The city of New Orleans has exerted a significant influence on the geopolitical dynamics of Central America(ns). In 1899 the creation of the New Orleans-based Standard Fruit Company and the United Fruit Company, marked the inception of plantation economies in Honduras. The establishment of a transnational economic network had reverberating repercussions throughout the isthmus, subduing both political sovereignty and economic autonomy not solely within Honduras but across the broader Central American region. As such, these southern industries were instrumental in turning Central America into a broader “Global South.” Moreover, these neocolonial enterprises engendered demographic shifts within the U.S. South, particularly in New Orleans, which hosts one of the largest populations of Hondurans outside the isthmus.

Despite the significant impact that New Orleans, and consequently the broader U.S. South, has wielded in Central American migration and sociocultural narratives, it has garnered little attention within cultural and literary scholarship. Most scholarship on the Central American diaspora and transnationalism has predominantly fixated on regions such as California and the "West Coast" (Arias, 2003; Rodriguez, 2009; Alvarado et al., 2017; Cardenas, 2018). This panel seeks to redirect scholarly attention away from the West by highlighting the pivotal role of the U.S. South in shaping the social dynamics and cultural expressions of Central American communities. Consisting of four presentations each lasting fifteen minutes, this panel employs a transnational analytical framework to scrutinize the enduring neocolonial legacies and logics within the South (e.g. plantation economies, racial capitalism, imperialism), and their profound ramifications on Central American subjectivities and communities.

John Kennedy Godoy begins our discussion via his presentation, “Returning the Ecological Gaze: Extractivism, Disaster Capitalism, and Internal Displacement in ‘The Honduran Boy.’” Godoy’s analysis of the photograph “The Honduran Boy”—a photo taken after the flooding of two Honduran rivers—underscores the role palm oil production in Honduran alluvial floodplains of the Sula Valley has had in creating an ecological and humanitarian crisis. Focusing on the subject of the photograph, Godoy explicates how Honduran agency appears in the context of ecopolitical forms of subjection and interpellation. Reading the photograph for the plexus of extractivism and disaster capitalism, Godoy demonstrates that in spite of ecological and political subjection the boy’s stance captures the oscillation between displacement and resilience.

Cristina Pardo Porto continues this exploration of the neocolonial effects of U.S. industries in her presentation, “Contesting Visual Narratives of ‘Picturesque’ Panama: Colonial Constructions of Race and Nature.” Focusing on two works, Utopías Decoloniales (2021) and Reclaim and Reconstruct Identity as an Exercise of Resistance (2021) by Afro-Panamanian artist Giana de Dier, Porto contextualizes such work within the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal , highlighting the struggles of displaced Afro-Caribbean migrants—women and workers—in the segregated Canal Zone. As such, Porto asserts that de Dier’s work illuminates past colonial structures and contests the coloniality of the present, offering new radical perspectives and representations of Central American subjectivities.

Alicia Ivonne Estrada’s presentation, “‘Guat Hunting’: Maya (Social) Death in the Diaspora” fuses this discussion of neocolonial legacies with Central Americans living in the U.S. South. Estrada examines the murder of Guatemalan migrant Onésimo Marcelino López Ramos in Florida, arguing that this murder is a form of “Guat Hunting” –an extension of U.S. settler colonial slave and Indian hunting practices that were instrumental in establishing the socio-economic power structure of white supremacy. Estrada’s analysis of these contemporary “Indian hunts” exposes the ways in which the multiple (social and material) deaths of Maya migrants in the South are constructed as normative by dominant media outlets, who fail to frame these murders within this larger settler colonial logic.

The panel concludes with Yajaira Padilla’s presentation, “The Comforts of Home: Salvador(e)an Possibility and Belonging in NW Arkansas” where she explores how the convergence of labor, migration, and consumerism in Northwest Arkansas is giving rise to hybrid Salvadoran cultural expressions. Noting that Salvadoran immigrants have transformed the social, economic, and cultural landscape of the region via the establishment of businesses, cultural production and student networks, Padilla argues that these cultural expressions enable the laying down of roots and “belonging” in the U.S. South.

Collectively, these presentations elucidate the ways in which Central American literary works and cultural productions respond to and resignify the geopolitical dynamics prevalent in the South. In so doing, this panel aims to disrupt and complicate prevailing discourses that tend view Southern racial and colonial frameworks within a white/black racial binary, and often neglect to highlight the ways Latinx communities, particularly Central Americans, are changing the socio-cultural fabric of the U.S. South.