In recent years, Latinx non-fiction like Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds (2023), Javier Zamora’s Solito (2022), Alejandra Campoverdi’s First Gen (2023), Dorsía Smith Silva’s In Inheritance of Drowning (2022) and Alan Pelaez-López’ Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (2020), have explored the European colonial and U.S. imperial roots of contemporary Latinx struggles and resilience. These texts build on a critical tradition in ethnic studies and U.S. women of color feminism of turning the personal into the political while also responding to calls in classic criticism at the intersection of Latinx studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory to reframe trauma and healing from a Latinx-forward perspective.
For example, in Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (2007), Antonio Viego proposes that we “have developed no language to talk about ethnic-racialized subjectivity” outside of discourses of “wholeness, completeness, and transparency” (Viego 4). Women of color feminist scholar, Norma Alarcón responds to this omission in her essay, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called my Back and Anglo-American Feminism” (1991). In it, she challenges Anglo American feminism’s “autonomous, self-making, [and] self-determining” subject to make space for Bridge’s “multiple-voiced” subject: a socially constructed and historically determined subject who embraces ambivalence, complexity, and contradiction (Alarcón 29). Similarly, in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003), Juana Rodriguez discusses how queerness, in its “excess of categories,” constantly shifts meanings much like Latinidad does (Rodriguez 24, 53). Clearly, for Latinxs who may never achieve neutrality, abstraction, or universality in the eyes of the dominant majority, traditional discourses about trauma and healing that assume the preexistence or the possibility of a single, self-referential, and stable normative subject are not enough.
To address this gap in the scholarship, this proposed panel will offer a provocative and varied portrait of how Latinx authors are turning to writing for healing from intergenerational trauma and systemic violence, powerfully willing all of themselves and their communities of survival into existence. This 60-minute session will feature four academic presentations, each lasting 12 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. Attendees will engage in group discussions to consider how Latinx memoirs and autobiographical poetry offer unique and valuable insights into how historically-excluded subjects overcome personal and societal hardships.
The session will begin with David Lombard who will bridge the recent rise of the health humanities with Latinx literature to argue that the Mexican American Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold (2015), which depicts the author’s son’s struggles with mental illness, can help develop a culturally sensitive model of schizophrenia. From here, John Kennedy Godoy will read Honduran and Ecuadorian American Jessica Hope’s First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream (2024), on the pressures of being a first-generation daughter of immigrants, to reframe addiction from a personal failing to a symptom of racialized and gendered wounds, deeply entangled with colonial and systemic violence. Next, Aitor Bouso-Gavín will provide a comparative reading of Salvadoran American poet Yesika Salgado’s Tesoro (2018) and queer Mexican American writer Rigoberto González’ Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006) on the poetics of colonial wounding and the literary articulation of intersectional oppression, including anti-Latinx racism, (hetero)sexism, fatphobia, and body-shaming culture. Finally, Fernanda Cunha will discuss how Wendy Ortiz’s representation of statuary rape in Excavation: a Memoir (2014) pushes against hegemonic racialized and gendered expectations of queer Latina victimhood while using metaphors and motifs of “suciedad,” or organic matter, to bring sedimented histories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality to the surface.
Ultimately, this proposed panel– which brings together literary scholars at different stages of their careers with expertise in the medical humanities, ethnic studies, and queer theory–will offer a timely reframing of Latinx survival strategies as revolutionary kernels for a more life-affirming and equitable future.