Chicana feminist writer Sandra Cisneros has long focused on the act of creating a space of her own, starting with her 1984 House on Mango Street. As Sara Ramírez focuses on in her paper, “YAP: Sandra Cisneros and the Politics of Archiving Latino Youth,” as a still living, able-bodied, author focused on crafting her own story, Cisneros has extended this act to taking a notable, agentive role in the assemblage of her papers and ephemera in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. The result, as Ramírez explains, is a concretization of Cisneros’s own archives as overtly political sites. More specifically, Ramírez focuses on Cisneros’s inclusion of a collection of YAP newsletters, a bimonthly publication that she initiated at Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago, Illinois. The newsletters render visible the topics important to “at-risk” youth in the Pilsen area, between 1978 and 1980. Ramírez reads the inclusion of YAP newsletters in a university archive as demonstrating Cisneros’s political commitment to creating space for marginalized voices in an institutional setting.

Magda García’s paper, “‘The gaping mouth slit heart from mind’: Reading Body Horror in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue State,” shifts the focus from the institutional archive to the body as archive, where un/familiarity serves to create unease. García turns to Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, specifically the concept of the Coatlicue state, to examine how horror imbues Latina/Chicana feminist imaginaries. García proposes body horror as a central component of the Coatlicue state, the psychological process of death/rebirth through which pain has the potential to lead to a higher consciousness. While the Coatlicue state is understood within a psychological context, García’s focus on body horror centers the role of the body, particularly images of tearing apart the body as a form of inventory of the self, rendering the body as un/familiar through a simultaneously internal/external bodily experience where the terror of not finding yourself is palpable.

Roberto Macias’s paper, “‘Temperance was for fools”: Archiving the Spiritual in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son,” explores the construction of a personal archive as a means of connecting with and reconceptualizing a spiritual and familial past. In the opening of Lemus’s novel, the trans protagonist, Frank Cruz, in reconnecting with his estranged and dying father learns that he is inheriting two things from him: a degenerative eyesight condition and a self-published book of prose poetry with an added retablo of Nahui Olin that belonged to Frank’s grandmother. From this personal archive, Frank eventually learns of his grandmother’s love affair with Olin, a famed Mexican feminist artist–a past that he idealizes and that comes to shape his own codependent relationship with his partner, Nathalie, in the present. Through a spiritual deciphering of this personal archive, which necessarily entails reconceptualizing the notion of home, Frank reconstructs both his own masculinity as well as inherited trauma.

The panel consists of three panelists and a presider, with 20 minutes allotted to each panelist and fifteen minutes to unstructured audience discussion.