In this collaborative panel of three 15-minute papers across scholars in Latinx Studies at different stages in their careers plus sufficient time for audience discussion, we will examine the connections between seriality, likeness, and the analogical, indeed, resemblances outside normative constructs of “the family” as they appear in queer Latinx literature and culture. In the emergent field of queer Latinx Studies, much debate on the “ontology” of race has framed discussions of relationality into suspicion around extraction. While at times valid, we take this year’s MLA’s Presidential Theme as an opportunity to explore how analogical thinking offers a structure to literary and cultural interpretation that gives criticism an immanence to a world of conflicting differences, which is to say, to formalize the contradictions within Latinx culture without the desire for resolution or sameness.

For instance, Miranda interrogates the disciplinary protocols of Latino studies and its general weariness of analogical thinking to foreground the political ambivalence of John Rechy’s novel City of Night (1963) in tension with Adál Maldonado’s overtly political photographic series Puerto Ricans Underwater (2016). In their difference, he reveals how both works rely on an analogical structure—even as they intend to critique it as the motor of liberal governance. Miranda asks how these artists come to embrace analogy as both the object of discussion and the engine of an emergent latinidad despite its flattening logic. In Maldonado’s Puerto Ricans Underwater (2016), the series demands an analogical reading to produce meaning of the ideal Puerto Rican subject suffering under the weight of American capitalism through its iterable difference of various subjects under the same background conditions. In Rechy’s City of Night (1963), the description of male-likeness produces an oeuvre of analogical differences through the serial repetition of its structure. By formalizing the problem, Miranda reveals how both these works mourn a latinidad produced by analogical thinking even as it requires such a reading practice to critique the imposed and serial formation of racialized relation for those hailed under its name.

Next, Guzmán’s paper will provide a historical context to the artists discussed in his new book-in-progress, namely the aesthetic implications of Reagan’s America clustered around the beginnings of “late capitalism.” Through a comparative analysis between the queer photography worlds of Los Angeles and New York City in the 1980s, Guzmán theorizes what he terms as the literary aperture, a nodal point of infinite compression/expansion of information, in turn, othering the object of its gaze, and best captured in a comparative study of these two art worlds. The paper ends with Guzmán turning to Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diaries (1977), a fragmented and serial meditation on the loss of his mother, to show how they resemble polaroids. This is key for Guzmán since much like the experience of looking at a photograph of a lost loved one, a certain diachronic process, or the experience of change over time, structures one’s understanding of the belatedness to an event or relation. This sensibility corresponds to the feeling of the lateness in realizing that one had more in common with the thing lost than imagined, spurring something like a brown study––a state of absorption in abstraction or thought as if slightly saddened having realized, and thus having to resist, one’s future end.

Finally, Ortíz reads Justin Torres’ novel Blackouts and Julio Torres’ tv-art project Fantasmas as touchstone artefacts of the United States in the mid-2020’s. Both completed and published/posted before the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, these pan-Latinx, queer-diasporic projects foreground and stage experiences of loss of consciousness and visual refusal to offer new paths, both aesthetic and political, (back) toward alternative forms of awareness and insight. How, the paper asks, do narrative conceits like the “memory” of blacking out and visual conceits like ink redactions that call attention to the textual passages they obscure (specifically in Blackouts) function as analogues for an “evanescing” Latinidad whose structural and strategic refusals to conceptual capture persist in keeping the field in such productive undecidability and turmoil? Together Blackouts and Fantasmas also provoke questions of formal instability and in-capacity, given the former’s promiscuous display of visual elements beyond its anchor in and as print text, and the latter’s reciprocally promiscuous display of print material across multiple occasions of its televisual unfolding.

Lastly, we seek audience discussion on how our papers demonstrate the evanescing “American" interregnum that were the “Biden years,” and in whose wake we’re witnessing the violent deportation and disappearance of a mass of immigrants without due process, many of them Queer, Latinx, or both.