In recent years, scholars have consistently turned to theorizations of fracaso, or failure—the unsuccessful, the incomplete, the disrupted—to reframe studies of nineteenth-century Latine/a/o/x literature and culture. This panel traces that conversation forward, into the twenty-first century. In so doing, it inquires how and to what end conceptions of Latinx fracaso endure. As scholars of the nineteenth-century have argued, discourses of Latinx failure can in fact be understood as elaborating alternative, if incomplete, visions for latinidad (Coronado 2013, Gruesz 2016, workshops/panels at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conferences in 2022 and 2024). Latinidad remains contested, misunderstood, and marginalized, both within and beyond the Latine/a/o/x community. Those gathered (willingly or unwillingly) under the term “Latinx” are often assumed to share “family resemblances,” as highlighted in Tina Lu’s Presidential Theme for 2026. While resemblances can be found across linguistic, historical, experiential, and cultural elements of latinidad, the “family” nature thereof remains highly contested. Latinx failure allows us to, as Lu writes, “reimagine the acts of comparison and relational thinking that are one core of our shared work.” Rather than characterize failure as a dead end, the panel examines how ostensible Latinx failures generate alternative possibilities for belonging. What failures and opportunities emerge in naming and translating Latinx racializations? How does the formulation “Latinx” simultaneously embed and disrupt failure? How do “Latinx failures” illuminate colonialist narratives? Talks are organized to move backwards chronologically, complicating ideas of evolution while prompting consideration of Latinx fracasos across time. The panel thus brings scholars of the nineteenth-century into conversation with those working on the twenty-first century, and it includes Latinx, junior, and senior scholars. Each speaker will have fifteen minutes, ensuring time for discussion.

William Orchard begins with José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumously published A Sense of Brown (2021). While A Sense of Brown might be considered a failed project in the sense that its ideas were never fully worked out, Orchard argues that this sense is exacerbated by the rise of Latinx, a term that takes off after Muñoz’s passing. Latinx, along with work in AfroLatinx studies, makes brown a term that feels clumsy and possibly even anti-Black. At the same time, Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia has helped critics imagine the critical force of “Latinx.” While Orchard suggests that theorizing Latinx through Cruising Utopia stalls an engagement with A Sense of Brown, he ends by considering the possibilities within brown’s trajectory in performance studies.

Rebecca Foote argues that while Latinx fails in many ways as a marker of identity categories, understanding the “X” as a poetic structure reframes it as more than a singular instance of shifting terminology. Close reading Aracelis Girmay’s the black maria (2016), a poetry collection situated within Girmay’s Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American heritages, Foote articulates a sonic poetics of the “X.” The poetry collection holds Latinidad accountable to its history of anti-Blackness while uncovering a Latinxness outside of the purview of US Latinidad. Asserting that Girmay’s writing nuances “Latinx” without dispensing of coalitional thinking, Foote considers poetic thought as the most discerning mode through which to theorize the open-ended and much debated term “Latinx.”

José Aranda’s comparative reading of nineteenth-century settler colonialisms similarly expands the contexts for latinidad beyond the US. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) and calls for vigilante justice against railroad monopolists, he argues, dramatize a Spanish/Mexican settler ideology where fracasos point to a haunting history of ruptures in Latin American modernity. He places this in opposition to failures in an Anglo-American settler context, where ruptures are instead managed through the amnesic power of the state; such moments are usually converted to a more usable past, as in “remember the Alamo.” Ruiz de Burton’s Confederate sympathies become a commentary on the distance she has traveled from being beholden to a Spanish/Mexican settler colonial history of fracasos.

Working from periodicals and non-traditional literary archives such as diplomatic correspondences, Evelyn Soto close reads ideas of creole degeneracy that re-circulated in the first half of the nineteenth-century, concurrent with revolutionary upheavals across the hemispheric South. She argues that such “backward” or “anti-modern” representations of latinidad mistranslated Spanish colonial categories for racial difference (the castas). These mistranslations of the Spanish colonial castas effectively encoded the potential for anticolonial efforts in league with enslaved rebellion during the Spanish American wars of independence. Anti-Blackness thus emerges as a concern once again. The language of creole degeneracy reignited, effectively, the Anglo- and Spanish imperial fears of a second Haitian Revolution made possible by anti-colonial movements in the Spanish Americas.