"Goya saw Hitler before Hitler saw Goya." With this blunt phrase begins the novel Fake Tracks. An anthropological vision set in the not-so-distant future, 2029, tells the story of a Chinese anthropologist who “tired of working in excavations in his country to extract accounting books and reports on ecological catastrophes hidden by fraudulent companies, decided to resume his studies of Spanish at the Instituto Cervantes and travel to Latin America ».

The protagonist wishes to know the land of his literary heroes, Mexicans and Argentines, who have taught him the Spanish language and impregnated him with a mythology that, so distant from his reality, refers him to an alternative world. It also corrodes the curiosity of knowing the territories to which government officials have fled accused of corruption in their country, or hundreds of workers who have been exiled after the massive bankruptcies of the corporations in which they worked.

In the world that García Canclini shows us, the great wars are fought in cyberspace, natural catastrophes have ruined with ancient archives erasing much of the historical and cultural memory of the world, social interactions run almost exclusively in socio-social networks. techniques (under permanent surveillance) and cities have become a tenuous battlefield between immigrants, exiles, stateless persons, and the owners of capital.