Presenter: Zyanya Dóniz Ibáñez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. She has published articles in Mester, Lucero, and Cuadernos Lirico. Her dissertation, Catagrafías del archivo literario mexicano y centroamericano, proposes the concept of katagraphies to denote the register of the archival encounter in contemporary literature. This project argues that recent literature stages the act of archival engagement as a katabasis, a descent into the underworld. Through this metaphor, contemporary writers inscribe their own characters into the moment of reading, producing a mise en abyme that simultaneously exposes the arbitrariness of realism and foregrounds the documentary nature of archival fragments. In this sense, katagraphies capture how literature transforms the encounter with archival materials into a performative, self-reflexive act, where textual and historical layers intersect and the archive becomes a site of creative negotiation.
Abstract: This presentation draws from my dissertation Catagrafías del archivo and examines how Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Balam Rodrigo’s El libro centroamericano de los muertos construct “migrant archives” by engaging Mexico as an in-between space of transit for Central American migration. Both authors interweave family records with institutional documents from the U.S. Border Patrol, colonial texts, and photographs, envisioning territory itself as the ultimate repository of memory. Mexico thus emerges not as homeland but as a perilous passage, a space made visible in the texts through the deaths of migrants. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the archive as a sepulchral space, I argue that these works use literary and poetic form to metaphorically reanimate migrant voices and challenge conventional understandings of archival authority.