The fantasia/phantasm that for North Americans connotes whimsy, extravagance, or illusion retains, in Latin America, its meaning of “image-making” and describes a way of scrutiny, a habit of mind. In that part of the world, whose past and present history has been marked by the multiple collision of cultures brought about by colonization and revolution (and their attendant dislocations), everyday reality is necessarily fantastic, just as the glance that records such a reality must be masked. In the wake of 16th-century European explorers and conquerors, Anglo-Americans tend to read Latin American