Our point of departure for this forum is what John Alba Cutler and others have identified as the deracination of Latinx literature from history. This is to say, the assumption that Latinx literature, like other marginalized literatures, remains ahistorical and perpetually becoming, new, and on the precipice of emerging. In other words, questions of periodization and historicism are the purview of the majoritarian sphere, whereas Latinx literature remains perpetually caught in a cycle of proving its existence, even while historicist scholarship in the field, as well as transformative efforts such as The Recovery Project, trace its origins back to four centuries ago. In bringing together scholars who specialize in various time periods of Latinx literature, our panel proposes that the periodization of Latinx literature is not ahistorical or fragmentary. Rather, our collective work traces a literary lineage rich in form, method, and content, and through which Latinx pasts, presents, and futures remain in continuous discussion with each other.

The panel combines Latinx studies’ perspectives from a diverse range of time periods, methods, literary genres, national origin groups, and the panelists’ own expertise that speak to the rich heterogeneity of the field. The presentations analyze hemispheric archives, follow transnational periodicals, account for translated ideologies, and trace the temporal and geographical movements of literary forms in order to collectively expand our notions of what it means to think about Latinx literary, cultural, and social practices across time. In particular, the presentations bridge scholarship of the Latina/o nineteenth century with that of more contemporary literatures. The former has challenged the nation-centered perspectives of literary production that the fields of American Literature and Latin American Studies have championed, rightly emphasizing the importance of hemispheric “circuits of texts, print cultures, artists and intellectuals” (Lazo and Aleman, vii). This critique has also paved the way for analyses of varied experiences of modernity–and its literary expressions–in different Latinx contexts and for different Latinx populations (John Alba Cutler, Yolanda Padilla, Laura Lomas, José Aranda). Scholarship pertaining to contemporary Latinx literature builds on these interventions, often exploring how attending to genre and form, what Frances Aparicio has termed “the turn to aesthetics,” shifts our understanding of Latinx literature (Renee Hudson, Maia Gil’Adí, Ralph Rodriguez). This thinking has allowed for us to understand contemporary literature not as an ever-emerging present, but rather as a literature indebted to and entangled with the past and the future.

Collectively, this panel turns to literature to offer different ways of narrating and historicizing Latinx temporalities. Each panelist will present for twelve minutes to leave ample time for discussion. The presentations follow the chronology of the texts’ publication dates. Eitzen Delgado focuses on captivity narratives, suggesting that sentimentality operates as a vehicle for political critique, and ultimately arguing for repositioning the Latinx nineteenth century as a key moment in history for decolonial thought. Trigos proposes that the 19th-C discourse of scientific racism can function as a method to bridge the study of Latinx modernisms and Latin American Studies; contesting eugenics logic can resist colonial frameworks of literary time. Soto’s paper also offers a trans-temporal approach, emphasizing the reach of “casta intimacies” to trace colonial legacies and to interpret the liminal kinships represented in Cristina Garcia’s Monkey Hunting (2003). Soto argues that the novel theorizes critical power and political possibility out of a trans-generational overspill in the brokenness of blood to intervene in the ongoing colonial histories of the casta system. Foote’s paper turns to the present by leaning into the intersections of curation and poetic form in Leo Boix’s Southernmost: Sonnets (2025). By arguing for the sonnet as artifact and method, the paper builds on the panel’s ongoing discussions of racial logics to claim that the sonnet’s historical entanglements with structures of power and containment can be leveraged, instead, to undermine colonial taxonomies of Latinx literature and shift the axes of its history. Together, these papers demonstrate how examining Latinx literature across time can offer emancipatory pathways that imagine alternative futures to colonial time.