The Construction of Latinidad Within Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction, the broad category that includes genres such as science fiction, high-fantasy, superhero narratives, and many others, has often served as a space to explore contemporary social issues, anxieties about the past, and visions of the future. Historically, these types of narratives have involved the vivid articulation of societal “others,” those who belong to groups that in our world are stigmatized as being substantially different and thus exotic and/or threatening. For creators from dominant society these stories were opportunities to treat “others” as playthings to be experimented with and upon for entertainment or social critique. For those of us from the margins, these stories have been battlegrounds where our identities fought for survival. This session explores ways in which contemporary speculative fiction constructs Latinidad in ways that advance humanizing depictions of Latinx people, as well as those cases where narratives reinforce reductive understandings about Latinidad.