Using Memes to Carve a Space for Undocumented Latino/a Visibility and to Tackle Fossilized Myths

This article considers the impact of memes shared among Millennial and Generation Z–oriented Latino/a social media outlets during the years 2014–17, and proposes reading memes as viable microliterary texts. Through the examination of many dozens of memes and hundreds of Facebook posts from the nonprofit organization UndocuMedia, I have identified two themes that reoccur with notable frequency: (in)visibility and knowledge. As expressed within the memetic platform, these themes have cultural functions beyond superficial banter: humor detracts from political absurdity, arguing points permits one to assume defensive and protective postures, and connecting with friends expands the network of allies. I first define memes and explain how they might be read as socially conscious microliterary texts. I then examine selected meme examples to illustrate how they are shared with the intent to challenge the social and political marginalization that has long plagued the undocumented Latino/a demographic in the United States and to debunk long–held fossilized myths. I conclude by discussing the role of accompanying hashtags and emoji in the process of transplanting online activism to the offline world.

Maya Blue and Franciscan Evangelism

In the first decades of the Franciscan evangelical campaign in Yucatán, Mexico (1540–90), Maya builders and artists directed the construction and pictorial decoration of hundreds of Christian edifices, ranging from small-scale chapels to larger churches and entire monastic complexes, offering a material record of the peninsula’s religious transformation. Strategic color selection and the deployment of Maya blue pigment in particular architectural, iconographic, and liturgical contexts enabled Indigenous catechumens to reconcile post-Tridentine conceptions of divinity with precontact sacred ideologies. By weaving diverse methodologies from the study of visual sources, textual documents, and material characterization techniques, we demonstrate how colonial Maya color theory actively engineered localized Catholicism.

“They Are Always There”

To speak of “Latin America” is to seek a frame of negotiation between those for whom it remains a pragmatic grouping, those who regard it as a psychic and geographic zone of experience, and those for whom it serves little other purpose than as a postcolonial mirage. And it’s certainly true that in the case of artists Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948–1985) and Cecilia Vicuña (Chile, b. 1948) a negotiation of zones takes on a particularly haunting mirage. Resisting the alluring and troubling “coherences” of African and Indian postcolonial returns in contemporary art (T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press, 2013), this paper argues that the zone of Latin America remains decidedly incoherent. The work of Mendieta and Vicuña conjure a cacophony of ghosts through the active resistance of easy conflations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous postcolonial experience. Through examining the hospitality that we must show to ghosts, Derrida’s marranismo reminds us that the guest speaks of a justice to come. In understanding the Latin American experience, this paper argues, the guest and the ghost share more than a phonological likeness.