UC Riverside

This dissertation analyzes Mexican and Colombian brief fiction published after 2000, focusing on four authors from the Generation Zero Zero, Mexican authors Alberto Chimal and Heriberto Yépez and Colombian authors María Paz Ruiz Gil and Gabriela A. Arciniegas. The Generation Zero Zero consists of Latin American authors born in the 1970s who have published their major works after 2000. Agustín Cadena, Lorena Campa Rojas, Dolores Corrales Soriano, and Lauro Zavala separate the Generation Zero Zero from the writers of the Crack and claim that the group is heterogeneous in their lived experience in a time of crisis, their dismantling of utopic ideas, and their literary creations within the fantastic, science fiction and horror genres. This dissertation analyzes four authors of this generation to identify underlying ecocritical trends, an environmental unconscious, and the representation of human and non-human characters within this group of authors. Through an ecocritical approach to their writing and an exploration of their use of brief literary forms, I analyze Chimal, Yépez, Ruiz Gil, and Arciniegas’ representation of the environment and the non-human to reveal both anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives within their publications, demonstrating a possible divide in the Generation Zero Zero in regard to environmental discourse.