Monsters and Saints
LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling

Shantel Martinez (Edited by), Kelly Medina-López (Edited by)

9781496848734

Hardback, published 30 January 2024

277 pages, 85 b&w and color illustrations
23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.272 kg

This truly innovative book amasses creative and research-based writing that illustrates a connection between historical indigenous communities and contemporary Chicanx identified peoples." - Rachel González-Martin, author of Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities

Contributions by Kathleen Alcalá, Sarah Amira de la Garza, Sarah De Los Santos Upton, Moises Gonzales, Luisa Fernanda Grijalva-Maza, Leandra H. Hernández, Spencer R. Herrera, Brenda Selena Lara, Susana Loza, Juan Pacheco Marcial, Amanda R. Martinez, Diana Isabel Martínez, Diego Medina, Cathryn J. Merla-Watson, Arturo "Velaz" Muñoz, Eric Murillo, Saul Ramirez, Roxanna Ivonne Sanchez-Avila, ire’ne lara silva, Lizzeth Tecuatl Cuaxiloa, and Bianca Tonantzin Zamora

Monsters and Saints: LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling is a collection of stories, poetry, art, and essays divining the contemporary intersection of Latinx and Indigenous cultures from the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America. To give voice to this complicated identity, this volume investigates how cultures of ghost storytelling foreground a sense of belonging and home in people from LatIndigenous landscapes. Monsters and Saints reflects intersectional and intergenerational understandings of lived experiences, bodies, and traumas as narrated through embodied hauntings.

Contributions to this anthology represent a commitment to thoughtful inquiry into the ways storytelling assigns meaning through labels like monster, saint, and ghost, particularly as these unfold in the context of global migration. For many marginalized and displaced peoples, a sense of belonging is always haunted through historical exclusion from an original homespace. This exclusion further manifests as limited bodily autonomy. By locating the concept of "home" as beyond physical constructs, the volume argues that spectral stories and storytelling practices of LatIndigeneity (re)configure affective states and spaces of being, becoming, migrating, displacing, and belonging.

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Collecting Our Bones
  Shantel Martinez and Kelly Medina-Ló
  pez
  
  Part I. Ghosts in the Real: Historiography in Our Stories that Becomes Research
• Chapter 1. La Llorona: A LatIndingenous Specter of Trauma, Motherhood, and Contemporary Racial Violence
  Sarah De Los Santos Upton and Leandra Hinojosa Herná
  ndez
• Chapter 2. Legacies of Land, Cultural Clashes, and Spiritual Stirrings: A Testimonio of New Mexican Ghost Stories
  Amanda R. Martinez
• Chapter 3. Dueling Border-Ghosts: Exploring the Equator as a Space of Spirituality and Resistance
  Diana Isabel Martí
  nez
• Chapter 4. Closing the Circle
  Eric Murillo
• Chapter 5. Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Three Salvadoran Women’
  s Epistemic Hauntings as Resistance against Heteropatriarchy
  Brenda Selena Lara
• Chapter 6. "Entre la Santa y la Muerte": Liminality and Empowerment in Mexico’
  s Santa Muerte
  Luisa Fernanda Grijalva-Maza
• Chapter 7. La CoyotaPerejundia
  Moises Gonzales
• Chapter 8. Iconografí
  a Prohibida/Forbidden Iconography
  Lizzeth Tecuatl Cuaxiloa
• Chapter 9. Making a Living
  Saul Ramirez
  
  Part II. Hazme Caso: Memoir, Poetry, and Stories
• Chapter 10. Curse of the Zamora Girls: Unveiling Familial Ghost Stories for Survival
  Bianca Tonantzin Zamora
• Chapter 11. And He Whispered, "Yolanda, Yolanda"
  Spencer R. Herrera
• Chapter 12. Mi Abuelita y Los Rosarios
  Arturo "Velaz" Muñ
  oz
• Chapter 13. Los Aullidos de las Madres
  Sarah Amira de la Garza
• Chapter 14. my baby wanted an el camino, that’
  s real
  Diego Medina
• Chapter 15. Cry Baby
  Kathleen Alcalá
  
• Chapter 16. Becoming Indigenous Again: Returning Home and Making the Ghosts Visible
  Juan Pacheco Marcial
• Chapter 17. cortando las nubes,or, death came on horses
  ire’
  ne lara silva
• Chapter 18. Thru the Veil and 32.2480°
  N, 112.9161°
  W (Sonoran Desert)
  Roxanna Ivonne Sanchez-Avila
  
  Part III. Bringing the Borderlands Home: Public Discourses and Theories of the Flesh
• Chapter 19. Hauntology of the Oppressed: The MeXicana Gothic and Spectral Geographies in Sandra Cisneros’
  s "Woman Hollering Creek"
  Cathryn J. Merla-Watson
• Chapter 20. Haunted by Settler Nostalgia: (Lat)Indigenous Specters, White Vampires, and the Historical Amnesia of Twilight
  Susana Loza
• About the Contributors
• Index