Pasados centers scholarship that helps us think historically about Latinx peoples and cultures. Although our primary focus is scholarship on pre-1980s Latinx literary and cultural histories, extending from the colonial era through the twentieth century, we set no particular temporal boundaries on the essays we solicit or publish. Rather, we welcome scholarship that helps us see our pasts, and our relationship to them, anew. This includes but is not limited to: scholarship that takes up cultural materials from the past; engages in textual interpretation and/or attends to broader issues of textuality; considers the intersections of literature and history; and reflects on methodologies of archival practices.
Pasados is dedicated to examining Latinx pasts in their complexity and heterogeneity. It makes no assumptions about the political, moral, or aesthetic value of particular cultural materials. In addition, it values insights about how the past informs the present at the same time that it does not presume a teleological relationship between the past and later movements or our contemporary moment. Rather, we operate with the conviction that the past always has the potential to surprise us, and that the present (and future) might yet become otherwise, in light of the submerged knowledges awaiting recovery in/from the archive.