''El dinosaurio'' (The dinosaur) is a

flash fiction Flash fiction is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story (also known as " twitterature"); ...

written by the

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...

-born Guatemalan writer

Augusto Monterroso Augusto Monterroso Bonilla (December 21, 1921 - February 7, 2003) was a Honduran writer who adopted Guatemalan nationality, known for the ironical and humorous style of his short stories. He is considered an important figure in the Latin Americ ...

, published as a part of the book ''Obras completas (y otros cuentos)'', in 1959. It is considered one of the shortest stories in Spanish, and its whole text is the following: Meaning: ''When he/she/it woke, the dinosaur was still there.'' It is a simple sentence that forms a flash story, probably the most famous of all those published by Monterroso throughout his career. It was considered the shortest

conte Conte may refer to: * Conte (literature), a literary genre * Conte (surname) * Conté, a drawing medium * Conte, Jura, town in France * Conté royal family, a fictional family in Tamora Pierce's Tortallan world * Conte, the title of Count in Italy ...

in the Spanish language until the publication of another three works during the 21st century: one in 2005, ''El emigrante'', by Luis Felipe Lomelí; other, in 2006, ''Luis XIV'', by Juan Pedro Aparicio, and one in 2015, ''Epitafio para un microrrelatista'', by Marcelo Gobbo.

Impact in Mexican popular culture

In the

history of Mexico The written history of Mexico spans more than three millennia. First populated more than 13,000 years ago, central and southern Mexico (termed Mesoamerica) saw the rise and fall of complex indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous civilizations ...

, the

Institutional Revolutionary Party The Institutional Revolutionary Party ( es, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, ; abbr. PRI) is a political party in Mexico that was founded in 1929 and held uninterrupted power in the country for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, first as the Nati ...

remained in power for more than seven decades. It was compared to a "Dinosaur" by commentators due to the length of its time in power; as such, the ''El dinosaurio'' poem was often used to mock them.

References

Bibliography

* Spanish short stories 1959 short stories {{1950s-story-stub