A significant and growing number of contemporary Latin American women writers and artists from the Spanish-speaking Americas are combining or placing literary texts in dialogue with other media as part of a wider strategy which draws attention to the constructed nature of all boundaries, borders, and hierarchies in an increasingly globalized and digitalized world. Multimedia thus becomes a particularly effective tool for works which seek to dismantle other supposedly rigid categories and hierarchies. The creative practitioners who feature in, and who have contributed to, this volume are representative of a crosscurrent of women from across Latin America who incorporate a literary dimension into their work, are developing a multimedia practice, which may or may not be digital, and share thematic interests in contemporary gender, racial, social, environmental, and/or political issues. These women prioritize experimentation, and so we conceptualize them as forming a crosscurrent running counter to established hierarchies, canons, and traditions rather than as a movement. They are: Pilar Acevedo (b. 1954, Mexico/United States), Rocío Cerón (b. 1972, Mexico), Ana Clavel (b. 1961, Mexico), Carla Faesler (b. 1969, Mexico), Belén Gache (b. 1960, Argentina), Regina José Galindo (b. 1974, Guatemala), Gabriela Golder (b. 1971, Argentina), Mariela Yeregui (b. 1966, Argentina), Mónica González (Mexico), Lucia Grossberger Morales (b. 1952, Bolivia/United States), Pura López Colomé (Mexico), Jacalyn Lopez Garcia (b. 1953, Mexico/United States), Eli Neira (b. 1973, Chile), Mónica Nepote (b. 1970, Mexico), Eugenia Prado Bassi (b. 1962, Chile), Ana María Uribe (Argentina, 1944–2004); Karen Villeda (b. 1985, Mexico), and Marina Zerbarini (b. 1952, Argentina).

In the context of this transgressive crosscurrent of Latin American women authors and artists, multimedia is adopted as a term to analyze bodies of work which include literary texts alongside one or more of the following: painting, photography, sculpture, music, performance, net literature, digital art, and video art. Each practitioner's corpus may or may not include digital media as we seek to extend current discussions of multimedia cultural production to include analog as well as digital media. The emphasis we place on considering both analog and digital media in the context of contemporary multimedia cultural production as well as our foregrounding of the literary as part of a multimedia corpus represent this book's original contribution. By foregrounding the literary, we showcase how the combination of text and non-text-based forms reinvigorates the literary just as the literary can be seen to reinvigorate other media.