The panel opens with a presentation by Francisco Carrillo. His paper explores recent works by Mexican writers like Cristina Rivera-Garza, Yuri Herrera, Vivian Abenshushan, and Sara Uribe, and discusses the emergence of a literary current that not only places its attention on the intersections of labor and environmental extractivisms, but that also draws connections between these practices and the working conditions of the literary industry. In this sense, Carrillo is interested in bringing up questions about the ways in which recent works of fiction are thematizing the labor of writing itself as connected to this landscape of precarity and informality and through this experimenting with practices that might open potential alternatives and sites of resistance to our current “working conditions”.

In a similar vein and through a brief discussion of Fernanda Melchor’s much-acclaimed Hurricane Season, Liesbeth François will touch upon how the neoliberal withdrawal of the state since the 1980s has not only erased basic guarantees of security and justice in Mexico, but also drastically re-shaped the landscapes of labor. François’s intervention resorts to Melchor’s depictions of youth in her novel to open up a series of questions about the blurring points at which formal but underpaid modes of labor and informal ones are becoming increasingly undifferentiated.

After these readings of contemporary Mexican literature, Andy Barrientos-Gómez will shed light onto the thousands of men, women, and children that succumb every year to the shadow economy that is human trafficking. This project is a comparative analysis of the representation of the sexual economy and its intersection with human trafficking in the Mexican novel, Las muertas (1977) and the Brazilian telenovela, Salve Jorge (2012) to interpret how the modus operandi of human trafficking, for sexual exploitation and commerce, operates as a surplus of gore capitalism. This, in turn, will shed light on the violence and commoditization of bodies in Latin America today.

Turning to think about the recent histories of informal labor sectors in Mexico City, Ian Erickson-Kery will close the panel by addressing questions about how the cartographies of informality seem to coincide, in numerous ways, with dominant modes of urbanization. Erickson-Kery’s questions use the work of artist Melquiades Herrera, especially his writing and photographic practice as they capture his unique observations and objects gathered from his daily walks through popular marketplaces. Erickson-Kery is interested in discussing Herrera’s art as it revises standardized representations of industrial labor to account for practices such as ambulatory vending, small-scale sweatshop labor, contraband smuggling, and autoconstrucción. Taken together in Herrera’s texts and images, these practices form a dialectic of visible and concealed labor constitutive of the contemporary city.

Each speaker will have 13 minutes to present, which will leave 25 minutes for uninterrupted discussion at the end.