Magical realism is a powerful tool within Latin American literature as it challenges our conceptions of life and culture. In Naranjo’s “And We Sold the Rain” the seemingly impossible within regular life highlights the strain of the economic crisis in the collective conscious. In our class discussion, we briefly touched on Naranjo’s use of intertextuality and reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work. While there is a direct reference with the mention of “Macondo,” there seem to be stylistic similarities between “And We Sold the Rain” and “100 Years of Solitude” (pg. 151). Marquez begins “100 years of solitude” stating “Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía” would remember the first time his father showed him ice (pg. 1). Naranjo begins her piece quite similarly, focusing on one man of power, a climactic moment, and a distorted sense of time. Naranjo’s narrator is omniscient, narrating what the treasury minister said “a few days ago” similarly to how Marquez begins his story in both the future and the past (pg. 151). Both Marquez and Naranjo play with time as a concept at the start of their stories as if to suggest that the nature of the problems that face both men are cyclical.  This technique also drops the reader immediately into the meat of the story and gives them a view of the potential conflict. Additionally, the cyclical nature of time points to a trend in magical realism that focuses on generational stories and struggles. I found the introductions of both stories to feel quite similar in style and am interested to see if others feel similarly.