While scholarship in visual culture, media studies, and Latin American studies has extensively addressed photography, illustration, and propaganda, the rapid popularization of Generative AI necessitates a (re)assessment of the continuities between earlier visual regimes and today’s algorithmically generated images. At stake is not only the question of representation, but also the epistemological status of the image itself: how images persuade, fabricate, and intervene in the production of cultural understanding. Bringing together work on mid-twentieth-century illustration, contemporary political iconography, AI-mediated conflict, and literary engagements with visual archives, this panel explores how images operate as sites of power, negotiation, and contestation across temporal and technological contexts.

This panel, then, asks: how do visual forms—from commercial illustration to AI-generated “photography”—mediate relationships between propaganda, history, and culture? What continuities link earlier forms of visual persuasion to contemporary algorithmic image production? And how do artists, writers, and political actors mobilize images to construct, challenge, or reimagine narratives of nation, race, and belonging?

Manuela Borzone’s paper, “Friendly Propaganda: Florencio Molina Campos and the Mass Reproduction of Hemispheric Alliance,” examines mid-twentieth-century depictions of the Argentine gaucho in commercial and print media, drawing on archival materials from the Tinker Collection at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin). By tracing the transformation of the gaucho from a contested national figure into a transnational symbol aligned with the U.S. cowboy, Borzone demonstrates how illustration functioned as a tool for South-North Pan-American propaganda, effectively reversing the typical North-South flow. Her work highlights the role of corporate collaborations and visual culture in shaping narratives of hemispheric alliance, while also suggesting how these historical practices anticipate contemporary debates about AI-driven visual persuasion.

Nilo Couret’s “The First AI Conflict: Staging, Fabulating, and the Retributive Photography of Nicolás Maduro” situates the 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro within a broader genealogy of media-driven warfare and representation within US–Latin American relations. Arguing that this event marks a turning point in the relationship between images and historical truth, Couret examines the role of AI in staging military intervention, generating persuasive “photographic” evidence, and producing viral memetic afterlives. Drawing on theories of cybernetic borders and retributive photography, the paper proposes that AI-generated imagery operates not merely as documentation but as an active agent in the construction of geopolitical narratives.

Alexa Smith’s presentation, “The Perversion of American Icons in Anti-Immigrant Propaganda,” turns to the appropriation of Uncle Sam imagery in recent U.S. political discourse, particularly in anti-immigrant campaigns associated with the Trump administration. Through a comparative analysis of historical and AI-generated representations, Smith argues that Uncle Sam functions as a mutable national icon that both reflects and constructs collective identity. Her reading of a Department of Homeland Security image alongside political rhetoric reveals how AI-generated propaganda mobilizes racialized and gendered tropes to produce exclusionary narratives of belonging, positioning visual culture as central to contemporary ideological conflict.

Viana Anette Hara’s paper, “Reframing the Republic: Countervisuality from Executed Rebels to the Black Female Body in Vida que olvida,” offers a literary and visual analysis of Justo Arroyo’s Vida que olvida, focusing on how the novel reworks archival photographs of executed Afro-Panamanian rebels into countervisual narratives. Through a theoretical framework that includes the pictorial turn and racializing infrastructures, Hara argues that the text transforms scenes of racialized violence into sites of resistance and re-signification. By centering the embodied experience of a Black female character, the paper highlights how countervisuality operates both at the level of national history and intimate subject formation.

In exploring visual media from print illustration to AI-generated imagery, all four papers share a commitment to interrogating how images produce, distort, and contest historical knowledge. Together, they demonstrate that contemporary concerns about AI “slop” are not wholly unprecedented, but rather emerge from longer histories of visual propaganda and mediation. Across the panel, we aim to see how images—whether drawn, photographed, or generated—function as powerful instruments in the ongoing negotiation of truth, memory, and power in the Americas.