Monsters and Saints
LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling

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

9781496848741

Paperback / softback, 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.