This series of two panels explore how maternal filial bonds shape the production, transmission, and transformation of memory in Latin American and Caribbean cultural expression. The works examined interrogate how motherhood and daughterhood function as aesthetic and political frameworks for engaging with histories of violence, dictatorship, and social exclusion. Drawing on feminist theory, memory studies, and cultural criticism, the panels examine how maternal and filial figures act as narrative technologies and ethical positions through which trauma, silence, and historical responsibility are articulated. From Argentina’s post dictatorship narratives to Chile and Bolivia’s feminist pedagogies, Uruguay’s dystopian imaginaries, Mexico’s revolutionary legacies, the Dominican Republic’s diasporic poetics, and Peru’s post conflict realities, these relationships emerge as frameworks through which writers and artists confront trauma, silence, and the afterlives of violence. The papers reveal how maternal filial figures function as technologies of remembrance, contestation, and resistance against hegemonic histories and patriarchal models of kinship. The selected narratives address haunting pasts and responsibility toward the dead (Enríquez), counterarchives of mourning after dictatorship (Andruetto and Reyes), and trans maternities and chosen kinships that transform care into a decolonial politics of remembrance (Sosa Villada). They also explore pedagogical maternalities as vehicles of feminist consciousness and civic transformation (Zamudio and Mistral) and fragile or absent motherhoods (Trías, Negri, Villacorta) that embody traumas of dictatorship, exile, and neoliberal violence. They further analyze the politicization of motherhood in guerrilla movements across Latin America, where maternal presence becomes resistance, and in transnational works (Acevedo), where sisterhood and surrogate care forge diasporic genealogies of remembrance. Through acts of storytelling, care, and transmission, these works construct alternative genealogies of justice and affect, transforming the maternal into a space of remembrance, resistance, and renewal.
Margarita Saona, University of Illinois at Chicago. “Horror and our Responsibility towards the past: Strange Mothering in Mariana Enríquez”
Mariana Enríquez, perhaps the most influential Latin American writer in the last two decades, has declared in multiple interviews the impact the Dirty War had on her. Learning at a young age about the horrors of the Argentinian military dictatorship exposed her to the evils of humanity. That legacy, she would say, does not remain in the past. It is in the present, still haunting us.
This presentation will explore the maternal in three stories, “El chico sucio,” “El desentierro de Angelita” and “Mis Muertos tristes,” in which women who are either childless or past their reproductive years, find themselves in situations in which they need to assume the responsibility of caring for the dead.
I will examine the role of the maternal in regard to the social responsibility for society’s crimes in these stories, taking into account some conflicting views on mothering, from Julia Kristeva’s to Bracha Ettinger, and feminist perspectives on the ethics of care as expressed by Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, and others.
Lisette Whitehead, University of Georgia “Transgressive Performativities and Maternal Resistance in Camila Sosa Villada’s Las malas (2019)”
This paper explores how Camila Sosa Villada’s Las malas (2019) challenges hegemonic and heteropatriarchal canons through its reimagining of motherhood, care, and collective identity within a trans community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity, the analysis examines how the novel constructs alternative forms of kinship that disrupt biological and moral definitions of maternity. Motherhood in Las malas emerges as a performative and political practice rooted in chosen bonds, affective labor, and resistance to systemic marginalization.
Central to this reconfiguration is La Tía Encarna, whose maternal role extends beyond reproduction to embrace care, protection, and ethical responsibility for a collective of trans women. This trans-sororal network transforms motherhood into an act of survival and solidarity, destabilizing traditional family structures and redefining affectivity through empathy and mutual dependence. Villada’s narrative transforms spaces of exclusion—such as parks and streets—into maternal territories of shelter and belonging, where care becomes an embodied form of resistance.
Through the appropriation of language and the assertion of voice, the novel foregrounds the power of storytelling as a maternal gesture: one that nurtures memory, identity, and community. Ultimately, Las malas articulates a decolonial politics of motherhood that resists normative gender boundaries and literary hierarchies, reclaiming the maternal as a site of transformation and collective re-existence for those historically denied kinship and visibility.
Keywords: Camila Sosa Villada, Las malas, performativity, gender, motherhood, decolonization, collectivity.
Betina Kaplan, University of Georgia, “Maternal Genealogies and the Politics of Memory: Mother Daughter Narratives in Argentine Literature” This paper examines the intersections of maternal filial bonds and the politics of memory in contemporary Latin American literature, focusing on the works of María Teresa Andruetto and Dolores Reyes. Both authors engage with motherhood not as a purely biological or sentimental experience, but as a site of historical trauma, resistance, and transmission of collective memory. Drawing on feminist and post dictatorial literary frameworks, the paper argues that the maternal filial relationship functions as a key narrative and ethical structure through which these writers explore the legacies of violence and silence that mark Argentina’s recent past. In Andruetto’s fiction, particularly Lengua madre (2010), the maternal voice becomes a space of negotiation between personal remembrance and national history, mediating the tension between speech and censorship inherited from the dictatorship. Similarly, Reyes’s Cometierra (2019) reconfigures the maternal bond through the figure of a young woman who literally ingests the earth to uncover the stories of the disappeared, turning bodily experience into an act of political mourning and testimony. Through these narratives, both authors foreground female genealogies as counterarchives that resist institutional erasure and patriarchal control over memory. The paper analyzes how their depictions of mother daughter relationships challenge the boundaries between the intimate and the public, the living and the dead, and the remembered and the repressed. By reading Andruetto and Reyes together, the study reveals how contemporary Argentine women writers reclaim the maternal as an embodied and narrative practice of remembrance that redefines agency and belonging in post dictatorial contexts. Ultimately, the paper situates maternal filial bonds as central to the ongoing project of rewriting memory in Latin American literature, where the personal act of remembering becomes a collective, political gesture of survival.
Dra. Nithia Castorena-Sáenz, Académica Titular, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, “Being there” is political. The mother as a political subject in the context of the guerrilla movement in Mexico. The operation of armed groups in Mexico and Latin America is characterized by the tension between the common practice of multiple social stereotypes and some kind of state of exception for their enforcement, within the framework of the extreme violence that different governments implemented against people who saw armed options as a possibility for existence and resistance. These stereotypes were sustained by three major social structures: gender, race, and class. This paper presents an approach to the implications of the symbol "mother" in the context of the armed groups that operated in Mexico and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, based on the premise that their presence as mothers of guerrillas, before, during, and after the participation of their sons and daughters, implied a clear political stance and not an unthinkable action according to the "mother" stereotype of the time. To contrast this stereotype, I analyze a feminist publication that circulated in Federal District (México city) from 1976 to 1978, entitled "La Revuelta." This magazine's editorial line took a clear political stance on feminist positions. In its special issue of May 1977, it wrote a review on motherhood. Finally, although it is not possible to exhaustively review the issue, I am interested in offering some reflections on the confrontation with the figure of the "mother" when it was incorporated into armed groups, and the various judgments that this situation triggered.
Cristina Fangmann, Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana (ILH), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras UBA, “The Ruses of the Weak: Maternal Masks, Feminist Pedagogies, and the Transmission of Memory in Zamudio and Mistral.” I propose to explore the figures and works of two South American women writers: Adela Zamudio (Bolivia, 1854–1928) and Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889–USA, 1957). Internationally publicly known in the field of poetry—a literary genre deemed suitable for women of their time—also prolific narrators and essayists. These were genres not so welcomed by their male colleagues, who preferred to imagine them stitching verses within the confines of their homes. Their journey into the public sphere followed the same path: teaching—a road that was not always a shortcut. Becoming schoolteachers was the first step toward higher level careers with national and international reach. These institutional roles allowed them to make their voices heard in the public domain. Through debates (Zamudio–Pierini, 1913), speeches, and journalistic and academic articles, they defended women's and children's rights, consistently denouncing hypocrisy, double standards, and the injustices of patriarchal society. Single, childless, and without known lovers, both played the game of masks (Zamudio) as Mother Teachers. Using what Josefina Ludmer called "the ruses of the weak"—withholding their bodies and sexual desires—and pretending to conform to heteropatriarchal norms, they managed to achieve economic autonomy and claim spaces of freedom not only in intimate closets (Fiol Mata). In times of great change, both intellectuals became spokespersons for literary and political modernity. In the field of pedagogy, while Zamudio defended secular education in public schools, Mistral embraced the revolutionary educational experience of Vasconcelos's Mexico and promoted activism in support of rural schools and a renewed connection with the Mapuche Andean culture. Through their maternal guise, they transmitted their progressive legacy to new generations.
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresMaternal-Filial Bonds and the Politics of Memory: Writings and Visualities in Latin American Literature ISV304MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
