In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to deny birthright citizenship to children born to parents who are “unlawfully or temporarily present” in the U.S. The administration’s attempt to control the temporality of migrant life, specifically the futures of potential yet-to-be-born citizens, is the latest tactic for producing illegality. In May, Catherine Ramirez published “Undocutime: Containment, Coloniality, and Childhood in Javiera Zamora’s Solito” and Alicia Schmidt Camacho “Solo el Pueblo: Migrant Justice Against Fascism in the Americas,” while Daisy Hernandez’s Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth was released in February. These recent writings provide a framework for interrogating the Trump administration’s intensifying attack on undocumented immigrants and their kinship structures; they also coincide with the recent mobilizations of “ICE Out” protests to resist the detention, deportation, and extrajudicial killings of migrants and citizens. Building on these national events and scholarly publications, this panel explores how Latinx writings about migration and citizenship question national belonging and illegality.

The panel opens with Elda María Román’s autotheoretical talk that lays the historical infrastructure for the panel. Tracks are routes, making movement possible. To track someone is to follow, monitor, or pursue. This talk explores how infrastructure can perform both functions. Braiding family stories, histories of immigration enforcement, and a train journey from Los Angeles to Providence, Román traces a line from railroads as instruments of extraction and Indigenous dispossession to exclusionary laws, biometric identification, surveillance databases, and deportation campaigns. She considers how infrastructure that promises connection also sorts travelers into those permitted to move and those who are monitored, detained, and expelled. Moving between policy and personal story, she asks how people internalize borders, carrying the state’s scrutiny in their everyday encounters with others.

In January 2026, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos became the face of family separation as he was led away by ICE agents, his blue floppy-eared bunny hat starkly visible. Monica Hanna’s talk argues that children’s literature is an important space for contextualizing and contesting anti-immigrant governmental actions. Claudia Guadalupe Martínez’s picture book Still Dreaming/Seguimos Soñando explores the history of “Mexican Repatriation” in the early 20th century, highlighting how Mexican Americans are, to use Mae Ngai’s terms, “impossible subjects” always assumed to be external to the category of citizenship. Drawing on emerging theory about the activist “worldmaking” of literature for children of color by Isabel Millan and scholarship on the history of mass removal and undocumented children by Marla Ramírez and Catherine Ramírez, Hanna illuminates how Latinx children’s literature responds to and shapes discourses related to citizenship, migration, and belonging.

Renee Hudson’s talk situates the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death on September 10, 2026, within the context of elite Mexican American women’s efforts during the early- to mid-twentieth century to institutionalize the memory of their great male antecedents. This history bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Southern women’s efforts to memorialize Confederate soldiers, especially within the context of Mexican Confederate soldiers such as Santiago Tafolla and Augustine de Zavala. Tafolla’s daughter and granddaughter recovered his memoir; de Zavala’s daughter was well-known for making the Alamo famous. Tying together these women’s recovery efforts with a particular strand of Latinx conservatism committed to white supremacy, Hudson illuminates the long cast of the confederacy on memorialization projects that operate at the expense of a more inclusive sense of national belonging for Latinxs. Hudson’s talk thus questions the forms that citizenship practice take, especially when Latinxs’ possessive investment of whiteness overrides their commitment to their communities.

The panel closes with Jennifer Harford Vargas’s talk on Alan Pelaez Lopez’s Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien and Jennif(f)er Tamayo’s To Kill the Future in the Present. Drawing on Glenda Carpio’s theory of migrant aesthetics, Catherine Ramirez’s concept of undocutime, and Cathryn Merla-Watson’s work on the speculative grammar of the subjunctive, Harford Vargas argues that their speculative documentary poetry collections defamiliarize readers to histories of undocumented migration and engage in future-oriented world-building. She analyzes how they use erasure poetry to turn government immigration forms into frames for and forms of poetry, interrogating how the prescriptive narratives of the state erase their experiences. She demonstrates how Peleaz Lopez’s invocations of fugitivity and Tamayo’s use of blackouts function as modes of speculative futurity and as transmigratory portals to other worlds. Their poetics of counter-documentation rejects the state’s terms of legality, rewrites its grammar of citizenship, and reclaims migrant narrative power.

This panel has 4 presenters from whose talks will be 12-14 minutes long and cover a range of genres, historical moments, and critical approaches.