This session focuses on the quest for visibility in Mexican literature and culture. Since colonial times, Mexico has been covered in a thick veil of prejudices and discriminative practices that have created cultural and social divisions in the country. Colonial institutions not only established protocols based on blood purity that became the foundation of a caste system but also determined complex dynamics in the core of cultural and everyday practices that allowed dominant, aggressive, and toxic male behavior that are still the normative principles of sociability.

This panel centers around the stories, narratives, and historical erasure of communities on the margins displaced and silenced by hegemonic discourses in Mexican society. The four presentations in this panel acknowledge the politics of visibility prevailing in Mexican culture and society, which maintains the wheel of discrimination and prejudice. Each presentation provides a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of productive narratives that tell the story of communities in the margins, such as Afro-descendant heroes during Mexican independence, marginal youths living in the urban periphery, victims of feminicide and their families, and migrant communities asking for recognition.

Monica García-Blizzard, in “Of Visibility and Marginality: Adolfo Garnica and Independent Mexican Cinema,” analyzes how Adolfo Garnica’s film También ellos tienen ilusiones brings new visibility to marginal youths living in the periphery of Mexico City. In 1956, independent Mexican director Adolfo Garnica concluded the short film También ellos tienen ilusiones, for which he was recognized at the 9th International Amateur Film Festival held in Cannes. His film insists on centering the subjectivity of impoverished youth while promoting solidarity. In bringing attention to the contribution of Garnica’s short film, her presentation also engages in a conversation about the visibility of independent Mexican cinema and its creators, many of whom were marginalized by the mainstream industry, as well as by film critics and other tastemakers.

Alan Malfavon, in “Power and Belonging: The Rise, Fall, and Erasure of José Antonio Martínez in Veracruz’s Early War for Independence,” analyzes how Mexican history has systematically erased the presence of José Antonio Martínez, Veracruz’s main Black Insurgent from 1811 to 1814 during Mexico’s War for Independence. José Antonio Martínez was an active ideological participant aware of and responding to debates concerning Black citizenship and belonging on both sides of the Atlantic. Malfavon identifies this little-known, dramatic, and significant development of the Mexican Insurgency in Veracruz to mark a symbolic and literal military and political transition that affected Veracruz’s Afro-descendants for the remainder of the war. His presentation seeks to recover and reconstruct the story of José Antonio Martínez and other Black Insurgents whose lives, roles, and legacies have been erased by Criollo narratives of the Mexican War of Independence.

Alejandro Ramírez-Méndez, in “(Hyper)Visible Borders: Migration, Visual Narratives, and the Politics of (Hyper) Visibility at the US-Mexico Border,” analyzes how Mexican migrants and members of marginalized communities experience the distress of hypervisibility in the US-Mexico border. Contemporary digital media artists and filmmakers like Evan Apodaca, Vicki Funari, or Sergio de la Torre have tried unique means of representing human mobility at the Mexico-US border. Their visual narratives and digital projects, like Apodaca’s Qué lejos estoy (2016) or Furnari’s and de la Torre’s Maquilapolis (2006), offer a re-understanding of how technology and visual media affect how we see and watch transnational identities and migration. This presentation examines the feeling of being overly visible within the liminality of the borderlands while using digital tools and rhetoric to express alternative citizenships and mobility beyond the Mexico-US border.

Natalia Villanueva-Nieves, in “A Literature of the Commons: Liliana’s Invincible Summer as Collective Testimonio and Communal Archive,” focuses on how Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021), which narrates the last months of Rivera Garza’s sister before being murdered by her ex-boyfriend, withstands the politics of invisibility in Mexican literature not only by producing a narrative that tells the stories of communities in the margins (such as the victims of feminicide and their families) but also by advancing literary devices that privilege the collective over individualism. In particular, this presentation examines how Liliana’s Invincible Summer consists of a communal testimonio that finds its origins and purpose in the historical materiality of community grassroots activism.