In a 1996 article, Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar proposed that one could read broad and important (“amplios e importantes”) segments of Latin American literature through the lens of migrant subjectivities, discourses, and modes of representation. Although Cornejo Polar references the hemisphere at large, his literary criticism primarily fixed its gaze on Peru and that nation’s most notorious migratory phenomenon: internal (within country) rural-to-urban migration from Peru’s Andean highlands to its urban coast. Peru and the Andes at large are inarguably the Latin American nation and region most attuned to internal migratory flows, be these migrations elective or forced, motivated by dispossession, political violence, economic precarity, or some combination of these factors. A robust body of scholarship led by Cornejo Polar, Aníbal Quijano, and José Matos Mar, among others, has for decades theorized these internal migrations as well as their articulation through literature and cultural production. Nevertheless, theorizations of internal migration beyond the Andean region are significantly lacking, even as scholars become increasingly interested in literary and artistic renderings of racialized dispossession.

The proposed panel endeavors to reinvigorate the hemispheric charge of Cornejo Polar’s early call to read Latin American literature through a migratory lens, albeit with a particular concern for the internal migrations that move—or displace—subjects within national borders. Eager to open transnational critical conversations and better incorporate literatures of internal migration into the growing fields of Migration and Border Studies, the panel gathers scholars working on a variety of national contexts with the aim of engaging the following questions: How do narratives of internal migrations theorize the nations through which their protagonists move? How do these literatures of internal displacement challenge dominant theorizations of migration, bordering, and xenophobia? What do literatures of internal migrations “do” that literatures of external (international) migration cannot? At the same time, and thinking more broadly around questions of migration, the diversity of national context represented within the proposed panels represents an invitation for scholars of Borders and Migration Studies to think beyond the US-Mexico border—as has been overwhelmingly dominant within the field—and, perhaps, follow the lead of scholars like Lorgia García Peña and Marisel Moreno who have recently produced field-shaping monographs on Caribbean borders and migrations.

Reading from the Mexican context, Zyana Dóniz will present a paper on Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiografía del algodón (2020) that considers the author’s treatment of labor, displacement, and internal migration vis-à-vis Mexico’s cotton industry. Thinking from Cuba, Monica Styles offers a mediation on Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarron (1966), a classic testimonial novel that traces its formerly enslaved author-protagonist’s internal migration from the hacienda to the safety of “el monte” (the wild). Drawing on twentieth-century realist novels from the Andean world, Lenin Lozano-Guzmán considers how Colombian Gustavo Álvarez and the Peruvian Félix Huamán reveal internal migration to be a mechanism of uneven and combined development in peripheral societies. Reading from the Southern Cone, Oriele Benavides will examine how Chilean-Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo’s novelistic treatment of internal migration constructs a subjective archive of displacement, expulsion, and non-belonging. Each panelist will be allotted a maximum of twelve minutes to present their work to allow ample time for discussion. Slightly shorter papers will be strongly encouraged.

In term of diversity of voices, our panel consists of two PhD candidates, two assistant professors (organizer included), and one visiting assistant professor. Panelist citizenships are as follows: two United States citizens, one citizen of Venezuela, one citizen of Mexico, and one citizen of Peru.