Since the drainage of Mexico-Tenochtitlan from the mid-sixteenth century onwards to the recent intermittent fires around the Paraná River Delta in the twenty-first century, wetlands, swamps, fens and bogs are chronotopes that have shed light on hegemonic narratives of progress (Eklund, del Valle, Taussig). This has been thematized in various forms throughout Latin American and Caribbean history, such as the historical accounts of La Florida del Inca (1605), by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the novel Tierra mojada (1942), by Afro-Colombian writer Zapata Olivella, the film La ciénaga (2001), by Lucrecia Martel, and La infancia del mundo (2023), by Michel Nieva, a “cli-fi” novel that takes place in the future and imagines a “caribe pampeano” as a result of climate change. Amid this constellation of narratives, this MLA special session discusses how these amphibious locales inform social and material relations through literature and film from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century in Latin America. The goal of the panel is to identify different poetics that grapple with wetlands to analyze modes of socio-ecological coexistence enabled by this biome, which has been the subject of debates that call attention to how communities and subjectivities are defined.

Building upon her article “Early Modern Wetlands: A Brief Literary History of the Unfast” (2022), which examines literary production from early modern England and La Florida del Inca (1605), Hillary Eklund’s presentation will focus on the poem Grandeza Mexicana (1604), by Bernardo de Balbuena. Her presentation considers the linkages between the poem’s thematizing of social mobility and the concomitant fluidity of identity on the one hand, and the aesthetic rendering of the city’s terraqueous environment on the other. Focusing on the water ecologies of Grandeza, Eklund examines how Balbuena’s rewriting of the region’s lacustrine wetlands into sparkling, hypermobile conduits for commerce participates in a broader seventeenth-century discourse of transforming wetlands from uncultivated wastes into profitable and categorically stable biomes. Additionally, Eklund will argue that for all the poem’s confident embrace of dominion and mastery, the murky traces of the city’s lacustrine waterscapes, along with their human and nonhuman inhabitants, attest to the opacity of an environment that simultaneously compels and eludes human designs.

This idea of a paradoxical space is also taken into consideration by Roberto Ibáñez Ricouz, who will propose a spatial reading of Mapocho (2004), by Chilean Nona Fernández. The Mapocho River in the novel operates as a repository for what is disposable and forgettable, yet at the same time it emphasizes and displays it. The waste, understood also as those bodies that are uncomfortable for the construction of an official history, do not completely disappear downstream but rather remain and circulate relentlessly through the city. The amphibious ecosystem in the novel is a space of radical contemporaneity (Massey, 2005) in which official history is incessantly contested by the presences that the river enables: it makes them coexist in the multiplicity of space.

Along similar lines, Bárbara Xavier França’s presentation will consider the film Los muertos (2004), by Lisandro Alonso, to discuss how the novel Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017), by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, portrays both a subject marginalized by the State and a society articulated against it (Clastres, 1977). França will examine how the consumption of psychotropic mushrooms operates in the novel to suggest that it offers an alternative engagement with the territory. The juxtaposition of Alonso’s realism with Cabezón Cámara’s psychedelic utopia prompts França to discuss the role wetlands have had in Argentina’s collective imaginary throughout the twenty-first century.

Finally, Thomaz Amancio will focus on Guimarães Rosa’s 1947 visit to the Pantanal wetlands in Brazil to argue that it is during this visit that one of Brazil’s greatest writers honed his style of representing nature and the speech of the people. Amancio will focus on “Ao Pantanal” (1947), and “Sanga Puytã” (1947), to discuss how although Guimarães Rosa sometimes expressed ambivalence about development, he focused on a phenomenological account of the wetlands and the ranching life of its people. By doing so, Amancio will analyze the ambiguity of Rosa’s writing on the Pantanal, exploring its ideological blind spots as well as its potential as a poetics of wetlands.

The four presentations together in this special session highlight a diverse approach to wetlands’ centrality to the elaboration of modernity, hegemonic cultural formations, and the enshrining of human prepotency over the natural world from the early modern period to the present. Each presenter agreed to keep their presentation between 12-to-13 minutes to ensure enough time for open discussion at the end.