th and 21st century efforts by civil population to fight against the forgetting of Latin America’s history of ruptures, erasures, imposed narratives, annihilations, state-corporate violence, “disappearances”, populisms (in the LATAM definition), slander, coups, and slavery.
The lives of our people frequently do not fit the normative History of our countries, our wounds are not documented for official matters, our national “heroes” are prejudiced, insensitive, inhumane people.
In a post-military dictatorships context, Latin Americans started to create new monuments with plaques explaining the history of heroes apart from the official History. In other cases, they started to vandalize, change, and rebuild plaques in monuments of historical figures, expliciting the actual consequences of their acts to the communities. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, Dopinho, a center for torture and execution of opponents of the military dictatorship, gained signage revealing its past after years of erasing the violence by portraying itself as a regular building. The signage project was later recognized by the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship for its historical value and is considered to become a Center for Memory.
A Second Opportunity on Earth: Loneliness and Solitude
Garcia Marquez concludes the downfall of Macondo, in decline for multiple years, with a tornado that completely destroyed the town. In his last moments, Aureliano Babilonia reads parchments with the hope to reconstruct the vanishing town, only to find out that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races [lineages, in a better translation] condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on Earth. While the reader may close the book with doom and hopelessness, it is important to remember the potential that lives beyond fiction. Real Latin Americans have the agency to create their own second opportunity on Earth: rethink hopes of foundation, acknowledging historical continuity and perceiving themselves as powerful survivors of violence; reinterpret spaces of unprocessed history, comprehending the past while attributing new meanings; reimagine modernity, in a locally based version aiming for class equity and justice for the workforce; and repurpose the public space as a collection of markers of memory, of remembrance of violence, and commemoration of actual heroes.
I hope that, this way, we can achieve the premise of the English translation’s title: may our next hundred years be of solitude, not loneliness.
- García Márquez, Gabriel, and Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1st Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed., Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007.
- Holanda, Sérgio Buarque De. Roots of Brazil. University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
- Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translated by Cedric Belfrage and Isabel Allende, Monthly Review Press, 2023.
