The panel begins with Sara A. Ramírez’s paper, “Time, Space, and Ensueños in silva’s “of the green grasses.” Chicana feminist writer ire’ne lara silva’s short story moves us to experience what Anzaldúa refers to as ensueño, or the self-healing, conscious imagining we enact through reading. Ensueños offer us a way to reassemble negative/harmful metaphors that we carry within our psyches but have not yet articulated. Through her short story that reimagines the plight of la Malinche, the supposed concubine of Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortés, silva asks us to reconsider the enduring misogynistic metaphor that “All women are traitors and sell-outs.” Ramírez posits that on one level, silva’s story lends itself to an ensueño by the reader, as the reader actively imagines the story. On another level, the story’s plot and action, which broach questions of time and space, illuminate how ensueño functions. The relationship between two characters, Malinalli and Cozamalotl, serves as an example of the ensueño process. Ultimately, Ramírez argues that silva reveals the liberatory potential of ensueño by demonstrating how ensueño facilitates sympathy through interconnection.

Continuing the discussion of feminist practices, Ariana Ruiz follows with her paper, “Suspended Arrival: Gendered Transit in Marisela Norte’s Los Angeles.” Ruiz examines Marisela Norte’s “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” to examine everyday mobility on public transit in Los Angeles. Focusing on the bus as a recurring route of encounter, interruption, and recognition, Ruiz explores how the poem brings Latinas into forms of compelled familiarity shaped by gendered, racialized, and classed conditions of movement. Norte’s speaker does not simply observe the women who ride alongside her but also illustrates how she is driven into the role of witness by the route itself; she is repeatedly brought into contact with women’s lives she only partially knows, yet knows enough to recognize as shaped by ongoing material and social strain. Accordingly, Ruiz argues that the poem figures bus travel as a form of suspended arrival where each stop renews the speaker’s implication in the unfinished lives of others. Ruiz reads Norte’s poem as preserving a desiring pull towards other ways of being and moving through the world, even as those possibilities remain interrupted by the demands of the present. In this way, Norte’s Los Angeles offers a poetics of gendered transit that unsettles dominant narratives organized around freedom, self-making, and arrival.

Ruben Zecena concludes with his paper, “Bridging Worlds: Autofiction and Queer Migration in Santiago Jose Sanchez’s Hombrecito.” Addressing themes of queerness, memory, and migration, Sanchez’s novel, Hombrecito, connects the loss of a motherland to the protagonist's relationship with his mother. In the first page, the protagonist is bitter about his mother not picking him up from school. He notes: “Today she forgot she is a mother” (3). Hombrecito is an autofictional text, posing questions about how the “self” is constructed via narrative. It plunges into the multiplicity that his mother embodies: as sacrificial, as selfish, as absent, and as present in his life. It also grasps how the protagonist seeks to be a dutiful son while keeping secrets from her. Instead of a Freudian Oedipal struggle, through which the mother only signifies as lack, Sanchez indicates how the mother is full of life. Zecena argues that by bridging their narratives together, the novel gains access to narrative plentitude–asserting an abundance of feeling in a context of loss. Rather than offer an individualistic account of migration, Hombrecito bridges worlds to posit a relational sense of self that shifts and changes across time.