Costumbrismo

Costumbrismo is a literary and artistic movement, chiefly Spanish and Latin American, devoted to the close observation and depiction of everyday customs, manners, local types and regional life, typically with a satirical, nostalgic or affectionately ironic tone rather than sustained plot or psychological depth. Originating in Spain in the late eighteenth century and flourishing through the nineteenth, its leading Spanish practitioners included Mariano Jose de Larra, Ramon de Mesonero Romanos and Serafin Estebanez Calderon, who published costumbrista sketches, or cuadros de costumbres, capturing the social types and daily life of Madrid and the Spanish provinces. The mode spread widely across Latin America over the nineteenth century, where it absorbed indigenous, Creole and regional material in the literatures of Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Cuba and elsewhere, and it is generally understood as both a movement in its own right and a persistent descriptive mode that fed into the fuller social Realism and Naturalism that followed it in Spanish-language letters.