This session will begin with a brief introduction of the panel, participants, and overall framework, taking approximately five minutes. Each paper will then be allocated twelve minutes, leaving at least fifteen minutes for unstructured discussion at the end to allow for audience engagement and transitions. The organizer, Maria Vazquez, will also serve as the presider by managing timing and discussion.

The session will begin with a literary analysis framework, situating each presentation within broader debates about memory, history, and national identity in Latin America. The first presentation, Failed Filiation and Impossible Returns, examines post-dictatorship Brazilian fiction and its treatment of failed familial and national belonging. Focusing on the protagonist Sebastián, the study traces his search for origins in Argentina and his attempts to reconcile the moral and emotional implications of his adoption. Framed within the tradition of Latin American “dictator novels,” the presentation illustrates how fiction can model the challenges of integrating personal and national memory, revealing the productive tensions of “impossible returns.”

The second paper, Brazilian Social Fiction of the 1930s as Historical Narrative, examines novels by Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos. These works depict the social and political conditions of Brazil during the Vargas era and the global economic crisis, transforming everyday labor and poverty into narratives that contest official histories of national development. The paper argues that proletarian fiction constructs alternative historiographies from below, highlighting marginalized subjects as active agents in history. By reading these novels as both literary texts and historical interventions, the presentation demonstrates how fiction participates in shaping collective memory and national imagination.

The session then moves to a Cuban perspective with Havana Homecoming: Cubathropic Disencounters of the Nation in Two Cuban Writers, which analyzes the work of Leonardo Padura and Antonio José Ponte. Drawing on Iván de la Nuez’s concept of “cubanthropy,” the study analyzes how these authors construct divergent literary discourses on Cuban national identity and historical memory. While Padura foregrounds a reconstruction of the past grounded in nostalgia and affective identification, Ponte is marked by a critical stance toward the sentimental archive of memory, seeking to subvert state-sanctioned narratives. Their well-documented political and aesthetic rivalry provides a productive lens through which to explore how literature operates as a contested archive of collective memory and identities fractured by political forces. This paper further underscores the ways in which cosmopolitan narratives of history can function as a site of ideological negotiation and cultural debate.

The session then shifts focus to Indigenous perspectives with Indigenous Memory and the Colonial Past in the Indigenous Town of Cicacalco, Zacatecas, Mexico. This paper examines a land title alongside associated oral histories from the Indigenous community of Cicacalco. By reading legal and oral texts as narrative constructions, it highlights the ways these sources articulate Indigenous identity and territorial belonging. Demonstrating that the land title functions similarly to historical fiction—combining documented events, symbolic language, and communal memory—the presentation underscores how local narratives actively shape claims to land and community, offering a critical perspective on the intersections of memory, law, and storytelling in contributing to national imaginaries.

This structure offers a comparative approach across Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican contexts, encompassing literary, historical, and Indigenous perspectives. Together, these papers demonstrate the multiple registers through which Latin American memory and identity are produced, contested, and transmitted.