'They are always there': Mendieta, Vicuña and the coming again of ghosts

To speak of “Latin America” is to seek a frame of negotiation between those for whom it remains a pragmatic grouping, those who regard it as a psychic and geographic zone of experience, and those for whom it serves little other purpose than as a postcolonial mirage. And it’s true, the term is used, critically and otherwise, by a wide range of peoples under its considerable set of semantic groupings of culture, place, and identity. It remains for many, however, a highly contested term that highlights the conflation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. To use it, one must be careful to confront the ghosts that it conjures. It is used here to mark out a framework of precisely that—conjuring ghosts—rather than to circumvent its problematic status.