Magda García opens the panel with her paper, “The Rise of BIPOC Horror: Contextualizing U.S. Latinx Horror,” which places the category of U.S. Latinx horror in conversation with three recent scholarly publications: Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (UCLA Chicano Studies Resource Center, 2017); It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections of Horror, edited by Joe Vallese (Feminist Press, 2022); and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams (Random House, 2023). These publications represent a cross section of academic, cultural, and popular works that speak to a sustained interest in the speculative by queer and/or BIPOC cultural producers. García’s paper further discusses how the special issue presents the opportunity to magnify the genre of horror, specifically, as engaged by U.S. Latinx cultural workers beyond the broader category of the speculative.
Located at the intersection of Chicana feminism, Latinx folklore, and hauntology, contributor Brenda Lara’s paper, “Hueseras, Mestizas, and Lloronas: Surviving Deadly Occupants and Séancing Feminist Specters,” analyzes texts that engage Chicana, Mexican, and Indigenous women's supernatural occupancy of the body and home, demonstrating folklore's significance to contemporary representations of colonial injustices. Examining the Shudder Production horror films Huesera (2023) and La Llorona (2019) alongside Chicana feminist literary fiction, including V. Castro's novel The Haunting of Alejandra (2023) and Gloria Anzaldua's poem “The Occupant,” Lara contends that Latina feminist writers and directors utilize specters to demonstrate the borderlands’ violent and liberatory contradictions in the United States, Mexico, and Central America. From Lara’s examination of folklore within a transnational context, we turn to Roberto Macias Jr.’s “‘Your lips, my lips, / apocalypse’: Latinx Love at the End of the World in Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro.’” Macias engages Díaz’s depiction of a mysterious new illness on the island of Hispaniola affecting primarily Haitians that literally and figuratively darkens the skin, specifically focusing on how the narrative of this monstrous “darkening” disease is paired with a story of unrequited love. In contrast to the ways in which love has been discussed in Latinx studies, Macias argues that Díaz deploys the genre of apocalyptic horror to meditate on the melodrama and excesses of Latinx love in order to explore how eros—construed in the Western tradition, from Plato’s Symposium to Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, as a dialectic and therefore as a sublation of negativity—sustains anti-blackness itself.
The panel concludes with Alexandro D. Hernández’s “Laughing Through Dark Times: Chicanx Nerdcore at the Intersection of Horror-Comedy,” which deploys gothic/horror literary and cultural studies scholar Dawn Keetley’s concept of “political horror” to examine how horror-comedy provides a socio-political response to fascism and racism during times of societal upheaval. Focusing on the television series What We Do in The Shadows (2019), Hernández reads character Guillermo De La Cruz as a “niño bueno” (“good son”) to an immigrant Mexican family who is drawn to the nerdcore fandom of the supernatural to the point of accepting the role of the racialized immigrant/first-generation domestic worker in service to a vampire master. Hernández delves into how De La Cruz contests rather than reifies established Latinx and horror stereotypes and tropes through horror-comedy. Finally, Hernández places his discussion of What We Do in The Shadows (2019) alongside recent literature such as Sylvia Moreno-García’s Certain Dark Things (2021), which draws from the folklore of Tlahuelpuchi, blood feeding, vampire-like women from Nahua ancestral stories in México, to highlight specifically Latinx vampire-lore.