While envisioning an emergent Mestiza consciousness in Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa deploys a metaphor that is not traditionally associated with U.S. Latinx letters and that stands in contrast to its various uses in blues music that originated with the legend of Robert Johnnson: the crossroads. Rather than serving as a Faustian bargain reflecting spiritual conflict, systemic racial oppression, and/or black resistance (Gussow 2017: 8), Anzaldúa acknowledges the myth’s Yoruba origins while reimagining the crossroads as a contact zone “where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs” (85). In this sense, the crossroads functions as a historical/spiritual juncture, an event as much as a form of embodiment, that functions as a site of political possibility that is however itself not yet emancipation. The intersection of the transcendent and the scatological evoked in Anzaldúa’s references to sifting through and tasting the dirt of burial sites, to gaping orifices and sacrificial practices, becomes a space of accounting, the spiritual work that must be performed before arriving at a new consciousness. Taking our cue from Anzaldúa, this panel is interested in irresolute narratives depicting the embodiment of the intersection of the sacred and the profane in Latinx literature that gesture toward the advent of emancipation.

Magda García focuses on V. Castro’s subversion of demonic possession in her novella, Goddess of Filth. In “‘She is the eater of sin and the unclean’: Spiritual Inhabitation in V. Castro’s Goddess of Filth,” García examines how spiritual possession gains new meaning as the protagonist, Fernanda, becomes inhabited by Tlazoltéotl, the Aztec goddess of filth. García reads inhabitation as a moment of undoing of the self where the host must undergo a period of (re)connection to the earth and to corporality, as illustrated by scenes of menstrual blood flowing from Fernanda and her consumption of dirt. Finally, García reads the novella as refusing resolution via exorcism, instead ending with a future in which Fernanda remains inhabited.

Jason B. Treviño reassesses the use of Aztec symbolism in his paper, “Breaking up with Aztlán: Making New Myths of Origin in Gil Cuadros’s ‘My Aztlan: White Place.’” Treviño demonstrates that Cuadros’ protagonist ultimately destroys Aztlán, characterized as a site of abuse, to center care and pleasure as the connective tissue to the self and to community. Through AIDS care and sexual pleasure, the protagonist finds anti-homophobic familial support, a new connection to Ethnic-Mexican identity, and a queer pleasure in his brownness through sex play. Treviño focuses on the protagonist’s imagined transformation into a crossed highway with a house beneath it, which becomes a reliquary for his shining bones, as a site of convergence where the queer pleasure of a new Chicana/o/x form lies.

Brenda Lara examines the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Altares Collection (UC Santa Cruz) as a site where memory and death converge at a crossroads of loss, embodiment, and possibility. “Afterlives and Autotheory: Memory at the Crossroads in Anzaldúa’s Altares” turns to Anzaldúa’s short stories on spectrality to show how the literary foregrounds her altar-making practices. By analyzing how Anzaldúa’s ofrendas, manuscripts, and ephemera function as records of loss but also as practices that transform absence into presence, Lara argues that the ephemera invite engagement with mourning as a mode of knowledge production where materiality binds the living and the dead. Anzaldúa’s short stories thus reanimate the archive’s affective dimensions and demonstrate how her autotheory dwells within contradiction, grief’s articulation and ephemera’s intellectual force. Lara argues that Anzaldúa’s literary and material work frames memory as an active process that unseals potentials for rethinking knowledge’s afterlives.

In “‘[A]pocalyptic daydreams’: The Unreliability of Masculinity in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Roberto Macias Jr. explores how Diaz’s novel comprises a Künstlerroman of an unreliable narrator. Yunior, an inauspicious writer and serial philanderer, distances himself from the story he recounts in describing his function as that of a “Watcher,” a reference to an advanced civilization that passively observes less advanced races in the Fantastic Four cosmology. Yet, throughout, the novel references the interviews, fields notes, etc., that comprise the text, and Yunior’s intimacy with a host of characters who interject alternate worldviews. Macias explores Yunior’s insistence on framing the narrative as a “Fukú story” in order to parse the irony of Oscar’s affirmation of Dominican masculinity in the conclusion, a heroic qua erotic induction that overrides what Simon Critchley calls the “released existence” of mysticism, the ancestral connection Oscar experiences in the cane fields.

Each paper will be 15 minutes to allow a 15-minute Q&A.