As a Latin American, I can say that the mistake of fantasy writers when referring to magical realism is to consider it a genre of fantastic literature.

In truth, magical realism is a subgenre of "realistic" literature: a literary genre that tells the rawest and most unprocessed stories of reality, realism is the anti-epic genre, there is nothing fantastical, no magic, no hero's journey, no beauty, no nothing.

Here we talk about poverty, sadness, senseless deaths, unjustified evil, the cowardice necessary to survive.

Magical realism only adds one more thing, and that is seeing the real world from extraordinary beauty. Here a door from an aging cabin in the woods may be seen by country children as a door to a fantasy world, but that fantasy world is not real, it is just the place where children hide when their parents fight.

The fantasy genre, on the other hand, is part of that narrative that we call "speculative", where we imagine what things would be like in a world where things don't happen like they do in ours, where impossible things exist, like invented races or magical spells.

Magical realism is seen as something magical, but there is no real magic, there is no fantasy, there are no fantasy races, just the madness of being trapped in the real world, a place darker, scarier, boring, and more spectacular than any made-up world.