At the crossroads of writing and individual and social life, two expeditions by Lucio V. Mansilla, Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) and Cartas de Amambay (1878), inquire into the restlessness of capitalist modernization in Latin America through narrative forms that imagine the future novel. Published in serialized form in prestigious Buenos Aires newspapers (La Tribuna and El Nacional), both texts use novelistic procedures such as intrigue to catch the reader, the discursive exploration of socio-economic circumstances, the tension between reading and belief as a bias of the interplay of reality and fiction.