The panel opens with We made love illegally: Love, incest, and world-making, where Alfredo Walls (Johns Hopkins University) studies Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro de México to argue that the forbidden love between the protagonists creates a world of reciprocal care and self-fashioning against the backdrop of political repression. Through a representation of incest, the novel unmasks the hypocrisies leading to the 1968 student massacre and uniquely performs the Benjaminian principle regarding how, through alternative history, it is possible to pay attention to the marginal and the outlawed. This paper studies how the seemingly chaotic structure of the novel is given cohesion by the cousins’ love affair, which situates Palinuro de México as an experimental romantic text that imagines an alternate world where the disruptive nature of forbidden love percolates through every social relation, pushing language and social conventions to their limits. The next presentation, Ecologies of Care Within Sites of Disaster by Diana Aldrete (Trinity College), studies Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s Trash (2023) through an ecocritical lens to examine how despite living in neglected border communities, the characters exercise ethics of care while engaging with the ecological disaster of a municipal garbage dump in Ciudad Juárez. Aldrete proposes that despite their marginalization, the protagonists deploy an ecofeminist perspective that advocates for a new cosmology where cooperation, mutual care, and love are necessary for maintaining life. Osiris Aníbal Gómez (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) continues with Screening Comunalidad: Tequio, Kinship, and Mutual Care in Ángeles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco, where he explores the concept of comunalidad, coined in 1980 by Mixe anthropologist, Floriberto Díaz and Zapotec singer-song writer, Jaime Luna. This concept is a communal territory-based philosophical practice centered on amplifying the collective agency of the human as an inseparable part of nature. Under a strict regimen of voluntary work, members of a community see service to the other and the territory as the purest and most innate bond between human and non-human life. Tequio (unpaid service to the community) is seen both as an expression of mutual care and kinship and a practice of collective intellectual creativity. Gómez studies the representation of comunalidad in Angles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco (2022), which brings to the fore women-led practices of mutual care and sorority in the film. Finally, Francesca Dennstedt (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) presents Restorative Criticism and Feminist Vulnerability, where she examines how Mexican feminist movements are mobilizing new ways of doing politics that are reshaping the literary sphere. Dennstedt explores a methodology of literary analysis capable of accounting for this violence to try to repair both the immaterial and material damage left by heteropatriarchal formations. She proposes restorative criticism as an affective method of analysis that pays attention to extratextual elements and to what was previously ignored with the intention of mobilizing political affections in our current present. This restorative criticism is built through Ave Barrera’s fiction Restauración to later enact a restorative reading of Inés Arredondo’s ideas of eroticism. Put together, this paper shows how vulnerability operates as a positionality with the potential to reorient literary criticism.