As a literary movement, McOndo then included like ideologies of literature and technique with which to communicate the experience of being Latin American in McOndo. Yet, the McOndos are quasi-apolitical, unlike the mid–20th-century Magical Realist novelists, for whom political discourse was the "raison d’être" of being a public intellectual. Nevertheless, the 21st-century modernity of McOndo orients it away from utopian Left-wing ideology (national identity, imperialism, colonialism, et cetera) to the politics of the 20th century, which include "a global, mixed, diverse, urban, twenty-first-century-Latin America, bursting on TV; and apparent in music, art, fashion, film, and journalism; hectic and unmanageable." In the 21st century, contemporary Latin America is an historico–cultural hybrid of the 19th and the 21st centuries (cf. the dictator novel and the banana republic). In the event, the writers of the "McOndo" (1996) short-story anthology took discrete literary paths; Alberto Fuguet noted that "divergence, for certain, was expected, for McOndo was not a deal, nor a treaty, nor a sect." Later, some McOndos reneged their literary militancy against Magical Realism; Edmundo Paz Soldán observed that "today, it is very clear, for many of us, that it is naïve to renounce such a wonderful tradition of political engagement on the part of the Latin American writer".