The landscape of Latin American digital literature has evolved significantly over the past few decades, giving rise to new creative forms, theoretical approaches, and methodological frameworks. Within this landscape, Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana, edited by Carolina Gainza, Nohelia Meza, and Rejane Rocha, emerges as a vital contribution to the field, offering an interdisciplinary analysis of digital cultural production in the region. This collection of essays aims to map key creative and theoretical trajectories, positioning Latin American digital literature within broader conversations around global literary studies and digital humanities. Structured into four thematic sections—Archivo y preservación, Aproximaciones teóricas y metodológicas, Procesos de escritura y creación, and Diálogos interdisciplinarios—this volume explores crucial topics such as digital archiving, preservation, textual obsolescence, multimodal storytelling, and intersections with artificial intelligence. Through case studies spanning multiple Latin American contexts, this book provides a nuanced exploration of the region’s evolving digital literary and cultural spheres. It is important to recognize that Latin America itself encompasses extraordinary cultural, linguistic, and historical diversity—including Indigenous, Afro-descendant, European, and Asian diasporic traditions—which deeply inform its digital literary production. This diversity provides a crucial backdrop for understanding the varied approaches, themes, and creative strategies examined in Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana.

Before I turn to the review itself, it is valuable to situate the volume within a broader and evolving field of scholarship on Latin American digital culture, literature, and digital humanities. Recent works such as Digital Humanities in Latin America: Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America (2020), edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez, offer a wide-ranging mapping of DH practices across the region, including activist engagements, transnational networks, and infrastructural challenges. However, literary production often remained peripheral in that volume. Cartografía crítica complements and deepens these earlier conversations by foregrounding the specificity of digital literary forms, genres, and practices. Similarly, Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production (2023), which I co-edited with Rhian Lewis and shares some authors with Cartografía crítica, highlights the uneven materialities of digital infrastructures, the politics of digital colonialism, and the creative remappings of Latin American identities through networked culture. Cartografía crítica builds on and extends such analyses, offering a detailed focus on literary creation and its intersections with digital materiality and aesthetics.

Other recent contributions underscore the value of cross-pollination between Cartografía crítica and emerging trends in Latin American literary studies and DH. Rudyard J. Alcocer’s Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature (2023) argues for greater methodological innovation, including the use of reader data and computational approaches to literary analysis—approaches that resonate with Cartografía crítica’s emphasis on methodological pluralism. In parallel, Afro-Latinx Digital Connections (2021), edited by Eduard Arriaga and Andrés Villar, foregrounds the creative and activist uses of digital platforms by Afro-Latinx and Indigenous communities. While Cartografía crítica does not explicitly center these perspectives, its attention to questions of visibility, multimodality, and voice aligns with the broader imperative to expand digital literary studies to encompass diverse cultural traditions and positionalities—a direction that future scholarship might further develop. Together, these complementary works underscore the significance of Cartografía crítica as both a landmark mapping of Latin American digital literature and a generative platform for future dialogues across fields.

Returning now to the book itself, it is important to note that this is a pluri-national effort, uniting authors from across Latin America. Indeed, the collaborative nature of this book is one of its strengths, as seen in the presentation of its introduction in both Spanish and Portuguese. Organized by three university professors from Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, this volume aims to amplify the visibility of Latin American digital cultural production across the varied disciplines its scholarship touches. The diversity of perspectives showcased in this volume reflects the richness of creative experimentation and theoretical contributions emerging from the region. As the first book in the Nuestras Américas collection by the Editorial of the Federal University of São Carlos (EdUFSCar), this volume advances a crucial dialogue on the role of Latin American digital literature within international scholarly and creative networks. At the same time, it highlights the significance of transnational collaboration and interdisciplinary perspectives in understanding the complexities of digital literary production today. In what follows, I will assess the book’s contributions, its strengths, its potential limitations and its broader potential impact.

One of the central premises of Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana is that digital literature in Latin America is not a monolithic entity but rather a diverse, evolving, and highly contextualized field. The introduction effectively sets the stage for this argument, emphasizing how digital literature reflects regional socio-political conditions, linguistic diversity, and technological disparities. The collection presents digital literature as an emerging paradigm within Latin American literary and cultural studies, shaped by global digital practices yet deeply rooted in local histories and epistemologies. Indeed, the volume effectively highlights the interplay between local and global tensions, a central theme that recurs throughout its chapters, underscoring the critical role of place within the digital. By bringing together perspectives from scholars, writers, and digital artists, this book offers a broad yet detailed account of the field’s development, theoretical debates, and creative innovations. The organization of the book into four thematic sections allows for a structured exploration of digital literature from multiple angles, while stressing thematic links across the book’s essays.

In the first section, Archivo y preservación, its authors stress one of the most pressing concerns in digital literary studies: the preservation and archiving of digital texts. As Carolina Gainza and Carolina Zúñiga discuss in their chapter, digital literature is inherently unstable, often threatened by technological obsolescence and ephemeral digital environments. Their analysis of the Cartografía de la Literatura Digital Latinoamericana project, which encompasses 180 works—or nearly 280 when including researchers from Brazil—underscores the challenges of cataloging and preserving digital literature, particularly in a region where infrastructural limitations hinder long-term archival efforts. Similarly, Rejane Rocha’s discussion of the Atlas de la Literatura Digital Brasileña highlights the institutional role of archives in shaping digital literary history. The collaboration between these two projects illustrates the necessity of creating systematic approaches to digital literary preservation, not only as a technical endeavor but also as a means of cross-cultural collaboration. Another compelling contribution in this section comes from Claudia Kozak, Leonardo Flores, and Rodolfo Mata, who examine the challenges of compiling Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volumen 1, the first anthology of Latin American electronic literature. Currently, the anthology spans works from 1965 to 2019, featuring fifty-two authors across six languages, eighty-one works, twenty-two categories, and ten countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Notably, a second volume of Lit(e)Lat is already in the works for future release. The authors highlight the editorial, linguistic, and curatorial complexities of compiling digital works, particularly in a region shaped by linguistic diversity and technological disparities. Collectively, the first section of this volume underscores the importance of institutional support, metadata standardization, and cross-border collaborations in ensuring the longevity of digital literary artifacts.

In the volume’s second section, Aproximaciones teóricas y metodológicas, readers are offered critical perspectives on how digital literature can be theorized and historicized. Andréa Catrópa da Silva questions whether the generational classifications often used in electronic literature studies are applicable to the Brazilian context, arguing for a more regionally specific historiographical approach. This discussion is particularly relevant given that digital literature in Latin America does not always follow the same developmental trajectories as in North America and Europe. Verónica Paula Gómez’s chapter examines the political dimensions of Latin American digital literature, arguing that it operates within a globalized yet uneven system of cultural production. She introduces the concept of “viralized normativity,” exploring how digital texts can subvert dominant literary canons and institutionalized modes of circulation. From there, a thought-provoking contribution by Vinicius Carvalho Pereira explores the emojification of Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de la selva, illustrating how digital remix culture can challenge traditional literary hierarchies. By reinterpreting classic texts through contemporary digital vernaculars, Pereira highlights the fluidity of meaning in digital literary practices. Mónica Nepote and Nohelia Meza’s chapter on electronic literature in Mexico provides a broader survey of hybrid narrative forms and linguistic experimentation in Mexican digital literature. Importantly, the authors mention the vital Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City, a space that was conceived in 2012. Their analysis of transmedial and multimodal storytelling further supports the book’s overarching argument that digital literature in Latin America is characterized by a dynamic interplay of textual, visual, and auditory elements.

In the third section of this collection, Procesos de escritura y creación, readers engage with creative methodologies and aesthetic concerns of digital literary production. Yto Aranda’s essay on ASCII art as a foundational element in Latin American digital poetry traces the historical evolution of visual-textual experimentation in digital spaces. In the following two essays, Eduardo Kac and Clemente Padín similarly reflect on their creative processes, highlighting the intersections between algorithmic design, poetic form, and interactive media. One of this book’s greatest strengths is its ability to interweave the perspectives of digital art and culture practitioners with academic approaches from scholars in the field. By doing so, it challenges the rigid boundaries of academia, embracing digital culture’s inherently interdisciplinary nature and fostering a dialogue that bridges artistic practice, technological innovation, and scholarly inquiry. A particularly compelling contribution in this section is Alckmar Luiz dos Santos, Rafael Soares Duarte, and Vinícius Rutes Henning’s study of e-Imigrações, a digital literary work that integrates comics, poetry, and computational aesthetics. Their analysis, strengthened by visual examples, underscores how digital literature merges multiple artistic traditions, reinforcing the interdisciplinary nature of the field. From there, Eugenia Prado Bassi’s chapter on Asedios examines the body-machine interface in digital writing, engaging with themes of identity, digital embodiment, and the politics of language. This discussion aligns with broader debates on post-humanism and cyberliterature, positioning Latin American digital writing within larger conversations on the materialities of digital texts. The following two essays explore the fusion of technology and poetic expression, highlighting the innovative methodologies employed by digital poets in Latin America. In “Calcular lo incalculable,” Eugenio Tisselli examines the interplay between poetic language and computational processes. Tisselli reflects on his approach to integrating algorithms into poetry, exploring the tension between the incalculable nature of poetic expression and the precision of mathematical language. Subsequently, José Aburto Zolezzi’s chapter examines the evolution of electronic poetry and the limits of poetic language in the digital space, providing a series of powerful visual illustrations from his own work. He proposes a framework for understanding the legacy of experimental poetry, emphasizing how new textual forms, quantum language and programming languages, expand the boundaries of language and reshape our perception of the world and ourselves. This section of the book concludes with an essay from Carlos Labbé, who examines his novel Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo from 2001. Labbé discusses its reception over the past two decades, considering why interest in the novel seems to have increased, even as the concept of digital literature that inspired it has faded from public discourse. To address these important questions, Labbé offers an essayistic perspective on the evolving landscape of digital literature and its place within contemporary literary discussions.

In the final section, Diálogos interdisciplinarios, the scope of the volume expands as the essays situate digital literature within broader interdisciplinary frameworks. This is a particularly important undertaking, given how deeply digital cultural production is embedded in multiple spaces, voices, and fields. To begin, Milton Läufer’s chapter on artificial intelligence and digital writing challenges the notion of AI as an inherently “intelligent” system, proposing instead a framework of “artificial stupidity” as a productive counterpoint to algorithmic determinism. From there, Pablo Gobira, Emanuelle de Oliveira Silva, and Priscila Portugal explore the pedagogical potential of digital literature, advocating for digital literacy as a crucial component of contemporary literary studies. This essay is followed by one from Yeny Magali Pérez Puerto, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz, Liliana M. Herrera Soto, and Adriana J. Ordóñez Paz. In their piece, the authors examine born-digital cultural works in Colombia from the perspective of information science. They discuss the organization of knowledge through processes such as content description and establishing relationships via ontologies, proposing a technological literacy framework for understanding these digital cultural works. Following their analysis, Luis Correa-Díaz examines the role of AI in electronic poetry, analyzing how machine learning techniques can both enhance and problematize poetic creation. To conclude this section and the book as a whole, Élika Ortega synthesizes these interdisciplinary dialogues, advocating for a more integrated approach to the intersection of electronic literature and digital humanities. She introduces the concept of contact zones as a spatial metaphor for rethinking the encounters between digital humanities practices along two key axes: the disciplinary-theoretical and the geographical. This metaphor proves particularly valuable as it facilitates the integration of diverse theories, methodologies, and objects of study, helping scholars navigate the evolving relationship between digital humanities and electronic literature in Latin America.

As highlighted throughout this review, Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana offers a comprehensive exploration of the study, practice, preservation, and dissemination of digital literature in Latin America. The book provides a nuanced perspective on the field’s historical evolution, theoretical discussions, and creative developments. Its strengths lie in its interdisciplinary approach, commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity, and engagement with critical issues of digital preservation and accessibility. One of the strengths of the volume is the dialogue it fosters between distinct national and regional contexts. While common themes emerge—such as concern for preservation, multimodal experimentation, and engagement with socio-political questions—the chapters also reflect important regional differences. For instance, Brazilian contributions often emphasize archival infrastructures and institutional collaborations, while Mexican and Colombian chapters foreground activist, community-based, and hybrid literary practices. The diversity of authorial perspectives—including contributions from both scholars based in Latin America and those working in diasporic or transnational contexts—further enriches the collection, though it also reveals occasional tensions in how Latin American digital literature is conceptualized, whether as a regionally situated field or as part of broader global digital cultures.

While the volume presents an extensive mapping of the field, its wide-ranging scope may be overwhelming for readers unfamiliar with digital literature, digital culture, or digital artists. Additionally, given the book’s focus on digital cultural products, incorporating more visual elements could enhance the reader’s experience. Some chapters also presume a high level of prior knowledge, which may pose challenges for non-specialists. However, these minor limitations do not diminish the book’s significance as a landmark publication in Latin American digital literature, culture, and digital humanities. By bringing together scholars, writers, and artists, Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana fosters an essential dialogue on the future of digital life and its many manifestations in the region. It is an invaluable resource for literary scholars, digital humanists, archivists, and anyone interested in the intersections of technology and culture in Latin America.

Works Cited

Alcocer, Rudyard J. Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Arriaga, Eduard, and Andrés Villar, editors. Afro-Latinx Digital Connections. University Press of Florida, 2021.

Fernández L’Hoeste, Héctor, and Juan Carlos Rodríguez, editors. Digital Humanities in Latin America: Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America. Routledge, 2020.

Raynor, Cecily, and Rhian Lewis, editors. Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production. University of Toronto Press, 2023.