“I once met a man who belonged to space, not time. He believed that if he stayed in the same place for too long he would deteriorate and shrink up,” writes Hebe Uhart (1936–2018), the late Argentinean fiction writer, journalist, and educator, in one of her many crónicas. The crónica (or crônica in Portuguese)—roughly, “chronicle” or “report”—is a column-like form in Latin American newspapers and periodicals, wherein writers create slice-of-life dispatches that are personal, talky, political, and even weird. A Question of Belonging (Archipelago Books) collects Uhart’s crónicas in an English translation from Anna Vilner for the first time.

Always in motion—on foot, on buses, on trains—Uhart, like the shrinking man, seems to agree that staying put can make one small. Often, she visits little towns, maybe only 90 kilometers away. She sleeps in locals’ houses because there are no hotels. She looks into clothing shops and considers the consumptionism of Perónists versus that of ex-communists. She catalogs local sayings and swears and creoles. She drops acid during group therapy.

Her writing is political and anti-racist but not propagandistic; it shows life how one person does, and can, experience it. Her beliefs and perspectives are open to constant revision: In “A Trip to La Paz,” she finds herself judging the threadbare smoky blue suit and high heels of a woman taking her son on a three-day train to the Bolivian capital, until they speak and she learns that the woman, like Uhart at the time, is a schoolteacher. But in her Bolivian primary school, without the benefit of the public funding Uhart receives in the Buenos Aires suburbs, students have no chalk to write with and only tree stumps to sit on. Still, as they cross the border, the woman gives her child a little flag, telling him to say “Viva Bolivia.” Uhart joins: “She, the child, and I said, ‘Viva Bolivia’ and her smile widened sadly. It was like a gift for me.”

Uhart is never not a participant, never not implicated. But while her “I” doesn’t recede—as it might in traditional reporting or, say, W.G. Sebald’s later travel-novels—her writing’s role is not to fill in the image of herself, as in a personal essay or autofiction. Rather, her presence displays the stakes of her interviewing and writing, and the necessary status as an outsider to the situations she depicts. When the woman who’s offered her a spare room in the village Irazusta, which Uhart heard about from a TV commercial, asks if she believes in God, Uhart considers the pouring rain outside, and the fact that her host is probably a believer. “I cooked up a theory about finding God in one’s neighbor that landed fairly well. I was proud of myself, as if I had stitched together a delicate embroidery. What’s more, I thought there’s no way I’ll be sent out into the rain and mud while we’re on the subject of God.”

Together in A Question of Belonging, which editor Sarah Gale organized to create “a portrait of her life, though from only a certain set of angles” rather than a linear history, Uhart’s crónicas of flow with the hypnotism of a pointillist novel—reminding me of Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms or Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.

It’s hardly exceptional that I’d read Uhart’s reportage as novelistic, not that I doubt its veracity. The New Yorker published one crónica, “The Preparatory School,” in 2023 as “flash fiction.” However, most originally appeared over the course of 40 years alongside journalism in Argentinian and Uruguayan newspapers, magazines, and literary supplements. The crónica—as practiced by Uhart, and by many writers throughout the hemisphere to this day—might be an antidote to the over-house-styled prose of a “Talk of the Town” dispatch precisely because nobody can quite agree upon what a crónica is.

A lot of ink’s been spilled trying to come up with a rubric for this long-living form. Critics, theorists, and chroniclers themselves describe the crónica as “hybrid,” “elusive,” “transgressive,” “flexible,” “somewhat unstructured,” and “notoriously difficult to define.” They say it is “a gaze,” “a certitude that something is being narrated,” “aesthetic journalism,” a “prose platypus” (notwithstanding that, sometimes, it’s poetry), a place where “the journalist and the novelist turn out to be the same person,” the merging of “flânerie and modern investigative reporting,” or “a textual kaleidoscope.” Bilingual glossaries tend to call it a “newspaper column.”

The crônicas by Clarice Lispector (1922–77) dial up such kaleidoscopic freakiness—perhaps unsurprising to those familiar with the Brazilian author’s gnostic output. I will not tell you I read all 742 pages of Too Much of Life, the complete collection of her columns, primarily from the Saturday edition of the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions in 2022. I detourned myself through the book, sprawling over its terrain. Quotes beaconed: “And nothing I have done in life pleases me. Plus, anything I did do in a loving way has shattered into pieces.” “I asked him if he had ever experienced loneliness, or if life had always had that justifiable sheen to it.” I dogeared pages. I skipped with dilettantism. “How dare they tell me that I vegetate more than live? … When I, of all people, live life in its purest form.”

Lispector’s often writing about writing: “I still feel slightly unsure about my new role as a writer of what couldn’t really be called crônicas,” she hedges in “Dies Irae,” 1967. “As well as being a novice in that, I’m also a novice when it comes to writing as a way of earning money”; “I know that my novel would fit the classic concept of a novel much more neatly if I made it more attractive, describing some of the things that frame a life, a romance, a character, etc. But a frame is precisely what I do not want,” she writes in “Fiction or Not,” 1970. “No I’m not talking about trying to write well…” she discloses in another 1970 column she titled “At the Whim of Your Pen.” “I’m talking about looking inside yourself for the nebula that gradually condenses, gradually becomes real, gradually rises to the surface—until the first word that describes it is born.” Sometimes a first word born for the Saturday Jornal would later find its way into her novels such as Água Viva.

Where Uhart’s crónicas—barring a few exceptions, like a reflection on her alcoholic ex, “A Memory from My Personal Life,” or “My Bed away from Home,” written from the ICU—orbit like little comets in outer reaches, many of Lispector’s crônicas have a feeling of looking out from within. That’s not to say they’re hermetic. Indeed, she publicly recounts phone calls, responds to letters (to Fernando Bernades, who writes that he earns too little to buy books, she has the director of the National Book Institute send several), and reprints a poem a houseguest, Sérgio Fonta, composed for her. She writes of god and creepy taxi drivers, and the newspaper itself (“I refuse to read the world’s articles, the headlines are enough to enrage me”). She travels too, or recalls traveling—for example, in a series of retrospective columns from 1971: “Traveling by Train,” “I’ve Ridden Camels; The Sphinx; Belly Dance (Conclusion),” “Talking of Journeys,” “I was in Greenland…,” “I was in Bolama, Africa.”

Her son, Paulo Gurgel Valente, in his afterword to the collection recounts that although Lispector would complain about working for newspapers, he doubts whether she meant it. “Saturday became the day when Clarice always managed to come up with something to surprise her readers, with a column that was sometimes flippant, sometimes lyrical, sometimes packed with news or information, or protesting the appalling situation of students in Brazil.” Her crônicas are alive—casual and strange.

In part I didn’t read the entirety of Lispector’s crônicas because last week I flew to Mexico City—a city that Uhart describes as a place that “overwhelms me with its historical and political past, a past so rich, and so peculiar”—and thought the 2-inch-deep paperback might be a little impractical for my carryon. Instead I brought Penguin Classics’ more orthopedically friendly collection of cróncias by Chilean writer, artist, and activist Pedro Lemebel (1952–2015), A Last Supper of Queer Apostles. Righteous rage, cutting humor, and lyric marvelousness unite Lemebel’s essays, published in various chapbooks and small publications between 1995 and 2012. (He also delivered one, “I Speak from My Difference,” as a speech during a leftist action in Santiago in 1986.)

Structured in five sections—Maricón, Coup, AIDS, Post-90, and Finale, with a foreword by Idra Novey and an introduction by its translator, Gwendolyn Harper, as well as appendices—A Last Supper serves both as a political counterhistory and an intimate depiction of Chile’s radical queer communities before, during, and after the two-decade dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Lemebel’s descriptions are lush, absurd. In “Even Poppies have Thorns,” a loca’s anus (Brooks leaves untranslated Lemebel’s preferred term for his comrades, “loca,” a Chilean slur for travestis, transwomen, and effeminate gay men) is a “velvet magnolia smeared in the rennet that blossoms her each night,” a “homofagous flower dribbling lace and sodden seed-crowns in the clench,” a “carnivorous pucker sprouting [saplings] in fecal ardor,” an “open slit.” (This loca is stabbed by her DL paramour, but she “kept screaming, as if each thrust gave her more life, more energy to leap and prance with his puppet who was dancing death. Because she sucked the knife like a dick, begging for more, one more time, Daddy, that last one nearly killed me.”)

Imagery lives with the hope remaining to living death:

“Santiago swayed with earthquakes and political tidal waves that were breaking apart Allende’s young coalition, Popular Unity,” begins “Night of Furs (Or, Popular Unity’s Last Supper.” New Years, ’72 into ’73. La Palma, an impoverished loca galvanized by the socialist president plans to host a party replete with 20 turkeys. “Even the poor, she said, were going to eat turkey that New Year’s Eve. And so word spread that her party would be unforgettable.” Queers of all classes head to the bash—including the coterie around the wealthy la Pilola Alessandri, who, despite the summer heat, dresses herself and her friends in her mother’s Dior furs. But when they arrive, the food is gone; the table’s strewn with bones. “Your turkeys flew off, honey!” snarks la Pilola.

As embarrassment over the meager spread turns into drunkenness, “[a]ll the locas began collecting the bones and arranging them in a giant pyramid on the table, like a mass grave lit by candles.” Someone plops in a miniature Chilean flag. Outside, the wealthy and fascistic and white have already been banging pots and pans to call for a coup. La Pilola likewise can’t take this mockery of her beloved nation she declares now a “populist slum.” She makes to leave. But where are her furs? “The minks flew off on you, honey!” a chorus cackles in return.

The years then “tumbled,” says Lemebel—through the dictatorship, through “the stained tulle of AIDS,” through “neoliberalism disguised as democracy” and its neocolonial order. “Maybe small histories and grand epics never run in parallel, with minority destinies scorched by a market always on the prowl for defectors,” begins the last paragraph of this crónica that proves that the small and the grand are inextricable. The locas died with the same wishes, Lemebel concludes: for those furs that “evaporated into the summer night, like a stolen dream, which picks up again but further on, beyond nostalgia—somewhere in the seropositive winters of those locas, when the plague’s snowy cotton frosted over their feet.”

Reading Lemebel’s screed against the gay rainbow flag “[w]hich is really just one color: white” on the plane to Mexico, I considered my implication, and the need for honesty. Last December outside a Condesa restaurant, I watched two Dutch homos keybump ketamine barely obscured by a playground slide while a father and son sat not five feet away, and I thought if I pretended I saw it on this trip instead, I could appropriate their chauvinistic disregard to segue from Lemebel into some kind of crónica my own. But, despite noting details as I traversed the city, none seemed to make a story:

● The silver rings in dry rice at the market in Tepito; the rain splatting on the tarps overhead
● The lunch-counter waitress with a quarter inch of red glitter cresting her eyelids who threw her hands up in marveled shock each time we tried to order—as if to ask for food at a lunch counter were the strangest thing
● The white-brick altar with its plaster Virgin behind the university security building, whose smudged glass door we knocked on, hoping to find someone to let through the chained gate to the Espacio Escultorico; no one came
● The baroque pants of mariachis bunched beneath the bathroom stalls as they shat at the cantina owned by the aunt of a beloved art-world dilettante
● The beer frothed up the bottle’s neck from a woman’s vibratory dancing at a purple-lit cumbia bar
● The gay guy saying of a party promoter, “He’s like a human trafficker for doll DJs”
● The charcoal clouds which looked nearly too 3D as they lowered over Juárez

Even my attempt at meta-discourse was ill-fated: Various original crónicas have been suggested, among them the Crónica Mexicáyotl, a 16th-century history of the Aztec empire written in Nahuatl. The oldest extant manuscript resides in the collection of the Museo de Antropología Nacional since its reclamation from the University of Cambridge in 2013–14. I enlisted the artist Enrique Garcia to stalk the museum’s halls with me, and we exhausted ourselves trudging through each exhibition. Overhead, construction noises battered our ears. I suspected the crónica might be upstairs, blocked from view. Or maybe it was in the library, as a search on Spanish Wikipedia suggested. Near the Mexica-focused room, we did find phrases from it—in Spanish translation—engraved on the walls. “Here Tenochcas, you will learn how the renowned, great city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan began. In the middle of the water, in the tular, in the cane fields, where we live, where we Tenochcas were born,” read one (I snapped a picture). “We are going to establish, settle down, and conquer…” began the other. We tried the gift shop for a booklet of this storied folio. No luck.

Although this historical propaganda could’ve been beside the point, marking a different “crónica”: The Real Academia Española, the monolithic academy of the Spanish language, defines the form as “a narrative history that follows the consecutive order of happenings” as well as “a journalistic article or radio or television broadcast about current events.” The Houaiss Brazilian Portuguese dictionary notes that “originally the crônica was limited to true and noble reports, however great writers from the 19th century onward began to cultivate it, reflecting…social life, politics, customs, everyday life, etc.” But are Uhart’s sensitive but unsentimental depictions of American lives, Lemebel’s unsparing activist camp, and Lispector’s curious, reader-conscious dialogues not noble in their own right?

Amid the museum’s monuments to gods and war, a facsimile of a black-ink manuscript, the Codex Boturini, unfolded. Little characters framed with pictographs marched across its pages, chronicling the Mexica’s migration. Figures swung sacks over their bags, raised feathered staffs above the head, spoke to emperors. A tree with human arms split in two. But in the margins of these epic scenes, one figure set himself apart. As others marched and bellowed, draped in robes, he curled up nearly nude beneath a pictograph, legs folded, asleep, I thought at first, although the pictograph being uninterpretable to me, he could’ve been dead. And for all I knew, he was yet another god or king, stripped of his vestments (as Uhart paraphrases Octavio Paz on Aztec lore: “even the gods died”). Still, it was characters like this one, I thought, that peopled the crónicas of Uhart and Lispector and Lemebel, the person not apart from the world but on history’s edge. Little foot marks swirled across the parchment, a dizzying journey across a nation. The chronicle as world. My feet ached. We sat down, drank water. A father raised his son to the codex’s plexiglass box. “Look!”