The four papers in this panel study formerly unexplored archives of the cultural production of Afro-Latin Americans and the textual and visual representations of Afro-Latin Americans in print culture by analyzing their presence in popular theater, poetry and in the press. In the last couple of decades, several scholarly works have addressed the brutal aftermath of slavery as well as its symbolic and ideological consequences still lingering in everyday reality. Yet Afro-Latin Americans’ contributions to the expansion of emancipatory discourses and antislavery struggles during the nineteenth century have not only remained understudied, but in some cases disavowed and erased. A recent article in the Washington Post by historian Erika Edwards, discussing Afro-Argentines’ contributions regarding the 2022 World Cup, for example, provoked hundreds of heated discussions in local newspapers, blogs, television, radio, podcasts, and social media spots. Echoing new investigative paths, this panel aims to discuss how Afro-descendants participated, negotiated meanings, and led social and cultural transformations during the 19^th century, with particular emphasis on women’s cultural production. Additionally, considering the current political climate in the US, where discussions about the value of Critical Race Theory in higher education are no longer the exclusive domain of academic spheres, but they are highly contested in public forums where they motivate the crafting of specific policies and political agendas, it is not only timely but imperative that professional organizations become safe spaces for the free exchange of ideas and for the discussion of inclusive modes of teaching, learning, and researching that are currently under attack.

Aguilar Dornelles’ paper highlights the political nature of the melodramatic manipulation of black female bodies in abolitionist Brazilian press and its central role in generating empathy and mobilizing popular support. Following the representation of two enslaved young women, Joanna and Eduarda, in Gazeta da Tarde, Revista Illustrada, Gazeta de Notícias, O Mequetrefe, O Apostolo, and O Paiz, it examines the political scope of female victimization and discusses how these images of silent suffering victims became a prevalent discourse in which black female agency was blurred, obscured, and erased. It contends that these melodramatic figures help us to understand the crucial role that gender played in the abolitionist struggle. Moody’s paper examines a periodical for Afro-descendent women in Cuba, Minerva, Revista Quincenal Dedicada a la Mujer de Color, published in Havana between 1888 and 1889, and the ways it charted a new discourse on womanhood and beauty for the Afro-Cuban woman. Minerva's various authors sought to celebrate personhood and individuality, while resisting the mainstream discourse fed by inequality, which associated her beauty with sexual availability. For some authors, like África de Céspedes, these discourses merged with an emphatic rejection of society's unreasonable expectations for women of color. From militant resistance to sexism, to reconsideration of the Afro-Cuban family, Minerva reveals varied proposals from a network of women writers in a time of social transformation. Gobbi’s paper redresses the historical disavowal of Afro-Brazilian agency and erasure of the significance of Palmares (the most enduring maroon settlement in Brazilian history) as a symbol of slave resistance, by analyzing the role of the colonial archive in the literary representation of Zumbi in the 19^th-century texts by Joaquim Norberto de Souza Silva (1851), Castro Alves (1878) and Sílvio Romero (1883), which refused 18^th-century Sebastião da Rocha Pita’s assumptions that offered an unheroic and dishonored account of Zumbi, the main political leader of Palmares, and established the settlement’s destruction as the necessary outcome of a “civilizing” mission while extolling the enterprise of Luso-Amerindian regiments. Ko’s paper turns to the archive of Argentina’s teatro popular criollo in the late nineteenth century to challenge the still widely-spread discourse of Argentina’s presumed whiteness and racelessness. While elite and official narratives successfully constructed an exceptionally homogenous Argentina where race and racial ideologies were irrelevant, Argentina’s popular theater of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently and consistently staged racialized performances and served as an important public site for discussions of race, racial identities, racism, and anti-racism. This paper discusses how applying the lens of race on this archive helps us understand how these massively popular performances continued to produce and disseminate racialized and racist images at the backdrop of an official discourse of whiteness. It also discusses the ways that it has led to other largely unexamined archival materials that go beyond the acknowledgment and denunciation of racialized and racist cultural expressions but to more positive histories of those who were simultaneously racialized and rendered invisible.