Central American Unicorns: Writing Ourselves into the Future

What does it mean to write ourselves into futures where we have rarely been imagined? In this short talk-performance, Maya Chinchilla weaves poetry, storytelling, and excerpts from Central American Unicorns in Space, a multimedia science-fiction project centering queer Central American voices and imagination. Moving between memory, humor, identity, and speculative futures, Chinchilla reflects on the possibilities of using poetry and speculative storytelling to move beyond narratives of migration, violence, and survival. Central American Unicorns: Writing Ourselves into the Future asks what happens when we imagine Central Americans not only as subjects of history, but as creators of new worlds, queer futures, and possibilities still to come.

Maya Chinchilla is a writer, educator, and media maker and author of The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética. She teaches Latino/a/x Studies and Writing at San Francisco State University and Laney College. A recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s US Latino Digital Humanities Grant, her work spans poetry, digital humanities, queer media, and speculative storytelling. She serves on the board of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) as artistic liaison and incoming co-chair. Her poetry appears in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, edited by Rigoberto González.