Reading Central American Literature and Culture from Late Stage U.S. Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

As protests and discourse surrounding the Panamá Canal reemerge and Nayib Bukele offers the United States the outsourcing of its prison population to El Salvador, legacies of colonization and empire are as present as ever in Central America. Defenders of Black and Indigenous life and territory daily face material and symbolic violence and state repression. Meanwhile, masses of people continue to be displaced and/or forced to migrate north – continuing the so-called “immigration crisis” that has been publicly exacerbated by recent U.S. administrations’ emphases on deportation. All the while, organizers, communities, artists, and thinkers––both in the isthmus and diaspora––persevere against ongoing permutations of empire and colonization.

This roundtable gathers Central American thinkers interested in reflecting on the historical importance of cultural production, social movement, and relationality across the hemisphere. As scholars and artists working in the Global North, the following questions guide us: how do we find ways of reading our literature and cultural production––both within a historic scope and in relation to our contemporary moment––while holding a nuanced understanding of everyday realities in “the region?” How has US imperialism and intervention in Central America reshaped space and informed Central American everyday cultures? How have transnational cities like Washington DC and New York City been influenced by these imperial forces and formed as a response to them? How do Queerness, Blackness, Indigeneity, and their intersections––most affronted by and centrally positioned to resist such impositions––shape and create transnational spaces? How do circulated acts of cultural “recovery” and memory-work orient diaspora toward the home nation in the post-peace accords era, and to what end? Both pedagogically and in terms of research, how do we engage the transhistorical resonances of U.S. empire and European colonization? How do we do so without over-emphasizing the hand of U.S. empire while nonetheless recognizing it as part of the palimpsest of coloniality within the Americas? To whom are we writing as diasporic scholars living and working in the United States?

We look forward to offering initial responses to these and other questions, and we invite attendees to join us with their own.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jorge Cuéllar, Dartmouth College

Panelists

• Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, University of Notre Dame

• ignacio carvajal, University of California-San Diego

• Daisy E Guzman

• Wanda R Hernández, University of Texas At Austin

• Gabriela Valenzuela, University of Southern California

Comments

• Paul Joseph Lopez Oro, Bryn Mawr College

• Yajaira Padilla, University of Arkansas

Biographical Information

Yajaira M. Padilla is Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her research centers on Central American cultural and literary studies and Central Americans in a US Latino context. She is the author of Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives (SUNY 2012), From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-belonging (University of Texas Press 2022), as well as several articles and book chapters.

Daisy E. Guzman Nunez is a Garifuna American scholar. She is an Assistant Professor of Global Black Studies at the W.E.B Du Bois Department at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst. Guzman Nunez research interests revolve around Black Indigeneity, Black feminist ethnography, and Afro-Latinx spaces. She recently received the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship 2024-2025. She is working on her book manuscript centers on the migratory experience from Guatemala to New York during the height of the Guatemalan Civil War. Pushing the voices of Garifuna women to the forefront of the Garifuna migration narrative is an important shift in the ways that we think of Garifuna Studies and Black Central American Studies.

Wanda R. Hernández is a scholar and cultural worker. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Central American and Latinx Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Hernández’s research interests revolve around the formation of race and ethnic identity among Central Americans through material and visual culture, space and place, and performances. Her manuscript-in-progress examines U.S. Central Americans’ personal archives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area between 1960–2000. In recent years she has curated exhibitions like Nuestras Historias: Latinos in Richmond and produced community-based theatre, such as Little Central America, 1984.

Paul Joseph López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer World-Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. Indigenous Blackness offers new ways to approach hemispheric questions on the multiple ways in which Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent queerly negotiate, perform, contradict and articulate their Black, Indigenous and Central American Caribbean subjectivities.

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is completing (in 2025) a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She is working long-term on two research projects: first, a study of accumulative aesthetics, materiality, and the transfiguration of loss in the justice-seeking practices of writers and artists across the Americas; and second, a literary/cultural study of the “emergence” of the U.S. Salvadoran diaspora in a relational, multi-ethnic and transnational context. Since 2019, Maryam is part of Tierra Narrative, a collective dedicated to circulation and production of Central American narratives from the isthmus and its diaspora. Most recently with TN, she produced and co-created the installation film ¿Que hora es en el reloj del mundo?, commissioned by the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present and presented at the Park Avenue Armory in 2024. She is also a poet, editor and translator.

Gabriela Valenzuela is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. She is a literary historian who examines U.S. Central American literature from the nineteenth century to the present with a focus on transnationalism, genre and print culture, racial capitalism, and gender and sexuality. Her current book project, “Reading Centroamericanismo,” examines the diverse, fugitive forms that constitute nineteenth-century U.S. Central American literature, arguing that these early writings generate a much clearer and radically different vision of Central American diasporas in the United States.

Jorge Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar and Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College where he teaches courses on modern Central America, global migration, and social theory. Originally from El Salvador, his work focuses on the contemporary politics, culture, and history of Central America. Jorge is currently preparing his first book project, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador. Most recently, Jorge has written essays on popular education, on the critical sociality of older age in El Salvador, and on cryptocurrency and the making of fiscal paradises in contemporary Latin America.

ignacio carvajal is a poet, scholar and translator. Their research interests include responses to evangelization and colonization in Guatemala during the 16th and 17th centuries; Central American literatures and cultures; poetry; and translation. Ignacio teaches courses on Central American and Latin American literature, Latin American Studies, and creative writing as Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California San Diego, where he is affiliated faculty to Latin American, Chicanx/Latinx, and Ethnic Studies.