This dissertation examines how Latin American speculative cultural production imagines outer space as a site of encounter rooted in the hemispheric history of the Americas. Rather than treating outer space as humanity’s universal future horizon, it shows how narratives of extraterrestrial exploration and contact in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx literature, cinema, and visual art engage a much older hemispheric drama: the 1492 colonial encounter and its divergent afterlives. These works offer a decolonial critique of Western expansionism by linking U.S. imperial intervention in the hemisphere to the colonial imagination of outer space as the ultimate frontier. Moving across mid-twentieth century Mexican B-movies, post-1959 Cuban science fiction, and contemporary Puerto Rican and Latinx poetry, this dissertation traces how speculative works across media and genre stage human-alien encounters that do not simply reproduce familiar science-fictional tropes of invasion, conquest, or technological triumph. Instead, they foreground gimmicky scenes, excessive bodies, errant technologies, and suspended futures through which alternative experiences of historical time become perceptible. In this way, they register the incommensurate national trajectories of modernization, revolution, and postcolonial struggle in Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, while attending to the transnational dynamics that bind these histories together. The project argues that speculative fiction, and science fiction in particular, offers a crucial lens for understanding the recent past and present of Latin America. At the same time, the genre calls for new theoretical approaches attentive to the region’s histories and cultural forms. Rather than focusing on science fiction primarily as a mode of cognition or rational extrapolation, this project considers speculation more broadly as an affective and embodied practice of world-making. Across these texts, outer space emerges as a contact zone where different historical understandings of the future intersect, and where political communities, forms of belonging, and the very category of the human come to be reimagined.