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Argentinian director Alejandro Brugués’s 2011 Cuban-Spanish film Juan de los muertos and Mexican playwright Pedro Valencia’s 2013 play Con Z de zombie spring from similar roots: both initially place the blame for each country’s zombie apocalypse at the feet of the United States. In Brugués’s film, the accusation is clear but never proven: news reports interspersed through the film state that the country is being invaded by “dissidents” paid by the U.S. government, though there is no political or military U.S. presence in the film beyond the symbolic presence of the country’s flag. In Valencia’s Mexico, the cause is entirely unknown: Randy, the zombie-narrator-protagonist, does not know how it began. He does, however, take satisfaction in the knowledge that the plague is heading north, since the undocumented zombie immigrants would be impossible to contain: “[L]o que hubiera dado por ver a un zombie latino partiéndole su madre a la border patrol, ¡por fin se habrían metido su ley antiimigrante por el culo!” (I.2, unpaginated) Both texts propose the idea of contagion as a double-edged sword that can be an instrument of resistance or oppression; as such, they underline the political and economic structures that dictate how human life is valued (and not) in both post-revolutionary countries. Brugués and Valencia portray the 21st century Latin American zombie as a vector of and participant in this double-edged contagion, unraveling and complicating apocalyptic outbreak narratives while articulating sociopolitical critiques of their respective countries that operate on a national and global level.

This introduction lays out key questions that the contributors to The Transatlantic Undead: Zombies in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures aim to engage. Regardless of its exact articulation, the zombie constantly serves as a means for criticizing undemocratic elements of society. As the articles in this collection show, the nature of oppression differs depending on where a particular work of literary and cultural production is articulated. Furthermore, the zombie’s role in critiquing said social order also changes depending on numerous factors ranging from the author to the cultural context in which it appears. Nevertheless, when viewed in their entirety, the articles of this volume show that the zombie continues to be a surprisingly versatile figure for social critique.

This study uses zombie theory to flesh out common themes between Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán. While both of these canonical Latin Americanist thinkers theorized literary and cultural cannibalism as a resistant act that could challenge the hegemony of Western cosmologies and aesthetics, very little scholarship has thought to reconcile—or even juxtapose—these men’s thought. The article asserts a shared camaraderie between Latin American people of color and the zombie’s of the region’s cultural production by emphasizing both entities’ association (fair or not) with cannibalism in the Western imaginary. When viewed through this framework, even the zombie apocalypse comes to signify an optimistic revolt of the oppressed against corrupt, imperial entities. The article references numerous cases of Latin American literary and cultural production both to highlight the discursive ties between the Latin Americanist zombie and people of African and indigenous descent and to signal strategies that these works propose for challenging Western (white) supremacy in the region.

El cine Mexploitation de los 1960 y 1970 ha recibido poca atención académica debido a las supuestas fallas estéticas que emergieron cuando los directores de este movimiento yuxtaponían los tropos de la ciencia ficción y el horror hollywoodenses a películas protagonizadas por luchadores enmascarados. No obstante, este cine elucida los discursos imperialistas que abundaban en México a mediados del siglo veinte. En este ensayo analizamos el personaje del Santo —el luchador más exitoso del cine Mexploitation— a través de varias películas. Luego afirmamos que su cine postula una colonialidad liminal mexicana. El Santo interpretaba una versión ficticia de sí mismo en que él era un superhéroe mexicano, y como tal se enfrentó a varias amenazas en sus filmes. Algunos de sus antagonistas —por ejemplo los marcianos y la familia Frankenstein— se pueden codificar como sujetos imperiales. Otros, sobre todo La Llorona y las momias precolombinas, son más precisamente espectros del pasado indígena. Ya que El Santo se codifica explícitamente como mestizo en sus películas, podemos aseverar que éste defiende el estado mestizo y moderno a través de su cine. Ciertamente, su deber es el de adelantar un proyecto que exalta el pueblo mestizo mexicano. Como tal, éste resiste el imperialismo extranjero a la vez que domestica (y coloniza) a los que pertenecen a los pueblos indígenas.