Kristian Ayala’s paper, “Mission Ruins and Specters of the Spanish Borderlands,” engages the spatial and historical dimensions of the gothic within Latinx literature by exploring how Spanish missions haunt pre-Movement era Chicanx literature. Ayala contends that scholarly understandings of Chicanx literary discourse as defined through the U.S.-Mexico borderlands do not fully account for a 20th-century cultural discourse that idealized a Spanish colonial heritage. By studying Gothicized ruins of the California missions in architectural discourse and historical romances of the early 20th-century, including Gertrude Atherton’s The Doomswoman (1893) and Maria Sacramenta Lopez de Cummings’s Claudio and Anita: A Historical Romance of San Gabriel’s Early Mission Days (1921), Ayala suggests that the specters of Spanish colonization in California challenge accepted notions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Similarly rethinking the spatial context of U.S. Latinx literature through horror, Magda García’s paper, “Claiming La Bruja: The Bruja as Hermeneutic in ire'ne lara silva's ‘tecolotl,’” examines the significance of the rural in the proliferation of U.S. Latinx horror. Through examination of Chicana/Tejana writer ire’ne lara silva’s short story, “tecolotl” (2013), this paper posits the bruja as representative of a specifically regional strain (namely, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas) of Chicanx literature. García situates the bruja as a hermeneutic that materializes from the ways in which rural Tejanas envision their affective, historical, and embodied selves through cultural modes grounded in the speculative. Through silva’s story, which tells of a young woman’s initial transformation into a lechuza (the bruja’s animal form) by committing an act of revenge, García reads the figure of the bruja as animating a form of counterpower through monstrous bloodlust.
By examining tales of horror based on regional oral histories and folklore centered on witchcraft, Dominique Rodríguez signals to the genres and forms to which U.S. Latinx horror is indebted, with particular attention to gender. Rodríguez’s paper, “Brujas and Lechuzas: Gender in Latinx Horror Stories of Brujería from the U.S. Southwest,” examines the representation of Brujería and its practitioners in Nasario Garcia’s collection of horror-stories, Brujerías: Stories of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the American Southwest and Beyond (2020), derived from oral histories of Latinx communities in the U.S. Southwest. Specifically, Rodriguez analyzes the role of gendered expressions of power in the horrific perceptions of Brujería and its alleged practitioners through a Chicana feminist perspective.
Lastly, Sonia Farid’s paper, “‘From beyond the grave’: Hauntology, Spectral ‘traces,’ and Latina Gothic,” examines Derrida’s concept of hauntology in two Latinx novels: V. Castro’s The Queen of the Cicadas (2021) and Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago (2021). Farid focuses on how past traumas, unresolved injustices, and buried secrets shape the present and determine the fate of characters who summon ghosts. Specifically, she identifies “traces” of a troubled past as a lens through which to examine Latinx identity and the traumatic history of Latinx communities across the U.S., namely South Texas and Chicago. Her paper examines 1) the use of a Texan urban legend (“la reina de las chicharras”) and Mexican folklore in Castro’s novel and 2) the Pied Piper fairy tale in Pelayo’s novel. Fostering a discussion on the relationship between U.S. Latinx horror and magical realism, Farid also traces the influence of Latin American “hauntological” literature such as Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and Julio Cortázar’s short story “Casa tomada” (1946) on Castro’s and Pelayo’s novels.
The panel’s timeliness is exemplified by the continued significance of Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (UCLA Aztlán Anthology, 2017) and the recent publication of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections of Horror (Feminist Press, 2022).
The panel consists of four panelists and a presider, with fifteen minutes allotted to each panelist and fifteen minutes to unstructured audience discussion.