A fresh reading and close analysis of The Kingdom of This World, Men of Maize, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Realismo mágico y primitivismo brings anthropology, modern art, intellectual history, reception aesthetics and semiotics to bear on the texts in question. Camayd-Freixas develops a theory of magical realism along ethnological lines as a meaningful critical concept in Latin American literary history. The author documents the historical relationship between magical realism and primitivism in Europe and Latin America. He argues that magical realism is a unity of the primitive viewpoint, the transculturation of reality-norms, and the construction of historical allegory; and examines the problems and development of magical realism in the work of leading Latin American writers. (Text in Spanish).