Plascencia uses magical realism to blur the line between fiction and reality throughout The People of Paper for specific purposes, including to describe the experiences of immigrants confronting a new culture, to undermine social institutions and destabilize their hold on “truth,” and to demonstrate that the boundary between the fictional and the real is not really a boundary at all, but rather a contested and amorphous borderland.

By way of background, magical realism may be thought of as a genre or style of writing in which the world is described realistically but includes magical events treated as everyday occurrences. At the same time, everyday occurrences seem magical to the characters. Thus, in a work like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, flying carpets are simply part of reality and easily accepted by the characters, whereas something as commonplace as ice appears magical. In The People of Paper, magical realism surfaces stories of the origami surgeon, the presence of mechanical tortoises, and the sky serving as the boundary between characters and the author, among many other instances. In a magical realist text, fiction and nonfiction intertwine in the storytelling, often revealing what has been previously hidden.