This dissertation examines the traumatic and ghostly literary resonances of four contemporary transcultural novels from Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic/United States, in order to challenge historical representations of indigeneity and the traditional national paradigm. In what follows, I analyze Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando Saturnina, Yuri Herrera’a Señales que precederán al fin del mundo, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and concentrate in the ways they depict modes of community-formation across demarcations of race, culture, languages, and literatures. These seminal novels depict compulsive and spectral indigenous imaginaries, and generate disruptive and subversive impulses that prevent the coagulation of traditional sociopolitical paradigms and the neutralization of politics. The four novels show how, throughout Latin America, indigenous voices articulate phantasmal discourses and recover mythical narratives that disjoint the national paradigms they grow out of. On the other hand, these voices also constitute a communitarian compulsive force charged with revolutionary power that acts both as a political instrument with which to read the reemergence of native ideologies in contemporary Latin American literature and as a critical tool that shows the unraveling of specific national models.