The Beguiling Crónicas of Hebe Uhart

Despite its growing popularity among Anglophone readers, the crónica—a unique form of literary reportage that blurs the lines of fact and fiction—remains a quintessentially Latin American genre. In English, scant studies on the form exist beyond 2002’s The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle.  The genre has long been marked by its political, polemical overtones (Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre, for example), but increasing democratization across Latin American has seen it shift toward a lighter, more observational approach, in which the writer keeps their distance (as in Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami.)

Toward the end of her life, the late Argentine writer —known for her novels, short stories, and travel logs—almost exclusively wrote crónicas. She turned to the form because “she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes in the introduction to , a collection 25 of Uhart’s crónicas that probe her daily life and travels across Latin America. Enriquez’s statement, translated by , is also marked by an unerring belief that a good story can be found almost anywhere. As put it in , Uhart’s stories capture a “reality interrupted by strangeness.”