Che Guevara on a t-shirt, Eva Peron in a Broadway musical, Bolivar as trans on a postcard, Gabriela Mistral on a peso bill, Pablo Neruda as a postman's friend, Frida Kahlo as a feminist icon, Artigas in a blues band ... The list goes on. Nevertheless, what all these cultural appropriations have in common is that the present has used the past to inscribe a functional narrative for that time. This course will not ask if we can know past events as they really happened, but rather it will explore how contemporary fictions, films, and visual art from the Southern Cone construct usable cultural archives for their present. Also, this seminar traces the ways in which contemporary authors, filmmakers, and visual artists reflect on the past in order to critically read their present. Concentrating on the past as both the subject of fiction and as a force for inscribing fiction, this seminar inscribes an approach to time that moves away from a linearity.