5th Biennial Latinx literary theory & criticsm conference
april 5-7, 2023
City University of New York Graduate Center
life and death in latinx literature
This conference explores the material and symbolic impact of life and death in Latinx literatures. Latinx writers address the distortions produced by the afterlives of colonial inheritances, blurring the borders between life and death. The aberrant logic of (neo)colonial practices aim to close the distance between life and death, bringing the two states into uncanny proximity by instituting death where life should flourish. These precarious states, from anti-immigration policies to carceral and racial capitalism to environmental catastrophes and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Latinx communities, serve, for Latinx writers, as anti-colonial preoccupations informing narratives intent on writing themselves back to life. Drawing from the ruins of capitalist society, therefore, Latinx literature re-presents and re-envisions social, political and historical legacies in an attempt to resignify life in anti-colonial and decolonial terms. In so doing, Latinx literature explores animate forms and practices, recuperating and expanding experience to offer alternate modalities of existence. This conference asks: How does systemic violence assert forms of death that haunt the lives of peoples of color? How do the aberrant hierarchies of gender and sexuality circumscribe the potentiality of women, non-binary folx, and queer forms of power? And how does the predatory emphasis of capitalism feed off peoples’ lives, destroy ecologies for profit, and promote wars that tame and forge markets? But also, how do Latinx writers imagine otherwise and create alternate ways of living? Moreover, how do Latinx imaginaries inform political movements and other forms of resistance intent on reconfiguring consciousness? How do utopic or anarchic visions, environmental awareness, disability and corporeal and neural diversity insist on the radical openness of social formations? How do Indigenous and African traditions suggest new epistemologies from which to organize life, philosophize being, and complicate aesthetic engagements?
What's in store for you
keynote speaker
poetry roundtable
community
conference schedule
Wednesday, April 5
Keynote: Dr. Richard T. Rodriguez
5:00 - 6:15 pm
Opening Reception: 6:30 - 7:30 pm
Thursday, April 6
Session 1: 9:10am - 10:25am
Session 2: 10:40am - 11:55am
Lunch: 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Session 3: 2:05pm - 3:20pm
Session 4: 3:35pm - 4:50pm
Poetry Round table: 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Friday, April 7
Session 5: 9:10am - 10:25am
Session 6: 10:40am - 11:55am
Lunch: 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Session 7: 2:05pm - 3:20pm
Session 8: 3:35pm - 4:50pm
Closing panel: 5:05pm - 6:20pm
Closing reception: 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Keynote Address
Wednesday, April 5
5:00-6:15 p.m.
Dr. Richard T. Rodríguez
Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English
University of California Riverside
Richard T. Rodríguez is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, film and visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies, and holds additional interests in transnational cultural studies, popular music studies, and comparative ethnic studies. After receiving his BA in English from UC Berkeley and PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, he taught for several years at Cal State LA and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before joining the UC Riverside faculty in 2016.
The author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2009), which won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad (Duke University Press, 2022), he is currently completing Undocumented Desires: Fantasies of Latino Male Sexuality. With Martin F. Manalansan IV, Chantal Nadeau, and Siobhan B. Somerville, he coedited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Queering the Middle: Race, Region and a Queer Midwest.” His work has appeared in the journals Social Text, Cultural Dynamics, Latino Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Biography, American Literary History, Profession, Palimpsest, Aztlán, and American Quarterly, and in various edited collections including The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, Latino/a Literature in the Classroom, Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, A Concise Companion to American Studies, and Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future.
The Moving Image Review Editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, he also serves or has served on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Latino Studies, and InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture. In addition, he currently serves on the PMLA Advisory Committee. The 2019 recipient of the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award, granted by the Minority Scholars' Committee of the American Studies Association, he is the co-principal investigator on a University of California MRPI grant titled "The Global Latinidades Project: Globalizing Latinx Studies for the Next Millennium." His show, "Dr. Ricky on the Radio," can be heard weekly on KUCR.
Poetry Round Table
Thursday, April 6
5:00 - 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Lara Mimosa Montes
University of Minnesota
Lara is the author of THRESHOLES (2020) and The Somnambulist (2016). Her writing has appeared in Amant, BOMB, Futurepoem, Fence, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere.
She is the recipient of artist residencies from MacDowell, Marble House Project, Shandaken: Storm King, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a CantoMundo Fellowship as well as a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry.
Lara holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has previously led mixed genre writing workshops through Wendy’s Subway and at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
A former editor of Triple Canopy, Lara currently teaches poetry at the University of Minnesota while moonlighting as a freelance editor. Most recently, she coedited the artist monograph Darrel Ellis (2021). She divides her time between Minneapolis and New York.
Dr. Deborah Paredez
Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Writing
Columbia University
Dr. Alan Pelaez Gomez
Assistant Professor of Queer Ethnic Studies
San Francisco State University
Deborah Paredez is a poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award. Her critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009), was awarded the 2011 Chicana/o Studies Association Book Award Honorable Mention and the 2010 Latin American Studies Association Latino Studies Book Award Honorable Mention. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, NPR, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry. Her book of literary nonfiction, American Diva, is forthcoming from Norton. At Columbia, Professor Paredez is a recipient of a 2020-21 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous (Coastal Zapotec) poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the intimate kinship units that trans and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. Their debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). While they are an artist, Alan has also been organizing with undocumented migrants in the United States for over ten years and firmly believes that art is a portal into the future, but which future? That depends on the artist and the ideologies that move them.
You can read Alan’s writing on Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Poetry, Catapult, the Georgia Review and more.
Moderator
Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas
Associate Professor of English
Lehman College
Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas is an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture. She also holds an appointment at the CUNY Graduate Center Phd Program in English.
Melissa is the author of the poetry collection Coatlicue Eats the Apple, editor of the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets, co-editor of La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades and co-author of the novel, Pure Bronx. Her most recent book project, with Rutgers University Press’ new Global Race and Media series, A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, examines the creative worlds and cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City within the context of a system of racial capitalism that marginalizes Mexican migrants. Her second book of poetry, Chingona Rules was released with Finishing Line Press in September 2021 and was a Gold Medal Winner of the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, International Latino Book Awards (2022). Her co-edited volume, Scholars in COVID Times is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2023. At Lehman College, Melissa serves as Director of the English Honors Program, Faculty Advisor to Obscura, the Literary and Arts Magazine of Lehman College, a Senator of the CUNY Faculty Senate. She is also Co-Director of the Bronx Latino History Project, a joint project with the Bronx County Historical Society.
Registration
Conference Fees for In-person Presentations:
Professors: $150.00
Late registration after March 6th: $200.00
Graduate students: $70.00
Independent scholars: $70.00
Undergraduate students: $20.00
non-presenters: $50.00
Conference Fees for Virtual Presentations:
Professors: $120.00
Late registration after March 6th: $150.00
Graduate students: $50.00
Independent scholars: $50.00
Undergraduate students: $15.00
Virtual Guests (non-presenters):
$50 non-refundable
Click here to register for the conference:
Registration Payment Methods:
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conference location
cuny graduate center
365 5th ave
new york, ny 10016
accomodation options
** Please note we do not have a designated hotel with conference rates for this event.
- The Hilton Garden Inn, 63 West 35th Street, New York, 10001, (212)-594-3310.
- La Quinta Inn (32nd and 5th) is a 4 minute walk from the Graduate Center, and rates start from $110.
- Carlton Arms Hotel (25th and Lexington) is about a ten-fifteen minute walk away
- The Pod Hotel (51st and 3rd) is a twenty-minute walk, 3-minute subway ride away.
- The Jane Hotel (Jane St and Washington St) is a bit far away from the Grad Center, but is usually inexpensive
- The Belnord Hotel (West 87th St) is a budget hotel on the Upper West Side.
Moderator: John Alba Cutler, University of California, Berkeley
Not Dogs: Viramontes and the Overrepresentation of Man
John Alba Cutler, University of California, Berkeley
“She could do this in the dark:” Embodied Knowledge in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus
Alexandra Ibarra, Northwestern University
“The Integrity of Talk in Under the Feet of Jesus”
Miguel Samano, University of California, Berkeley
“‘because she was a mother too’: Mothering and Carework in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them”
Mariana Gutiérrez Lowe, Northwestern University
Thursday, April 6
Session 1 9:05 - 10:40 a.m.
Moderator: Vallerie Matos, Graduate Center, CUNY
“Bearing the Burdens of Culture in Short Eyes and George Washington Gomez”
Briana Alma, Marymount University
“Refusing to Fit: Adolescent Latina Bodies Resisting Society in Real Women Have Curves and Mosquita y Mari”
Alejandra Galdo, Marymount University
“Internalized Misogyny in Mother-Daughter Relationships in Americo Paredes and Sandra Cisneros’s Fiction”
Fátima Molina, Marymount University
Healing, Humor, and Forms of Life
Moderator: José A. de la Garza Valenzuela, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Reflexivity and Healing in Guadalupe Maravilla: Disease Throwers, Jun Winaq’, and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative”
John Kennedy Godoy, Cornell University
“On Laughter: The Carnivalesque Emergence in the Fields of Under the Feet of Jesus”
Michael A. Parra, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Excavating Forms of Life: Place and Knowledge-Making in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina”
Cecelia Alfonso-Stokes, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Moderator: William Orchard, Queens College, CUNY
“Death as a Way of Life in The Verging Cities”
Devon Victoria Bradley, University of Texas at San Antonio
“The Impact of Capitalism in Tijuana: Life, Death and Displacement of Marginalized Bodies at the U.S.-Mexico Border”
Carolina Ramirez Moreno, University of California, San Diego
“Like a Crack in the Earth’s Crust: Reconsidering Roberto Bolano’s 2666”
Laura Conte, University of Mississippi
Chair and discussant: Mario A. Gómez-Zamora, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Radio’s Writers and the Latinx Archive”
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Graduate Center, CUNY
“After/Images: Black Puerto Rican Women Within & Beyond the Archive”
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Michigan State University
“Martyrs, Miracles, and Archival Afterlives in the Venegas Family Papers”
Anita Huizar-Hernández, Arizona State University
“A Digital Archive of the Dead: Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper and the possibilities of YA Latinx Speculative Fiction on urban displacement”
Ricardo Martin Coloma, Graduate Center, CUNY
Thursday, April 6
Session 2 10:40 - 11:55 a.m.
Moderator: Belinda Linn Rincón, John Jay College
“The Living Dead in Las Americas: Latina Literatures of the Gothic”
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado, Baruch College, CUNY
“Haunting the Archive: A reading of Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive”
Lorna Perez, Buffalo State College, SUNY
“Specter, Corpse, Doll: Dead White Femininity in Hortensia Elizondo’s Archival Fictions”
Mercedes Trigos, New York University
Moderator: Maia Gil'Adí, Boston University
“From Subjectless Latinidad toward Objectless Latinx Critique”
Thomas Conners, Harvard University
“Un-Knowing (Latinx) Fictions: Epistemological and Aesthetic Agnostics in Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind and Yxta Maya Murray’s God Went Like That”
Ricardo Ortiz, Georgetown University
“How Do You Solve a Problem like Francisco?": Against Latinx Literature as Redemption
Marion Rohrleitner, University of Texas, El Paso
“On Lower Frequencies: Araki’s Kinship of Mutual Alienation”
Joseph Miranda, Cornell University
Moderator: Jonathan Gray, John Jay College, CUNY
“On Huecos and Desaparecidos: Latinx South American Literary Imaginaries and Keywords for State-Sanctioned Violence and Undocumented Migration”
Jennifer Harford Vargas, Bryn Mawr College
“‘A life rendered will always be incomplete:’ Discourses to counter Anti-Immigration Policies in Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country”
Susan C. Mendez, The University of Scranton
“Confessions of Impossibilities: Reimagining the Archive of Postwar Guatemala”
Nancy Quintanilla, Cal Poly Pomona
Moderator: Sarah Preston, University of Oregon
“Puerto Rican Bodies Under Siege: The 1960 Study on the Institutionalization of ‘Mentally Retarded’ Individuals in New York City and the Postwar Segregation of Urban Youth”
Jorge Matos Valldejuli, Hostos Community College-CUNY
“Intercultural Tales: Learning with Baltimore’s Immigrant Communities”
Thania Muñoz Davaslioglu, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
“On Death and Documents: Mourning Mexican Migration to the NYC Borderlands in Karla Cornej́o Víllavícencío’s The Undocumented Americans”
Miriam Juárez, New York University
Chair and discussant: Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz
“P’urhépecha Gendercide in Michoacán: An Archival and Testimonial Approach”
Mario A. Gómez-Zamora, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Genocide in Tierra Caliente, Michoacán: Archival Neglect and P’urhépecha Memory”
Vanessa Moreno, University of Arizona
“Toward a Borderland Political Discordancy: Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel and Currents of South Texas Radicalism”
Jaime Javier Rodríguez, University of North Texas
Moderator: Michael Dowdy, Villanova University
“Miguel Algarín’s ‘Conversations with Silence/Conversaciones con el Silencio’”
Joseph Cáceres, Graduate Center, CUNY
“Under the Guise of a Bombazo: Bomba-Vogue Poetics in Navigating Blackness and World After This One”
Rojo Robles, Baruch College, City University of New York
“Latina/o/x Blogging Cultures and the Literatures of Difference”
Urayoan Noel, New York University
Moderator: Richard Perez, John Jay College, CUNY
“The Limits of Latinx ‘High Fantasy’: Zoraida Cordova's challenge to genre”
Marcela Di Blasi, Dartmouth College
“Making the Cut: Aesthetics, Violence, and Colonial Time in Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s A Woman Of Endurance”
Victoria Chevalier, Medgar Evers College, CUNY
"Gloria Anzaldúa in Nueva York's Borderlands"
Laura Lomas, Rutgers University-Newark
Thursday, April 6
Session 3 2:05 - 3:20 p.m.
Moderator: Teresa Hernandez, Willamette University
“Heart and Horror: Gentefication in the Netflix Series Gentefied”
John Riofrio "Rio", College of William and Mary
“Barrio Gothicisms in the Photography of Laura Aguilar”
Alexander Lalama, Bradley University
“Fantasmas and Fronteras: Fathers, Sons, and Other Fictions Set in the borderlands”
Domino Perez, University of Texas at Austin
Moderator: Belinda Linn Rincón, John Jay College
“Brujaja: Anti-Blackness and Healing in a Time of COVID”
Theresa Delgadillo, UW Madison
“The Politics of Birth and Cross-Racial Sex in Chicanx Literature”
Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue, Southern Methodist University (Texas)
“Centering From the Edge: The Fat, Fly, Brown Poetry of Yesika Salgado”
Desiree A. Martin, University of California, Davis
Moderator: Bill Johnson González, DePaul University
“José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho as a Jim Crow Modernist Text”
Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno
“Minding the Modern Girl: Eugenics Discourse and Cognitive Modernity in Maria Cristina Mena’s Short Stories”
Valentina Montero Román, University of California, Irvine
“Hispanophilia and Picaresque Novels of the US-Mexico borderlands”
Kristian Ayala, Stanford University
Thursday, April 6
Session 4 3:35 - 4:50 p.m.
Moderator: Ricardo Ortiz, Georgetown University
“The Dreamer Brand: Immigration, Storytelling and Commodification in Maria Andreu’s Young Adult novel The Secret Side of Empty"
Maya Socolovsky, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
“The Feminista Frequencies of Faithful Witnessing in Myriam Gurba's Mean”
Wanda Alarcón, University of Arizona
Moderator: Isabel C. Gómez, University of Massachusetts, Boston
“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints”
Keish Kim, Rutgers University
“Latinx Genre Nerdery and Fantastic (End)worldmaking in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Angie Caroline Bonilla, Independent scholar
“I hunger for stable ground ”: Multiple Marginalizations and the Quest for Stability in Elizabeth Acevedo’s Clap When You Land”
Vinita Vincent, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India
Moderator: William Arce, Fresno State
“A Return to the Natural: The Healing Power of Nature in Andrés Montoya’s a jury of trees”
William Arce, Fresno State
“The Mexicana/o and Chicana/x Afterlife: Re-constructing José Olivarez’s “Mexican Heaven” in Citizen Illegal”
Jose Navarro, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
“Reading Chicana Poet and Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo: Creating ‘art for people’s sake’”
Annemarie Perez, California State University Dominguez Hills
“Ethical Witnessing of the Matter of the Body and the Matter of Writing in the Poetry of Gary Soto”
Bill Johnson González, DePaul University
Moderator: Marisel Moreno, University of Notre Dame
“On Crossing Caribbean Borders: Balseros in Cuban American Poetry”
Marisel Moreno, University of Notre Dame
“Desert Studies Against the Border: The Case of the Sonoran and Chihuahua Deserts”
Francisco Robles, University of Notre Dame
“When Death Is Not the Same as ‘El Otro Lado’: Reconceiving Migration Testimonio through Arenas, Cepeda, and Lovato”
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas
Moderator: Nicolás Ramos Flores, Colby College
“Representation as Self Care in Puerto Rican-American Street Murals”
Nicolás Ramos Flores, Colby College
"Hiding in my journal…": The caring literary space in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X
María J. Durán, Brandeis University
From Grindr Advice Column to Memoir: John Paul Brammer’s Multimedia Life Writing and the Care Work of Latinx Narrative Space Online
Jennifer Lozano, University North Carolina, Wilmington
Friday, April 7
Session 5 9:10 - 10:25 a.m.
Moderator:
"Queering Citizenship: Precarity, Liminality, and Mobility in Sheila Ortiz Taylor's Coachella"
Meleena Gil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Claiming Chicanx Identity: Gay Love in Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the Universe"
Oscar Garcia, University of California, San Diego
“Wild Politics and Feral Femmes: Medea’s contribution to Undocumented Women”
Esperanza Onoria Santos, Rutgers Newark
Moderator: Mercedes Trigos, New York University
“Migrant Bodies: Testimonios, the Mutilated Body, and Codifications of Life and Death”
Jessica Aguilar, University of California, San Diego
“Displacement, Crossing, and Transhemispheric Imaginaries in Carmen Aguirre’s Anywhere but Here”
James Nate Nichols, University of California, Santa Barbara
Moderator: Suzanne Uzzila, Lehman College
“Surviving Baby Lollipops: Life and Death in Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz”
Suzanne Uzzila, Lehman College
“Living and Dying with Gloria Anzaldúa”
Suzanne Bost, Loyola University Chicago
“Decolonizing Memory: Reimaging History” in Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds”
C. Christina Lam, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
Moderator: Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“From Graves to Cathedrals: Latinx Bottomhood and Futurity”
Erick Rodriguez, University of California
“Cruising Ecologies: Queerness and Political Affect Here and Now”
John W. Kennedy, Cornell University
“On Becoming Death: Fraternal Orderliness and Linguistic Caricatures in City of Night”
Michael A. Parra, University of California, Santa Barbara
Moderator: Edward Paulino, John Jay College, CUNY
“Border Gnosis, the Soma, and Latinx Literature”
Stephanie Fetta, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“State Ecohorror and the Killing Deserts”
Belinda Linn Rincón, John Jay College, CUNY
Moderator: John Ribó, Florida State University
“I’m dead”: Allegor(e)ical Capitalism in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World”
Michael Dowdy, Villanova University
“Emigration as Death in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World”
Joshua Pederson, Boston University
“Biopower, Necroforce, and the Colonial Body in Alexandro Segade’s The Context”
Kristy L. Ulibarri, University of Denver
Moderator: Catherine S. Ramírez, UC Santa Cruz
“Bioprecarity, Vitality, and Undocutime in the Child Migrant Story”
Catherine S. Ramírez, UC Santa Cruz
“News Without Narrative: The Necropoetics of Juan Felipe Herrera”
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, UC Santa Cruz
“Latinx “Proud Boys,” White Christian Nationalism, and the Emergence of “Multiracial Whiteness” in the Democratic Commons”
Lázaro Lima, Hunter College, City University of New York
Friday, April 7
Session 6 10:40 - 11:55 a.m.
Moderator: Isabel C Gómez, University of Massachusetts Boston
“Rendering Latinx Lives Grievable: A Translingual Documentary Poetics”
Isabel C Gómez, University of Massachusetts Boston
“Self-Translation in Contemporary Latinx Poetry”
Rachel Galvin, University of Chicago
“El poema se [des]hace”: Dolores Dorantes and the Translingual Word”
Janet Hendrickson, New York University
“Gloria Anzaldúa: Poetry as a Curandera for the Wounds that are the Borderlands”
Angela Mendoza, San Diego State University
Moderator: Elena Machado Sáez, Bucknell University
“Cartographies of Erasure”
Ylce Irizarry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Translational Politics”
Marion Christina Rohrleitner, University of Texas at El Paso
“Archival Activism”
Elena Machado Sáez, Bucknell University
Moderator: Marcelle Maese, University of San Diego
“Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative”
Christina Garcia Lopez, University of San Francisco
“Letras y Limpias: Decolonial Medicine and Holistic Healing in Mexican American Literature”
Amanda Ellis, University of Houston
“Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas: Remembering Xicana Indígena Ancestries”
Susy Zepeda, University of California, Davis
Friday, April 7
Session 7 2:05 - 3:20 p.m.
Moderator: Thomas Conners, Harvard University
“The Great Silence’s Constructive Collapse: Thinking Beyond Latinidad and the Human with Allora, Calzadilla, and Chiang”
John Ribó, Florida State University
“The Scar Where the River Once Ran: Care, Currents, and Cartography in Hector Tobar’s ‘Secret Stream’”
William Orchard, Queens College CUNY
“Winds of Revolution: Puerto Rican Fiction and Speculative Reality after Hurricane María”
Israel Reyes, Dartmouth College
“Speculative Landscapes, Speculative Latinx”
Maia Gil'Adí, Boston University
Moderator: Ariel Estrella, Cornell University
“Finding the Silueta of José Esteban Muñoz in ‘The Sense of Brown’”
Ariel Estrella, Cornell University
“Beyond the Borderlands: Counter-Histories of Latinidad in Wendy Treviño’s ‘Cruel Fiction’ and Ariana Brown’s ‘We Are Owed’”
Fernanda Cunha, U of California, Berkeley
“(Mis)Remembrances of Home in Latina Fiction”
Laura Caicedo, Cornell University
“Ordinary Girls in Grotesque Times: Notes on Jaquira Diaz’s Queer Latina Childhood”
Sofi Chavez, U of California, Berkeley
Moderator: Crystal Perez, California State University, East Bay
“Coming of Age Latina: Imagining Latina Futures in Erika Sanchez’s I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter”
Crystal Perez, California State University, East Bay
“Pandillas geis: Incarceration, Disposability of Queer Inmates, and MS-13 in Imperdonable”
Christián González Reyes, University of California Berkeley
“I Love My Work”: The Steamy Eroticism of Porn Star Actress Alicia Rio”
Yessica Garcia Hernandez, San Francisco State University
Moderator: John Alba Cutler, UC Berkeley
“Joaquin Murrieta, Performance, and the Spectacle of Latinx Death”
Christofer Rodelo, University of California, Irvine
“C19 Narratives of Creole Degeneracy and Latinx Racialization”
Evelyn Soto, Sam Houston State University
“Reprinting Olancho: The Textual Forms of Centroamericanidad in the Latinx Nineteenth Century”
Gabriela Valenzuela, California State University, Los Angeles
Moderator: Patricia Ybarra, Brown University
“Re-imagining Masculinity with Raúl Castillo”
Patricia Ybarra, Brown University
“Decolonizing Erotics With Emilio Rojas’ Colon”
Armando García, University of California, Riverside
“Collaborating Across Media on american (tele)visions”
Victor I. Cazares, Playwright and Performance Maker
“Collaborating Across Media on american (tele)visions”
Rubén Polendo, New York University
Friday, April 7
Session 8 3:35 - 4:50 p.m.
Moderator: Richard T. Rodriguez, University of California, Riverside
“Brief Grief: Gay Chicano Short Form and Queer Mourning”
José A. de la Garza Valenzuela, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“The Weight of a Virus; or, Love in Gravity”
Nic Flores, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Abolish or Adapt: The development of Transgender literacy for detention centers”
Damian Vergara Bracamontes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Dilemmas of Grieving the Disappeared: Necropoetics as Political Resistance to Neoliberalism”
Ángel García, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Joseph Caceres, Graduate Center, CUNY
“Speaking Silences, Laying Bare Contradictions: Interrogating the Mestiza Futurism of Borderlands”
Ruben Diaz Vasquez, Stanford University
“New Fights and New Goals for Young Latinx Rejection and hate in Erika Sanchez’s I am not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter”
Luis Escamilla, CUNY Graduate Center
“Counter-Inventories of Memorialization in Salvadoran Diaspora Poetics”
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Yale University
Moderator: Keish Kim, Rutgers University
“Applying for Asylum as a Child: Icebox and the Detentionary Imaginary”
Guadalupe Escobar, University of Nevada, Reno
“‘This Body Could Be Mine’: On Death and the Disappearing Border Subject in Sara Uribe’s Antígona González”
Teresa Hernández, Willamette University
“The Undocumented in Chicanx Literature”
Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, University of Illinois at Chicago
Moderator: Jill Richardson, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
“Queer Health & Aging: Challenges and (Im)Possibilities”
Christopher Rivera, Coppin State University & Suleyman Bolukbas, Penn State
“Stories that Survive: Literary Love in the Aftermath of Orlando’s Pulse”
Marivel Danielson, Arizona State University
“On the Literatures of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting: Violence, Mourning, and Liberation in Contemporary Queer and Trans Latinx Literary Production”
Marcos Gonsalez, Adelphi University
Moderator: Suzanne Bost, Loyola University, Chicago
“Mi Tierra Firme: Making Groundedness in Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came With Them”
Chris Mendez, Indiana University Bloomington
“Fossil Futures, Plantation Afterlives: Wasteification, Social Death, and Petroculture in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus”
Anthony Gottlich, University of Mississippi
“Fried Ends and Formaldehyde: Marketing and Toxicity in Helena María Viramontes's ‘Miss Clairol’”
Sarah Preston, University of Oregon
Friday, April 7
Closing round table
5:05 - 6:20 p.m.
"The PhD Pipeline and Job Market in Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies"
Moderator: Vanessa Perez-Rosario, Graduate Center, CUNY
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Catherine Ramirez, University of California, Santa Cruz
Lázaro Lima, Hunter College, CUNY
conference organizers
Dr. Richard Perez
Associate Professor of English
John Jay College, CUNY
Richard Perez is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York where he teaches courses on U.S. Latino/a, Caribbean, and Postcolonial literatures. He is the creator and director of John Jay College’s minor in U.S. Latino/a Literature. He is concluding a book project entitled Towards a Negative Aesthetics: U.S. Latino/a Fiction and the Remaking of American Literature, which explores the use of the negative in U.S. Latino/a aesthetic formations. In support of his book manuscript, Professor Perez was awarded the prestigious Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship. His manuscript also garnered the City University of New York Faculty Publication Program Fellowship and two PSC-CUNY Grants. Professor Perez is the co-editor of two critical anthologies published by Palgrave Macmillan. His first edited book, Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Criticism (2007), evaluates the state of U.S. Latino/a literary studies and projects an interdisciplinary vision of that study for the 21st Century. This book was part of Palgrave’s series on American Literature Readings of the 21st Century. His second edited anthology, Moments of Magical Realism in U.S. Ethnic Literatures (2012), points to a subtle shift away from privileging magical realism as a monolithic category in the literature of the Americas and focuses this critical approach on writers of color who deploy magical realist moments to refer to traumatic or suppressed histories. His most recent critical anthology, The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, examines magical realism in literatures from around the globe. Featuring twenty-seven essays written by leading scholars, this anthology argues that literary expressions of magical realism proliferate globally in the twenty-first century due to travel and migrations, the shrinking of time and space, and the growing encroachment of human life on nature. Professor Perez also co-founded the Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference. In addition, John Jay College awarded Professor Perez with the Scholarly Mentorship Award in 2012 and the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013. His work has also appeared in the Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, Women Studies Quarterly, Latino Studies Journal, and MELUS Journal.
Dr. Belinda Linn Rincón
Associate Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies and English
John Jay College, CUNY
Belinda Linn Rincón is an Associate Professor in the departments of Latin American and Latinx Studies and English and is the co-founder and Co-Director of the Latinx Literature Minor Program. She specializes in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, Latina feminisms, and war and militarism. Her book Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture (2017, University of Arizona Press) examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970s to the present and its political, ontological, and aesthetic implications for the Chicana/o community. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Bodies at War offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic. Her book won second place for the 2018 International Latino Book Award for Best Women's Issues Book. Rincón has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies and Latino Studies. In 2015, she won the Antonia I. Castañeda Essay Award given by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies for her article “‘Estas son mis armas’: Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Poetics of Feminist Solidarity in the Era of Neoliberal Militarism” in Women’s Studies Quarterly.The award recognizes the best essay published by an untenured Chicana scholar that provides a historical and intersectional analysis of Chicana/Latina and/or Indigenous women. She received the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and fellowships from the American Association of University Women; the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center; the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program; and the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. She is the co-founder of the Biennial Latinx Literary Theory and Criticism Conference which convenes scholars and students from around the country at John Jay to showcase the major critical directions that scholars are forging in the field. She is currently working on a monograph about Latinx horror and gothic in film and literature.
past conferences
- 4th Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, “Transamerican Reticulations: Towards a Latinx Theory of Hemispheric Literatures,” April 25-27, 2019, John Jay College
- 3rd Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, “Latinx Lives, Matters and Imaginaries,” April 13-15, 2017, John Jay College
- 2nd Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, “Latina/o Utopias: Futures, Forms, and the Will of Literature,” April 23-25, 2015, John Jay College
- 1st Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, “Haciendo Caminos: Mapping the Futures of U.S. Latina/o Literatures,” March 7-9, 2013, John Jay College
Contact
Email:
latlitconfnyc@gmail.com
