In her paper “A Caribbean ‘Monster’ of the Anthropocene: Decolonizing Human-Crustacean Assemblages in Rosario Ferré’s ‘La muñeca menor’” (12 minutes), Charlotte Rogers studies Ferré’s short story and argues that the interspecies beings that populate “La muñeca menor” are the intentionally monstrous progeny of Puerto Rico’s legacy of environmental colonialism. As the oldest ongoing colony in the world, the island’s socio-ecological history is marked by the enslavement and exploitation of Indigenous and African laborers in mines and on plantations and, in the second half of the twentieth century, on the use of the island as an experimental industrial laboratory. This paper brings the “multispecies turn” in Environmental Humanities out of its home disciplines in contemporary anthropology and philosophy and introduces it to literary criticism of the Américas.

In “Queering the Peruvian Desert Coast in Javier Vargas Sotomayor’s Telúricas Subterráneas” (12 minutes), Javier Muñoz-Díaz discusses the mariconización/queering of the Peruvian coastal territory in Vargas Sotomayor’s visual and performative works. In particular, he studies how Vargas Sotomayor recovers the Indigenous and homosexual/marica/travesti in a territory colonized by extractivism and racist capitalism in the Anthropocene. To do so, Muñoz-Díaz focuses on three of Vargas Sotomayor’s works. The first, titled “Earthquake and Sodomy,” establishes the territory of the coastal desert within Indigenous cultural coordinates that denounce the colonial criminalization of non-heteronormative practices. The second, a performance titled "Huayco Epidemic," inserts itself in an archaeological debate surrounding the so-called “erotic huacos” of the Moche culture and enacts the excavation of non-heteronormative bodies. The third and final work, an engraving called “The Tongue is my Wind,” presents a portrait of the Indigenous writer José María Arguedas intervening with attributes of a stereotyped female sexuality.

In “Trees and Codes: The Potential of Algorithmic Politics” (12 minutes), Alex Saum-Pascual studies the imbrication of digital technologies in Latin American literary production, looking particularly at its engagement with concepts of environmental crisis writ large, through a new materialist lens. She focuses on the work of two digital artists who reconfigure digital materiality not only in relation to its physical and signifying strategies but also regarding the Capitalocene and its exploitation of the Earth and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. She examines three poetic games by Eugenio Tisselli (Mexico): La Puerta/The Gate (2017), Mycelium Rider (2018), and Las líneas de fuerza (2023); and two sister works by Milton Läufer (Argentina): The Emerging Gardens of Babel (Four Seasons) (2021) and (on a Midwinter’s Night) (2021). By challenging the aesthetics of algorithmic abstraction that spring from most digital works, these two artists reject the purported disconnection between land, matter, body, and globalization’s free circulation of goods, and emphasize, instead, the material impact of capitalism’s digital infrastructures.

Finally, in “The ‘Bee Effect’: Decolonial Ecofeminisms from the Global South in a Post-Developed World” (12 minutes), Elena Deanda analyzes the role of Indigenous women, particularly of Mayan and Ayoreo women, in films and animations that show how ecofeminist and decolonized movements apply a female ethics of care to nature (like bees and water) and humans, like nations, countries, and the wider world. In doing so, Deanda argues that Indigenous women are to be considered the avant-garde in the designing of many post-developed worlds. By analyzing cultural products including Denis Chapon’s short Abuela Grillo (2009) and Kata Beilin’s film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees (2023), she highlights how, when preserving and re-designing the different biophysical and social commons, Indigenous women leave an impactful footprint on present and future societies: a butterfly, or rather, a ‘bee effect’ on the (post)anthropocentric world.