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<p>This article argues that Gabino Iglesias’s <i>Coyote Songs</i> mobilizes horror as a form of testimony, exposing how necropolitical violence at the U.S.-Mexico border is represented and encountered as lived, embodied experience. Situating the novel within an emergent tradition of Latinx horror, I develop the concept of testimonial horror to describe a mode of narrative witnessing that bears testimony to forms of violence, disappearance, and juridical erasure that exceed the limits of legal recognition. Through readings of Pedrito’s apprenticeship into border violence, Alma’s ritualized performance of resistance, and the spectral maternal figures of La Inmaculada and the Unnamed Mother, I demonstrate how the novel stages the afterlives of colonialism, racial capitalism, migration, and state abandonment. Rather than offering horror as escapism, <i>Coyote Songs</i> transforms horror into a political and aesthetic practice that confronts the production of disposability and insists on the visibility of the ungrievable.</p>

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Haunting the Law

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月9日

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  • Luis Alberto Cortés

摘要

This article argues that Gabino Iglesias’s Coyote Songs mobilizes horror as a form of testimony, exposing how necropolitical violence at the U.S.-Mexico border is represented and encountered as lived, embodied experience. Situating the novel within an emergent tradition of Latinx horror, I develop the concept of testimonial horror to describe a mode of narrative witnessing that bears testimony to forms of violence, disappearance, and juridical erasure that exceed the limits of legal recognition. Through readings of Pedrito’s apprenticeship into border violence, Alma’s ritualized performance of resistance, and the spectral maternal figures of La Inmaculada and the Unnamed Mother, I demonstrate how the novel stages the afterlives of colonialism, racial capitalism, migration, and state abandonment. Rather than offering horror as escapism, Coyote Songs transforms horror into a political and aesthetic practice that confronts the production of disposability and insists on the visibility of the ungrievable.