This panel is situated at the intersection of the environmental humanities and human-animal studies, areas that have to date only intermittently connected to the study of Latin American literatures. Yet Latin America is not only the most biodiverse continent on Earth, its literatures abound in figurations of more-than-human species that foreground ecological crises, Indigenous cultures, colonialism, national identities, struggles for social justice, and patterns of human and animal migration. The panel focuses on texts that feature animals migrating across geographical, national, and species borders as a literary strategy to rethink human-animal relations from a Latin American perspective on environmental crises. While these crises affect the planet as a whole, they result in historically and regionally specific forms of human and more-than-human precarity that the three presentations engage with. Latin American literature, we argue, offers different visions of environmental futures and different formal strategies than North American and West European literatures, perspectives that are crucial to advance the environmental humanities as well as environmentalism beyond the university.

Mario Ortiz-Robles highlights that the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) defines “migratory species” as wild animal populations many of whose members “cyclically and predictably cross one of more national jurisdictional boundaries.” But to the extent that migratory species don’t recognize political boundaries, conservation efforts along migratory corridors must not only contend with global environmental challenges, they are also subject to the shifting winds of international cooperation. This paper tracks the environmental and political pressures affecting the migration, hibernation, and reproduction of the endangered Monarch Butterfly so as to determine the extent to which the seemingly stateless condition of migratory species is grounded in border politics. The Monarch’s annual migration from Canada to Mexico has become a closely observed biocultural phenomenon because conservation efforts have been tied to the fraught North American politics of commercial trade and human migration. But the visibility of the Monarch as a cultural signifier for migration has also been enhanced by its figural presence across its geographic range. Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, who was responsible for the creation of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, forms part of a broad collectivity of writers, artists, and filmmakers who have weighed in on the Monarch’s migratory fortunes.

Gisela Heffes examines the epistemological and representational challenges involved in writing the more-than-human world. How can one give voice to nonhuman life without reproducing an anthropocentric perspective? In L’animal que donc je suis, Jacques Derrida argues that language is structured around a fundamental division between the human and the nonhuman, rendering any representation of “the animal” inherently reductive and violent. This impasse recalls, as Jane Bennett suggests, the possibility that a measured anthropomorphism might help reorient perception toward the nonhuman, even as it risks reinscribing metaphorical projections. Against this theoretical backdrop, María Ospina’s novel Sólo un poco aquí (2023) offers a narrative experiment that gestures toward a possible way out of this longstanding dilemma. The text explores assemblages between human and nonhuman beings, with particular attention to the migration of birds across both forested environments and urban spaces. The novel unveils the precarious conditions that shape animal life in modernity, as domestic and wild species alike confront forces that threaten their survival and continuity. These animal trajectories are intertwined with issues such as war, technology, migration, climate change, environmental destruction, and poverty, proposing a literary mode attentive to relationality, mobility, and the entanglements that unsettle the boundaries between species.

Ursula Heise focuses on animal or human-animal hybrid narrators as a literary estrangement strategy. In Caribbean and Latin American texts, such narrators function as connectors to the colonial past and to the Indigenous cultures that were lost or diminished by colonialism, at the same time that they help to establish new types of communities that look to the future and tackle environmental restoration in the face of extraction, species extinction, and climate change. Starting with a brief overview of animal narrators and their role in environmental literature generally, the paper will specifically analyze the spatial perspectives that more-than human narrators bring to bear, along with their handling of human language. It will focus on two case studies, Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau's Les neuf consciences du Malfini (2009) and Peruvian writer Luis Hernán Castañeda's El imperio de las mareas (2019), which feature a hawk and a human-shark hybrid as first-person narrators that foreground distinctively aerial and aquatic perspectives on climate change. These perspectives, the paper argues, arise from a regionally specific perspective on colonialism, its global aftermath, and environmental futures.