Dolores Flores-Silva is a professor of Latin American literature and culture at Roanoke College and the author of The Cross and the Sword in the Works of Rosario Ferré and Mayra Montero (2009).Keith Cartwright is chair of the Department of English at the University of North Florida and the author of Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways (2013) and Reading Africa into American Literature (2002).

"American literature starts here’, Flores-Silva and Cartwright write, where an American gothic originates in response to the violations of Euro-settler colonialism and where presumably ‘impassable gulfs’ become passages binding the living to the undead, where La Llorona, her origins deep in prehistory, haunts the present. A fascinating and generative study"—Barbara Ladd, Professor of English, Emory University, USA.

• Acknowledgments; Introduction. Gulf Gothic; La Llorona’s Undead Voices: Woman at the Borderwaters; Plantation Entanglements: Gulf Afterlives of Slavery; Gulf Atmospherics: Huracán and the Visceraless State; Coda: “Phantasmal Space”; Works Cited; Index