Jorge Majfud Albernaz was born on September 10, 1969, in Tacuarembó, a small city some four hundred kilometers from Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo—a distance that is more than geographic, and one that critics overlook at their peril. Branded by its cattle ranches, rolling plains, and temperate climate,[1] it presents, at first glance, the familiar image of a pastoral town, yet beneath that surface runs a quieter current of unease. Some scholars contend that Carlos Gardel, the most celebrated figure in the history of tango, was born there—an origin still disputed as if the soul of the Río de la Plata depended on the outcome. The writer Mario Benedetti also spent his childhood in Tacuarembó, another coincidence that unsettles those who continue to idealize the provincial. Here, the rural and the urban do not simply meet; they collide, as gaucho traditions endure alongside the architecture of colonial and postcolonial Uruguay. Each March, the annual festival known as “La Patria Gaucha” pulls the countryside into the town for a few charged days, exposing, in concentrated form, the myths and tensions that continue to shape the nation.[2]
Jorge’s father, the son of an impoverished family of twelve children, trained as a carpenter. In the 1950s, propelled by determination and quiet ambition, he left for Montevideo to study carpentry and radiotelephony, methodically building a future with his own hands. He went on to become a successful businessman in several sectors, including agriculture, banking, and pharmaceuticals, yet before Jorge was born he chose to return to Tacuarembó, opting for an austere life marked by discipline and integrity. His mother, Marlene Albernaz, born in 1940, was a sculptor and drawing teacher whose artistic sensibility shaped the atmosphere of their home. Jorge grew up among her drawings and sculptures—figures of men, women, and horses that, on summer nights, seemed to stir when he rose for a glass of water. In those luminous, unsettling intervals, the line between the imagined and the real appeared to dissolve, and a child came to understand that the world of fiction was not separate from the world of facts but a living presence within it. She died in January 1984. [3]
“We call reality to madness that remains and madness to reality that vanishes”
City of the Moon(novel, 2009)
Some of his father’s customers could not pay for the furniture he crafted, and when money failed, they settled their debts in books. The carpenter agreed to the trade, and the boy read everything that entered the house. He read with no purpose beyond the dizzying pull of following characters through their lives, and that pull, early and almost imperceptibly, hardened into a vocation. He resisted it through much of his adolescence, but in the end he could not turn away from it.[4]
On his father’s side, Jorge Majfud descended from Lebanese Christians. His paternal grandparents left Lebanon for Uruguay, joining the broader wave of Lebanese and Syrian migration to the Río de la Plata in the early twentieth century.[5]
Jorge was four years old when the civil-military dictatorship seized power in Uruguay in 1973. From that moment, it did not simply frame his childhood; it cut through it and claimed it. Fear settled into daily life, at the family table, in every knock at the door, in every hushed exchange. For ten formative years, he lived beside a dictatorship and inside it, in a country where adults spoke in code, where children learned to read alarm in their parents’ faces, and where silence became a means of survival. It was not a neutral biographical detail but a lasting wound and a quiet charge against a regime that reached into the inner life of a child, narrowing dreams and suspecting imagination. This violence—intimate, often unseen, and unrelenting—is what Majfud would later confront and rework in testimonies like “The Technology of Barmarism” (2010) and his novel The Same Fire (2017), about a child who remembered everything and became a discreet messenger, carrying forbidden notes to political prisoners and the unspoken history of a muted generation.
Under military rule, Uruguay became, in proportion to its size, the country with the highest number of political prisoners in the world—a stark distinction for a nation that had long taken pride in its democratic tradition. The Secretariat for Human Rights later reported that between 1968 and 1985, at least 192 people were detained and disappeared, even as investigations continued amid a broad belief that the real figure was significantly higher. As Majfud himself observed, the number of disappeared in Uruguay was smaller than in Argentina or Chile, but the social, psychological, and cultural damage was no less deep, running through daily life and leaving a legacy of fear, silence, and broken families. The dictatorship was not an abstraction; it entered Majfud’s home, dismantled private lives, and pushed people beyond what anyone should be forced to endure. Cases like that of his Aunt Marta—who died by suicide after her husband was tortured—capture this brutal intimacy of state terror. Majfud and his brother saw Marta’s final days, witnessing the slow collapse of a young woman who could no longer bear the terror and humiliation inflicted on the person she loved; their memory of her death endures as an accusation, a reminder that behind every statistic lies a life torn apart.[6]
The dictatorship left a dark mark on the country’s history and on his family. His maternal grandfather, Ursino Albernaz—whom Jorge described as “the old rebel, the revolutionary, the black sheep of a family of conservative peasants”—was imprisoned and brutally tortured. Soldiers at a local garrison—among them the notorious Captain Nino Gavazzo, considered so vicious that even the United States intelligence services refused him entry to the country, dismissing him as a “drunken loudmouth” after learning of his threats against U.S. Congressman Edward Koch—turned his body into a battleground. From those sessions in hell, his grandfather emerged with a shattered knee and a map of bruises that, harsh as they were, proved less devastating than the suffering his younger son would endure. Like almost every other Latin American fascist dictatorship, the Uruguayan regime was promoted by the CIA and backed by Washington and major corporations,[7] a cold geopolitical calculation paid for with human lives.
That younger son was Carlos Albernaz, called Caito, Jorge’s uncle. In 1973, the military came for him. They tortured him in a nearby river using a method known as “the submarine”—placing a plastic bag over the subject’s head until his own breath suffocated him, or holding him underwater until the body convulsed. They dragged him through fields thick with thorns. As Ferrer Herrero notes, Latin American military personnel were trained at the School of the Americas, run by the United States in Panama, an institution that produced a long list of dictators across the continent.[8]
The next day, they threatened Caito with castration. That night, he tried to conceal his testicles, imitating the instinctive movements of male calves at castration time. When his wife, Marta, came to visit, the soldiers showed her a bowl of beef blood and told her they had already carried out the mutilation. It was a lie. The organ they displayed belonged to an animal. But Marta believed them. She went back to her in-laws’ country house, took the revolver they had hidden on top of a wardrobe, lay down on her bed, and shot herself in the chest.
Jorge and his younger brother Nolo were playing in the yard when a gunshot split the air. They went to Marta’s room and found her on the floor, a bloodstain spreading across her chest. A neighbor arrived soon after and led the children out of the house. Jorge was three or four years old at the time. “I remember them,” he would say years later, referring to the atrocities he had witnessed as a child and that the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano would later distill into one of the brief stories in his final book.[9]
There were other cruelties, smaller in scale but no less defining. At the age of five, Jorge carried messages to political prisoners during children’s visits to the notorious Libertad Prison, where his grandfather and uncle were held. At school, teachers followed government directives. One teacher, acting on orders from the dictatorship, required the children to tear pages from a book that included a story in which a fox suggested it had eaten an owl—the authorities deemed it too violent for children. On vacations, he overheard visitors to his grandfather’s house speaking in low voices about the methods of the Uruguayan and Argentine governments: throwing people from airplanes into the sea with their feet tied together. These were the “death flights” that would become publicly known fifteen years later.[10]
Majfud recalled that children of that era were taught not to speak; a careless word could bring reprisals on others or on themselves as students. He later drew on this experience to describe a “generation of silence,” a phrase he gave to the protagonist of his first novel.[11]
The dictatorship had split the family in ways that echoed the country itself. Several of Jorge’s paternal uncles served in the army. They did not take part in the persecution of the Albernaz family—on the contrary—but their role inside the military opened a quiet rift within the household. Jorge remembered a cousin whose father was in prison, and whose mother—Jorge’s grandmother—refused to let the boy call the soldiers “milicos.” She made him repeat, with formality, “soldados de la patria.” The child was learning to address power in the language it demanded, even as that same power was dismantling his family.[12]
Record of one of the entrances to Libertad Prison approved by the military for 6/4/1976 (Document declassified by the Uruguayan government in 2015)
The dictatorship ended officially in 1985, but its consequences did not. In 1982, Jorge’s uncle Caito died in a supposed motorcycle accident on a rural road near his parents’ farm. Two years later, in January 1984, Jorge lost his mother. His father woke the children one hot morning and told them that their mother had died. In November of that year, the first elections that officially ended the dictatorship were held. It would have been one of his happiest moments, but his mother did not live to see it.[13]
Between 1986 and 1990, Jorge entered a period of profound personal crisis, a descent without consoling metaphor or promise of heroic redemption. He would later say he felt himself split in two, becoming almost “schizophrenic, if that’s possible,” confined within a mind that would not release its hold, a private torment that required no walls. During those self-imposed years of isolation, he turned to mathematics and oil painting with an intensity that bordered on self-punishment, as if numbers and colors were the last remaining languages that had not betrayed him, the only systems that did not deceive. Crippled by a severe social phobia, the simple act of someone looking in his direction felt like a weapon drawn and held against his chest. Under that gaze, he folded inward and recognized only a despicable, ridiculous figure, a distorted version of himself, staring back.
Even in that darkness, he did not consider suicide—not out of faith in life, but out of a visceral rejection of the act itself. The memory of his aunt and of so many others who had chosen that brutal exit marked him deeply; what others wrapped in tragic language he experienced as an explosion that tore through the lives of those who remained. His refusal of suicide was absolute, almost fierce: he saw in it an unbearable concentration of pain in the bodies and minds of those left behind. To him, the gesture reeked of extreme selfishness, even as artistic circles tried to cloak it in Van Gogh’s aura, turning it into a macabre fashion. Decades later, he would say, with sarcasm, that for some it had become the final marketing strategy—a last, calculated act of violence to sell more books and elevate the price of paintings.[14]
In 1990, he decided to stop. “I decided to stop being schizophrenic,” he later told the Spanish scholar Raúl Ferrer Herrero. “It was a personal decision, born entirely of my own resolve, untouched by any therapy, which I always detested, perhaps because I saw some acquaintances going to the psychologist and committing suicide after years of therapy.” By then he had immersed himself in the theory of relativity and, even more intensely, in the work of Ernesto Sabato and Jean-Paul Sartre. Something in existentialism’s insistence on freedom—the claim that in every circumstance we are free to choose, that we are condemned to choose—took hold of him with irresistible force. He rejected the idea that human beings are merely prisoners of their past, yet he was equally wary of any suggestion that the past can simply be erased. He felt the weight of what is repressed and still pulses in the present and sensed the urgency of probing it, even as he held fast to what he called “the existentialist card of human freedom.” Above all, he placed his faith in creative freedom, which he regarded as the highest form of freedom, a force that begins in the courage to say No—to refuse, with full awareness, a situation that does not satisfy. Birds cross the sky in their annual migrations without the power to rebel against that cycle; a human being, even in the worst conditions, still carries the burning capacity to refuse and to choose another path.[15]
At seventeen, Majfud moved alone to Montevideo, where he finished his secondary education at Liceo Elbio Fernández and then enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of the Republic, while also studying at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. At the time, architecture was the longest university program in the country, with an average duration of thirteen years; some students were known to have children and even grandchildren before completing their degrees, a sign of its demanding blend of art, the humanities, and mathematics. Majfud saw this field as one that would give him enough time to dedicate himself to writing and travel. Including a gap year in 1995, when he traveled around the world as an architecture student, he completed the degree in six years, the minimum possible duration. The discipline joined his aptitude for mathematics with the artistic sensibility he had inherited from his mother. He would later describe this choice as a fortunate accident, a significant parenthesis in his life, and a way of protecting his literary world while remaining involved in a practical profession.[16]
In high school, he was a middling student, at times “a disaster,” until the final months of his studies at Elbio Fernández School in Montevideo. Even so, he was one of only two classmates that year to gain admission to the School of Architecture. Once at the university, his courses progressed smoothly and with little apparent effort. In the most demanding mathematics classes, he caught himself thinking, “I don’t understand why I understand everything.” Although the program was far more rigorous and demanding than undergraduate levels in the USA — usually, math and structures exams lasted six hours — that facility meant he did not have to devote much attention to coursework and could spend most of his time reading and writing. During those years, he was composing the novel that would become Hacia qué patrias del silencio (memorias de un desaparecido) — Toward What Homelands of Silence: Memoirs of a Disappeared Person. He rewrote it at least a dozen times on a recycled typewriter he had bought at the famous Tristán Narvaja street fair in Montevideo, where permanent used bookstores lined the sidewalks. The typewriter’s carriage return was broken, so he tied a plastic bottle filled with water to it, letting it hang from one end of the table to provide the weight needed to pull the carriage back to its starting position. He drank mate —the indigenous infusion with a high concentration of caffeine —which helped keep him in a state of near ecstasy for hours. “It was a very cathartic book,” he said.[17]
He lived modestly. He once spent all the money he had for the month on extra books and had to survive on water alone for five days. He could not afford to shave, and his friends at the university told him, without meaning to offend him, that he looked like a beggar. He never asked anyone for help except his father or his grandfather, who were hundreds of miles away. He did not have the money to pay for a phone call. A couple of times, he sat on the doorsteps of houses to think about what he could do, and they chased him away like a dog.[18]
In those Montevideo years, while studying architecture, he moved among young rebels, uncertain readers, and construction workers. His days unfolded in the solitude of a television-less apartment and in the anonymous bars of the city. There, he sat alone, imagining other worlds, reading, writing, and tracing the outlines of his own deliriums. He read Sartre. He read Ernesto Sábato. Onetti, Nietzsche, Camus, García Márquez, Galeano, Roberto Arlt, Neruda, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo… The literature of the Río de la Plata—with its existentialist undertones and its melancholy, its dialogue between city and countryside, between modern anxiety and rural memory—shaped his imagination. Juan Carlos Onetti’s El pozo, published in 1939, practically coincided with Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée, published in 1938, and both belonged to the same family of literary thought that Majfud was absorbing.[19]
In 1995, one of the happiest years of his life, Jorge spent nine months traveling around the world with his classmates from the architecture school. He later traveled alone through the Middle East, and in Amman, Jordan, a problem with his debit card left him unexpectedly without access to money. He spent a night on the street, an episode that tested his resourcefulness, sharpened his sense of risk, and offered a more layered view of the region—far richer and more complex than the simplified images of the Middle East he had previously encountered in the West. The following year, he completed his architecture degree, and Editorial Graffiti in Montevideo published his first novel, Hacia qué patrias del silencio. Memorias de un desaparecido (Towards What Homelands of Silence. Memoirs of a Missing Person).[20]
After working as a structural engineer and construction manager, in 1997 he went to Pemba, Mozambique, to take on a new post. There, at the shipyard Estaleiro Naval de Pemba, he assisted in the design of ships, drew up plans for schools, and oversaw construction projects for a European Union aid group in the small city and its surrounding inland areas. In 1997, Eng. Joaquim Pedro Cruz was the CEO of the company.
“I remember that time as if it had lasted a century,” Majfud said, “now full of magical memories.” He traveled by wooden boat through a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean and visited remote villages. There he met Joseph Hanlon, a British journalist, social scientist, and professor of Development Policy and Practice at the Open University, who had written books against apartheid in South Africa and possessed deep knowledge of Mozambique’s history. He also met Ntuane Machel, son of Samora Machel—the first president of independent Mozambique—and Graça Machel, who would later become the wife of Nelson Mandela. Jorge shared several dinners and long conversations with Ntuane during a period when he was working at the Pemba shipyard, building large wooden boats. Part of what he experienced then—the wooden-boat journeys, the isolated villages, the conversations—was later distilled into essays published in his second book.
In Africa, he drafted most of Crítica de la pasión pura, his first book of essays, published in 1998—a crucible for ideas that declined to soothe Western sensibilities and chose instead to confront them. In Mozambique, a woman of the Maconde tribe, having listened to him converse with a Chilean, remarked that Spanish was merely imperfect Portuguese.[22] The brusque judgment, and the continent that framed it, unsettled the hierarchy of languages and cultures he had received and revealed its arbitrariness. Africa took hold of his work, stripped it of its inherited assurances, and imposed a reckoning he could no longer defer. In his novel La ciudad de la Luna (The City of the Moon), he imagined Calataid, a fictional city of European refugees—Christians, exiles from other human disasters—marooned in a neglected corner of the Sahara since the 15th century, immobilized by fear after Algerian independence in 1962 and clinging to the belief that they are meant to save the world from its final collapse, a community that instead displays the very decadence it claims to resist.
Around this time, Jorge began corresponding with Mónica, a fellow architecture student who had also joined his 1995 trip around the world. The letters took weeks to arrive. On the strength of that hesitant exchange—never entirely clear—Jorge returned to Uruguay and married Mónica in 1999. She has been his wife ever since.[23]
After his marriage, Jorge worked as a structural engineer while teaching technology and design at the Technical School (University of Labor of Uruguay, UTU) and mathematics to high school students at Liceo 1. In 2001, he spent a semester in Costa Rica, teaching architecture at the Hispanic American University. In 2003, he presented his novel La reina de América (The Queen of America) in Tenerife and Madrid, invited by the Canary Islands government and introduced by the writer Fernando Delgado at Casa de América. That same year, he moved to Ibiza and joined José Prieto’s studio as an architect.[24]
In Uruguay, the neoliberal financial crisis of 2001–2002 in the Southern Cone marked a turning point in his life. When a professor at the University of Georgia, who had read his first two books, invited him to continue his career there, he accepted.[25] As his period in Ibiza and Formentera came to an end, the studio director offered him a generous, permanent contract to remain working in Spain, an offer he declined without hesitation. He had already resolved to leave architecture behind and devote himself fully to research and literature. At 33, he returned to Uruguay, sat for the required international exams (TOEFL, GRE), and enrolled at the University of Georgia as a postgraduate student, deliberately restarting his academic path on his own terms.[26]
When he arrived in the United States by airplane in 2003, he was given a form that required, among other things, that he select a race — as though identity could be compressed into a single box. The request struck him as oddly foreign, almost blunt in its simplicity, and he wrote above the box, in plain refusal: “no race.” He had never thought of himself as Latino or Hispanic until the country insisted on fitting him into one of its ready-made categories. That label, he came to see, was not a neutral description but an American construct — an instrument of power later recast as a language of vindication. “Because we —the others— have entered a game that we did not invent,” he wrote, fully aware of its rules and intent on resisting them.[27]
In those early years, he and Mónica chose an extremely austere life in Athens, Georgia—a spare existence that proved deeply fulfilling, framed by books and by fellow students from around the world. On Saturday nights, he organized asados—barbecues—in the campus parks with friends and acquaintances from different countries. His Spanish, he confirmed, had evolved without losing any rigor; it had become, in his words, “much richer.” Living in a second language sharpened his metalinguistic awareness of his mother tongue. He became more consciously and intensely engaged with the Spanish language and culture after settling in the United States than he had ever been in Uruguay.[28]
After completing his master’s degree in 2005, he received the Excellence in Research Award in Humanities and Letters from the University of Georgia in 2006. In 2008, he obtained his doctorate in Hispanic Studies, both degrees earned with a 4.0 GPA.[29] His doctoral thesis examines how language operates as a contested terrain among different social and political groups, a study sparked by a sign that read: “race mixing is communism.” The first part of the thesis, approximately one hundred and fifty pages, is tightly analytical. The second half sets up a pointed contrast between Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) and Carlos Alberto Montaner’s Las raíces torcidas de América Latina (The Twisted Roots of Latin America). He chose Montaner’s book as a counterpoint because, although he regarded it as “fairly mediocre,” it was widely read and, in his view, had likely been promoted by the CIA. The thesis traces how intelligence agencies can elevate certain books while working systematically to consign others to obscurity.[30]
Protesters in Little Rock, Arkansas, demonstrating against the integration of Central High School; August 20, 1959.
After completing his doctorate, Jorge joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, one of the earliest historically Black universities in the United States and often described as the first degree-granting HBCU in the country. With characteristic dryness, he would later note that there was a Ku Klux Klan club not far away.[31] He taught at Lincoln until 2010, when he became a professor at Jacksonville University in Florida, where he has remained ever since.[32] At Jacksonville, he teaches Latin American Literature, Architecture, History, and International Studies. In 2013, he received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Professional Activities, and in 2019 he was recognized with an Excellence Award from the university.[33]
Jacksonville, where he ultimately settled, is a city set at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the St. John’s River, facing Georgia like an open threshold. There, in what he called “the academic bubble; another bubble of the many in a society,” he found the time and inner space to research and write with intensity, while steadfastly maintaining his connection to his nationality, which he understood as something far deeper than a simple mailing address.[34] He chose to continue publishing in Spanish as a deliberate act of cultural, political, and existential vindication. His essays and articles appeared in El País of Madrid, La República of Montevideo, La Vanguardia of Barcelona, The Huffington Post, Página/12 of Buenos Aires, Milenio of Mexico, Monthly Review of New York, El Nuevo Herald of Miami, Common Dreams, and numerous other newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television channels around the world, carrying a voice intent on challenging, questioning, and provoking reflection.[35] His work was translated into multiple languages.
Jorge Majfud counts his relationship with Eduardo Galeano among the most consequential intellectual friendships of his life, one that, like many of his connections, began on the page. Galeano read his articles in La República of Montevideo and sent back comments. Majfud believes he was the one who first reached out, but the bond deepened after he moved to the United States. From then on, Galeano regularly asked what was happening in the country, intent on understanding the reality of the United States through someone living it. He was, Majfud later recalled, notably open, always ready with another question, a patient, attentive conversator.[36]
In August 2009, Jorge traveled from Lincoln University to Philadelphia to meet Galeano, who was in the city to present his book Espejos (Mirrors). They first tried a bar called Cuba Libre but left, as Majfud would later say, out of “an ideological prejudice.” Guided by a GPS, Jorge drove through Philadelphia until they found a bar-pizzeria, where Galeano drank Heineken and spoke with unbroken clarity until midnight. Jorge, who preferred beer, ordered naranjada—orange juice. They talked for more than five hours, nearly six. Galeano was due at a library the next morning; Jorge had a class to teach. Those hours, Majfud said, were among the great pleasures of conversation.[37]
Galeano wrote to him often, and Jorge has preserved hundreds of those emails in his Gmail account, though others were lost when he left Lincoln University and the University of Georgia. After Galeano’s death on April 13, 2015, Jorge continued to visit Galeano’s widow at the now well-known house in Montevideo. He remembers Galeano as a man with whom a sense of friendship emerged within the first or second day of knowing each other.[38]
The most remarkable outcome of their friendship emerged from Galeano’s final book. In 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the military coup, Jorge published an article in the Argentine newspaper Página/12 entitled “Forty years after the coup.” Galeano, who regularly sent him comments on his articles, was deeply affected. On June 27, 2013, he wrote to Jorge: “Your article broke my heart, but I am very grateful to you on my own behalf and on behalf of so many others.” He added: “The story of your older brother and his words in the face of your aunt’s suicide inspires me to write one of those short stories that I love to write because the universe is so small. If you agree, I will include it in my new book, which is in the works and will be called The Story Hunter. I would need a couple of details. All the drama of our country is contained in those few words.”[39]
Majfud sent him the details. For months, their conversations drifted to other subjects, until Galeano fell ill. They never returned to that story, speaking only of new ones. Yet it resurfaced in El cazador de historias (Hunter of Stories), Galeano’s posthumous book, published in 2016.[40] There, in a brief, one-page piece, he recounts the Majfud-Albernaz family’s experience with his characteristic tenderness:
The Majfud family had been cornered by the Uruguayan military dictatorship, had suffered imprisonment, torture, and humiliation, and had been stripped of everything they had. One morning, the children were playing in an old cart when a gunshot rang out. They were far away, but the shot rang out across the fields of Tacuarembó and then they knew, who knows how, who knows why, that the bang came from the bed of Aunt Marta, the most beloved. From that morning, Nolo, the youngest of the family, asks and wonders: “Why are we born if we have to die?” Jorge, the older brother, tries to help him. He searches for an answer. The years go by, like the trees passing by the train window, and Jorge continues to search for the answer.[41]
With his usual precision, Majfud observed that Galeano’s brief account contained a small error, one that did not alter its central truth. It was, in fact, his mother’s family—the Albernaz line—who suffered most directly from the tragedy. There were Majfuds in uniform as well, though none took part in the harassment of the other branch of the family. Yet the story, as Galeano shaped it, held on to what mattered: how a child’s question, born of violence, can become a vocation. Why are we born if we have to die? Jorge took up the question and did not set it down, pursuing it through novels and essays, in the gaps between archives and public meetings, between academic history and political organizing, between the weight of the past and the demands of the present.[42]
Galeano and Majfud also worked together on several collective initiatives. In 2011, both contributed to the collective volume Truman, Hiroshima, published by Ediciones Irreverentes in Spain. In 2013, they were among the signatories—along with Emilio Cafassi and Juan Gelman—of a statement entitled Justice in its Labyrinth, which called for justice for the human rights violations committed during the period of state terrorism. The statement rejected the Expiry Law that had blocked the prosecution of those responsible for crimes committed during the military dictatorship since 1986: “Without truth there is no peace; without justice there is no democracy. Human rights are not begged for. They are demanded.”[43]
Majfud also served as compiler, editor, translator, and prologuist of Ventanas, a work by Galeano, and of Ilusionistas, Noam Chomsky’s latest book in Spanish, published in Madrid in 2012.[44] He contributed to collective volumes that brought him together with Slavoj Žižek, Carlos Taibo, Ray Bradbury, José Saramago, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Ernesto Sábato. In 2013, he appeared in the collective volume De la indignación a la rebeldía (From Indignation to Rebellion), which also included Galeano, Carlos Taibo, and Žižek.[45]
Jorge Majfud’s bibliography is striking in both scope and consistency. His novels include Hacia qué patrias del silencio (1996), La reina de América (2001), La ciudad de la Luna (2009), Crisis (2012), El mar estaba sereno (2017), Tequila (2018), El mismo fuego (2019), and Silicona 5.0 (2020). His essay collections and scholarly works include Crítica de la pasión pura (1998), El tiempo que me tocó vivir (2004), La narración de lo invisible (2006), Cyborgs (2012), El eterno retorno de Quetzalcóatl (2012), Cine político latinoamericano (2014), Hermenéutica (2014), USA. ¿Confía Dios en nosotros? (2017), Neomedievalism: Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era (2018), Perros sí, negros no (2020), La frontera salvaje: 200 años de fanatismo anglosajón en América Latina (2021), La privatización de la verdad (2021), El otoño de la plutocracia estadounidense (2023), Teología del dinero (2023), Moscas en la telaraña (2023), Palestina: El Vietnam de la Generación Alfa (2023), La prisión sin muros (2024), El fin de la Pax Americana (2024), Plutocracia: Tiranosaurios del Antropoceno (2024), and 1976: El exilio del terror (2024). He also published Bosquejo de una teoría del poder (P = d.t) in 2024, a theoretical work that proposes a formula for power.
His novels trace the convulsions of the Latin American continent—its dictatorships and prisons, waves of European immigration to the Americas, domestic and political violence, migration, the fault lines of cultural and linguistic identity, religious and political fanaticism, ecological catastrophe, and consumerism. Crisis follows the lives of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, incorporating Spanglish into its dialogue. La reina de América recounts the story of a Spanish immigrant who, in the shadow of the Southern Cone dictatorships, ends up working as a prostitute in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.[46]La ciudad de la Luna imagines a fictional city of European refugees marooned in the Algerian desert. Tequila leads readers through a fictional journey marked by constant danger.[47]
His novel La reina de América received a mention at the Premio Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, in 2001. The judging panel—among them Belén Gopegui of Spain, Andrés Rivera of Argentina, and Mayra Santos Febres of Puerto Rico—praised the book as one that “stands out as an intense writing regarding the established powers by the use of parody and irony.”[48] In 2012, readers of the American magazine Foreign Policy (now EsGlobal in Spanish) recognized him as “The Most Influential Latin American Intellectual.” In 2013, Impacto Latin News, New York’s oldest Spanish-language weekly newspaper, named him one of the ten most important Hispanic authors in the world. In 2019, he received the Premio Letterario Internazionale Indipendente in Italy and a Faculty Excellence Award from Jacksonville University. In 2024, Caras y Caretas magazine reported that, according to artificial intelligence, Majfud was among the ten most recognized Uruguayans in the world.
Majfud characterizes himself as a “committed author,” fully aware that such a designation may be contested or even deemed objectionable by some. For him, committed literature constitutes an “aesthetic of ethics,” a practice in which artistic form and moral concern are intertwined—whether in moments of clarity and achievement or in inevitable shortcomings and missteps. He maintains that ethical commitment and moral responsibility expand in proportion to the power an individual holds, while at the same time he criticizes the way contemporary culture disproportionately demands such commitment from intellectuals and writers, figures it frequently classifies as “unproductive” or “immature.” In this configuration of cultural expectations, he questions a society that would rather see intellectuals produce light, easily consumable fiction, or write love songs centered on sexual and gastronomic themes, detached from the more intractable and troubling realities that shape collective life.[49]
He has consistently declined to use partisan politics as a vehicle for personal gain, noting that he had concrete opportunities to secure economic advantages through party structures and refused each of them. Rather than conceiving the political as confined to parties or electoral competition, he approaches it as a broad field of social and psychological forces. For Majfud, the political names a set of universal dynamics: the confrontation between power and justice, the entanglement of violence with systems of domination, the strategic manipulation of individual and collective identities, and the progressive commercialization of human existence.[50] In November 2019, following the coup in Bolivia, Majfud published a public letter calling for the resignation of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, a text that rapidly circulated, went viral, and received the support of millions of Latin Americans.
His political analyses have positioned him within a dense network of contemporary intellectual exchange, bringing him into conversation with some of the most significant critical voices of the present. He has engaged in dialogue with Noam Chomsky, whose work he translated and edited in Spanish; with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, with whom he held a public conversation in 2023;[51] and with Víctor Hugo Morales, with whom he spoke at the Teatro Caras y Caretas in Buenos Aires in 2023.[52] These exchanges unfold not in isolation but through institutions and public forums that confer and contest cultural authority: he has spoken at the III Global Conference Hispanic Issues in New York,[53] at Western Carolina University,[54] at the Association of the Uruguayan Press in Montevideo,[55] and at the Frente Amplio in Madrid.[56] Through these settings, his work participates in an ongoing negotiation between academic inquiry, media discourse, and political knowledge.
For Majfud, fiction is the privileged space in which the deepest truths of the human being can be articulated. He characterizes the practice of fiction, and of the novel in particular, as a fundamentally cathartic undertaking. He avoids advance schematization: he does not usually draw up a writing plan, a procedure he considers more fitting for academic research. Even in his essays—associated conventionally with a more rational and deliberate mode of thought—he dispenses with prior planning. These texts, in his case, emerge from the intensity and urgency of the moment. In the novel, this rejection of planning becomes even more uncompromising. If he begins to suspect that he is “manufacturing” characters or situations, he discards everything he has produced to that point. He is fully aware that there exist codified formulas for composing a successful novel or a bestseller, yet he has no interest in adopting them. Instead, he insists on granting situations and characters their autonomy. As an author, he confines himself to following these figures and inhabiting their world. He allows them to surface from his unconscious, and, in that space, they may confront him with ideas that stand in direct opposition to his own.[57]
He draws a careful distinction between author, narrator, and characters as three analytically separate categories. As an author, he understands himself as a concrete individual who upholds specific moral values and responsibilities. As a narrator, however, he refuses to confine narrative voice within any form of puritanism or prior moral censorship. His characters frequently inhabit extreme situations; some respond in ways that may be read as saintly, while others act as outright criminals. He himself is neither saint nor criminal by virtue of representing such behaviors in narrative form. Literature, for him, functions as a privileged instrument for probing the most remote and unsettling zones of the human condition. He likens the freedom of his characters to the logic of dreams: no one bears direct moral responsibility for their dreams, yet dreams remain fictions saturated with deep meaning.[58]
He characterizes the creative process as a disciplined mental practice, one that requires a deliberate oscillation between a “rational side” and its apparent opposite. Once this dual orientation is consciously assumed and sustained over time, a cascade of situations begins to emerge, at times with an almost frantic intensity. In those moments, the material instruments of writing—his fingers on the keyboard or his hand moving across a notebook—prove incapable of matching the velocity of the ideas themselves. He regards this phase of generative excess as his greatest pleasure and, simultaneously, as a source of a certain dread, insofar as it exposes the writer to the tensions between control and overflow that mark creative labor. By contrast, he treats the subsequent stages of literary production—the acts of publishing and selling, as well as the reception of praise, criticism, or even insults directed at his books—as fundamentally irrelevant to the core of his work. In keeping with this stance, he donates his royalties and his lecture fees, a practice that, he maintains, preserves his independence from the institutional circumstances and economic pressures that so often shape, constrain, or redirect other writers.[59]
Jorge Majfud has lived and worked across multiple continents. Born in a small Uruguayan city marked at once by ranching economies, borderland crossings, and the sedimented memory of dictatorship, he later traveled through the Middle East, lived in Mozambique, worked in Spain, studied in the American South, taught at a historically Black university in Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Florida.[60] Across these trajectories, his writing moves deliberately between literature, history, and political philosophy, treating them not as sealed disciplines but as overlapping modes for interrogating power, representation, and belonging. His work has been studied at universities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, where it often serves as a point of entry into broader debates about migration, memory, and democracy. He is a member of the International Scientific Committee of Araucaria in Spain, of Phi Kappa Phi, and of the Professional Member category of the PEN American Center, institutional affiliations that situate his work within transnational circuits of academic and literary authority. He founded and edited the magazine SigloXXI—reflexiones sobre nuestro tiempo,[61] a project that extends his critical practice into the editorial sphere, creating a forum for reflection on the political and cultural urgencies of the present.
More than four decades after the dictatorship that marked his childhood, Majfud continues to write with the steadiness of someone who understood, at three or four years old, that the visible order of the world concealed a more violent and unequal reality. That early understanding did not emerge abstractly: it arose from a gunshot that cut across the fields of Tacuarembó, from a mother’s sculptures that seemed to animate the nocturnal space of the home, from a grandfather’s shattered knee, from an aunt’s suicide, and from messages clandestinely passed to political prisoners when he was five. It was deepened by books acquired at the cost of household furniture, by a typewriter whose carriage return depended on a plastic bottle filled with water, and by five days without food because he had chosen to spend his money on books. Out of this dense fabric of memory, violence, material scarcity, and cultural aspiration, he produced novels, essays, and articles—a sustained body of work that argues, with the persistence of someone who has witnessed how far human cruelty can extend, that the world is intelligible and that, precisely for that reason, it remains open to critique and transformation.
As Eduardo Galeano observed, the years advance like trees sliding past a train window, and Jorge continues to pursue the same unresolved question. He seeks to understand why human life is framed by birth and death, and what that finitude implies for responsibility, meaning, and memory. He asks how power fabricates the narratives through which it justifies itself, how those narratives become embedded in culture, and how, through critical reading and writing, they can be dismantled and rewritten. He returns, too, to the fact that a child who grew up under a dictatorship, in a house crowded with sculptures and books, became a writer who refuses to leave the official version of events intact. He persists in this inquiry, and that persistence itself—the labor of writing, questioning, and rejecting imposed silence—has become his way of answering the questions he cannot abandon.
Raúl Ferrer Herrero, El otro en Jorge Majfud (Ediciones Irreverentes, Madrid, 2017; 2nd ed. Humanus / Illegal Humanus, 2022). Study of “the Other” (exclusion, otherness) in Hacia qué patrias del silencio, La ciudad de la Luna, and El mar estaba sereno, using Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. An English version exists as The Other One in Jorge Majfud.
Leonor Taiano Campoverde, De un infierno a otro: el migrante latino en Crisis de Jorge Majfud (Dialogarts / Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2018). Full-length monograph on migration, the “cosmopolitan poor,” and the mosaic structure of the novel Crisis.
Leonor Taiano, “Huyendo hacia la paradoja del tío Sam: Consideraciones sobre Crisis de Jorge Majfud,” in Finisterre: en el último lugar del mundo (Mexico, 2017), pp. 123–148.
Nina Pluta (Prof. Dr. Nina Podleszańska, Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków), “Migrancias y la dimensión transnacional de la crítica en la narrativa de Jorge Majfud,” Chasqui (Arizona State University), 2021. Analyzes the transnational critical stance in La reina de América, La ciudad de la Luna, Crisis, and El mar estaba sereno. Also indexed on Dialnet.
Silvia M. Gianni (Università Cattolica / Università di Milano-Bicocca), “Identidades de papel. Identidad de la ausencia y negación de los migrantes indocumentados: un enfoque desde tres textos narrativos,” Altre Modernità / Other Modernities (University of Milan), 2014. Reads Crisis alongside works by Alejandro Hernández and Sergio Ramírez on undocumented identity as “absence.”
Leonor Taiano Campoverde, “Crisis: el compromiso majfudiano y la diáspora latinoamericana,” Cincinnati Romance Review, 2018. Deconstruction of exodus and nostos motifs and of the Latino migrant as subaltern antihero.
Karen Barahona (Baldwin-Wallace University), “Sobre Crisis, novela de Jorge Majfud.” Critical essay on crisis as theme, mosaic form, and immigrant experience.
Alberto García-Teresa, review-essay of Crisis published in Letralia and Viento Sur (no. 126, 2013). Treats the novel as a sociological mosaic of immigration and capitalism.
Sumit Gupta (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “Deconstructing ‘The American dream’ in selected works of Hari Kunzru and Jorge Majfud” (2024). Comparative reading of the American Dream as deception in Majfud (especially Crisis) and Kunzru.
Galeano, Eduardo. El cazador de historias (Hunter of Stories). Siglo XXI Editores, 2016. The posthumous collection containing the one-page story about the Majfud-Albernaz family.
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