Colombia is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking of the Gothic genre. For the most romantic, Colombia is a tropical paradise where it is always sunny; for those less familiar with the country, it is synonymous with little more than drugs and violence. Even for Colombians, Gothic is not a genre through which the country is frequently narrated, in contrast to the omnipresent magical realism, in its variant masterfully used by Gabriel García Márquez. Perhaps the most visible space in which the Gothic is currently articulated in the country is in the Goth subculture, an important “urban tribe” in the cold and rainy city of Bogotá. However, Gothic as a literary genre has been practiced in Colombia since the nineteenth century with pieces written in parallel to those produced by European and U.S. gothic authors. By the 1980s, a distinct Gothic variant—the Tropical Gothic—emerged in Colombia and in the larger region of Latin America.

The idea that the Gothic has flourished and continues to do so in Colombia, and in Latin America more broadly, is still novel in cultural and literary studies on the continent. It is not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that critics and scholars started tracing the presence of the Gothic in Latin America. Argentine scholar and poet María Negroni directly connects Latin American fantastic literature with the Gothic genre in her 2009 book Galería fantástica (Fantastic Gallery). In the prologue of her book, she regards “Latin American fantastic literature as drifting in the wake of gothic literature” (9, my translation), linking the two movements and their productions. For Negroni, the Gothic is an important influence on Latin American fantastic literature, whereas the Gothic itself is not a genre or a mode that has been practiced on the continent. It is not until the second decade of the twenty-first century that studies written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English began to claim a Latin American Gothic as such and trace its cultural products.

Texts in Spanish and Portuguese pioneered these studies: to the already mentioned Galería fantástica we can add the book Gótico Tropical: O sublime e o demoníaco en O Guarani (Tropical Gothic: The Sublime and the Demonic in O Guarani, 2010) by Brazilian scholar Daniel Serravalle de Sá.