Cristina E. Pardo Porto is assistant professor of Latin American and Latinx visual cultures at Syracuse University. Oscar A. Pérez is professor of Spanish at Skidmore College and the author of Medicine, Power, and the Authoritarian Regime in Hispanic Literature.

• List of Figures viiAcknowledgments ixPlants, Animals, and Cultural Criticism from Latin AmericaCristina E. Pardo Porto and Oscar A. Pérez 1PART I Beyond Anthropocentrism1 Anthropomorphism and Vegetal Life in Sara Gallardo’s “Un césped”Micah McKay 272 “They Have Wrapped the Fibers of My Plants around Their Naked Feet”: Plants and Animals of the US-Mexico BorderscapeKate Ostrom 393 Tropical Scenery: Plant and Animal Resistance in Early Photographs of Panama’s RainforestCristina E. Pardo Porto 564 Brazil, the Country of Palm Trees: A Study of the Arecaceae in the Work of Tarsila do AmaralAna Carolina Carmona-Ribeiro 77PART IILanguage and Knowledge5 Cattle Intimacies: Animal Voice and Literary Speech in João GuimarãesRosa and Marília Floôr Kosby Thomaz Amancio 956 Languages of Life: Biosemiotics and Living Systems of Plants and Animals in Contemporary Mexican PoetryBrian T. Chandler 1117 Bugs, Plants, and Laboratories: A Grammar for/of More-Than-Human Entanglements in Alexis Gambis’s Science New Wave FilmsOscar A. Pérez 1278 In the Beginning Was the Fable! Textually Transmitted Beasts and Commodities in Amores Perros and Calila e DimnaBeatriz Rivera-Barnes 144PART III Coloniality and Multispecies Resistance9 “He wanted me to be his little dog”: Imagery of Nature, Gender, and Colonial Powers in Jerónima Nava y Saavedra’s Spiritual AutobiographyPilar Espitia 16310 Guamán Poma’s Ecocentric Ethos in Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen GobiernoVíctor Sierra Matute 17911 Migration and Stasis in Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ /La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos by Irma PinedaEmily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez 19712 El árbol del chicle: Plant Life and Racialization in Luis Rosado Vega’s Poema de la selva trágica (1938) and Yulene Olaizola’s Selva trágica (2021)Jorge Quintana Navarrete 212PART IV The Politics of Plant and Animal Life13 Of Paddocks, Plants, and Cattle: Security and Burden in the Caribbean Age of SugarNiall A. Peach 23114 “There’s Nothing Better than Giving Life”: Freeing the “Plant” from the “Plantation” in Recent Latin American Narratives about CoffeeMauricio Espinoza 24715 Captivity and Pride in the Yerba Mate World: A Bond for Survival under Persistent ColonialityJonathan Mulki 26216 Return to Nature: The Politics of Animals and Plants in Two Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Latin American Vegetarian CookbooksVanesa Miseres 279Afterword: A Latin American Mélange of ExistencePatrícia Vieira 298List of Contributors 305Index 309