“Nos llevó el ensanche”: Medellín en las novelas urbanas de Manuel Mejía Vallejo

Abstract

The Colombian writer Manuel Mejia Vallejo published between 1973 and 1987 a series of urban novels about the image of his city: Medellin. This paper analyzes the narration of urban space around three central motifs: progress, uprooting and nostalgia. It also studies how the novelist narrates the symbolic erased of the citizen and the devastation of the traditional city due to the expansion of the streets and the uncontrolled demolition of the neighborhoods. For the characters of these novels, memory is the only way to maintain their identity within the logic of a modern city.