This session will explore literary landscapes that intricately engage with the tangible realities and narratives of migration. Discussions will delve into the role of literature in shaping and challenging contemporary perceptions of cross-border experiences, probing the boundaries and potentials of language, form, and memory in addressing both visible and unseen aspects of migration. Thus, this panel confronts one of the most urgent issues of our era: undocumented migration. In doing so, it follows the scholarship of figures such as Glenda Carpio's Migrant Aesthetics, which examines literature's capacity to prompt readers to reflect on their own complicity in the ongoing displacement of migrants, and Thomas Nail's The Figure of the Migrant, which examines movement as a form of political power, theorizing migration in relation to contemporary societal and political frameworks.

This session will feature four presentations, with each participant allocated 15 minutes. The remaining time will be dedicated to the Q&A.

In the first presentation, PhD candidate Tijana Cupic will present her paper "The Affective Reality of a Working Migrant Body in Central American Literature," where she argues that the intersection of immigration and labor policies are at the core of the affective reality of immigrant workers. Cupic will examine 20th and 21st-century Central American literature that portrays how labor conditions and immigration policies in the United States intersect to define a working migrant body coming from Central America. The literary corpus this research analyzes consists of three narratives from the Northern Triangle countries: Claudia Hernández (El Salvador) They Have Fired at Her Again (2016), Adolfo Méndez Vides (Guatemala) Las murallas (1997), and Roberto Quesada (Honduras) Nunca entres por Miami (2014). The author argues that the everyday working conditions that the characters from the novels experience in the United States are emotionally and politically charged and embodied experiences that create an affective political reality of an immigrant body from Central America. The second paper, titled "Masculinidad migrante: misoginia y homofobia en Paraíso Travel y Nunca entres por Miami" will be presented by PhD student Javier Franco. In his work, Franco will study Paraíso Travel and Nunca entres por Miami, two 21st century immigration novels, will highlight the dangers of Latin American masculine ideology within the context of migration that sees the immigrant man as feminized, emasculated by the metropolis and the women (who represent the American dream) that emigrate with them.

The third presentation will be "Makina the Debtor, Makina the Creditor: Migrant Bodies and Moral Debt in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo" where Assistant Professor Angel Diaz Davalos will analyze Makina, Herrera’s transborder protagonist is a migrant and a messenger. For Davalos, shis the bridge between two countries and two cultures, but most importantly, she stands at the center of the economic and cultural relations between the Global North and South. This paper will focus on how, as financial mathematical algorithms hit marginalized communities, ‘debt’ has taken on an added and convoluted ethical and moral standing, as in the moral debt owed to Africans for slavery, to Indigenous populations for land theft, or to the Global South more generally for centuries of extractivism. In this way, Davalos analyzes Makina’s role in deconstructing the traditional debtor-creditor relationship in the context of migration in the Americas. Finally, Associate Professor Cara Kinally will present "“Digital Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer." In her work Kinnally discusses the methods through which Rivera reminds us that digital work is not divorced from physical bodies; that even when workers are literally invisible, such migrations have tangible, bodily consequences, even if those in the Global North do not witness them. For Kinnally, the film probes the very definition of what it means to migrate, how migration is evolving in our digital present (and future), and how even instances of disembodied migration remain tied, paradoxically, to the physical body. Ultimately, Sleep Dealer looks to the future—one that now seems frighteningly near—and questions how perceptions of migrant bodies will change and are changing in the digital age, but also how systems of bodily coercion and control are amplified, not deterred, by technologies of disembodiment.

As shown above, the participants will explore how literature delves into the often unseen or less immediately apparent dangers faced by undocumented migrants in Latin America. Furthermore, this panel will generate a discussion regarding the role of literary works to shape and challenge current understandings on migration.

This panel comprises a diverse array of voices representing various cultural backgrounds and career levels.