Rodrigo Figueroa Obregón’s paper, "Mexican Anti-Republican Motherhood in Brenda Navarro’s Casas Vacías and Guadalupe Nettel’s La hija única," engages critically with Thomas Genova’s concept of republican motherhood, analyzing how contemporary Mexican novels subvert historically promoted maternity ideals from the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those championed by post-revolutionary Mexican governments. Navarro’s novel contrasts sharply with these ideals by interrogating whether motherhood inherently embodies cheerfulness or horror, exploring the emotional displacement associated with the loss or lack of maternal desire. Nettel’s narrative, in contrast, disrupts the patriarchal, nuclear family model by presenting a queer, communal caregiving network formed around a child with a disability, drawing compelling parallels between human and animal maternal behaviors to challenge biological and familial determinism.

Mónica García Blizzard further complicates idealized motherhood through an analysis of Luis Buñuel’s provocative 1950 film, Los olvidados—situated within the context of mid-twentieth century Mexico, during which poverty on the urban margins proliferated alongside the country’s rapid industrialization and economic growth. The film reaccentuates the topic of structural violence as experienced by the poor by taking aim at one of Mexican culture’s most cherished archetypes: the abnegated, unconditionally loving, and self-sacrificing mother. In playfully using the multiple meanings the expression, “hasta la madre,” whose vernacular meaning in Mexican Spanish is to be entirely fed up, García Blizzard argues that Buñuel’s representation stems from his frustration with Mexican cinema of the 1940s, which idealized family relationships among the poor. In contrast, the mother figure in Buñuel’s film is so fed up with her material conditions, that she largely forgoes the maternal role leading to her son’s violent death. Through textual filmic analysis, this paper elucidates how part of the uniqueness of Buñuel’s mordant socioeconomic critique of Mexican society, is that it reaches hasta la madre, or all the way to the figure of the mother, positing that poor women on the urban margins cannot possibly summon and sustain maternal devotion in the face of abject poverty and institutional neglect.

Turning to contemporary literary representations, Ayten Tartici’s paper, "Motherhood by Proxy: Surrogate Caregiving and Displacement in Guadalupe Nettel and Pilar Quintana," explores how childless yet maternal figures in recent Latin American fiction enact caregiving through proximity rather than biological connection. Focusing on Nettel’s La hija única and Quintana’s La perra, Tartici analyzes the distinct maternal stances of each protagonist: Nettel’s career-oriented young woman, who chooses sterilization, and Quintana’s older protagonist, who struggles with infertility and adopts a dog as a surrogate child. Despite differences, both characters embody what Tartici terms “motherhood by proxy,” highlighting their compulsion to closely monitor and parent newborns—human and non-human—thus perpetuating societal anxieties about maternal adequacy, surveillance, and control. Rather than critiquing feminized care as invisible labor, these novels emphasize the societal necessity of surrogate maternal figures, offering a distinctive Latin American approach compared to American or European counterparts.

A brief, 10-minute commentary will be offered by the panel presider and organizer, Inger Flem Soto, as a starting point for general discussion. Flem Soto will place these presentations in conversation with broader debates across Latin America, particularly those emerging within Southern Cone scholarship. She will highlight how these works collectively complicate and unsettle state and culturally grounded investments in the mother figure, emphasizing the political potency inherent in multiplying and destabilizing motherhood.