ABSTRACT
The simplified view that French readers may have had of the work has matured, grown more nuanced. The writers who came to Paris were not alone in pursuing their various enterprises; the receptive environment made it possible for them to stay and grow and gain recognition according to individual merits, not as tokens or representatives of their native lands. For Latin American writers, Paris has begun to shift imperceptibly from the capital of the past to a locus one of many, foreign and domestic for the future. If Latin American literature no longer benefits as much from its fashionable status of the 1960s and 1970s in France, that is because the novelty and the political urgency have worn off. Earlier in the century, most of the writers who went off to Paris had to go back where they started if they were to maintain and build upon a sense of who they were as Latin Americans.
