What role has paranoia and personal writing played in modern history? Unforeseen events, such as World Wars, the clash between Communism and Capitalism, the growth of media, a global pandemic, among others, have marked our times. It is not surprising that paranoia has become an element of everyday life in times that, according to Fredric Jameson, are anti-theoretical and anti-intellectual (267). This view allows us to venture that being contemporary implies being paranoid or, at least, accepting paranoia in the structuring of everyday life. By articulating different theories and concepts of the construction of a self-image and testimonial narrative, this work focuses on Caribbean and Southern Cone literature produced from 1960 to the beginning of the twenty-first century. What I am proposing is the possibility of rereading the Latin American canon from a paranoid perspective, considering that this outburst of paranoid subjectivity is seen in foundational texts. In that sense, my research revolves around paranoia not as a state but as a new way of reading power dynamics, the role of secrecy and truth, and the limits of the autobiographical genre in Cuba, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. Paranoia is a tool for reading the dynamics of power that proposes to see these interactions from a historiographic perspective. Columbus’ gaze upon setting foot in the West Indies predicts the foundation of the history of America: “a history of betrayals, uprisings, desertions, conspiracies, mutinies, coups d’état; all dominated by infinite ambition, abuse, desperation, pride and envy” (Arenas 116). The authors to be studied throughout this dissertation forge their idea of paranoia based on the harassment coming from the geopolitics of the state and that falls on the social body, or as a speculation from the confrontation of the state. These aspects are more than visible in the foundational texts of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, and José Enrique Rodó. These three thinkers coagulate the first anguished conceptions of a Latin American territory that was under development and under threat. Paranoia is conceived as a historical emotion (Boym 7) with which one seeks to understand the world. The definition of paranoia proposed in this research arises, in part, from how theorists such as Svetlana Boym, Timothy Melley, and Sianne Ngai understand paranoia; either as “rational delusion”, “interpretative disorder” or “normative state of affairs”, respectively. The warlike, socio-political, and technological contingencies of the twentieth century have undoubtedly acted as external and internal forces designed to impact the imaginary of the population, blurring the distinction between irrationality and rationality. Due to the aforementioned indistinction and the quality of celerity that characterizes our days, paranoia leaves the “clinical discourse” to infiltrate into political and legal ideas (Zoja 275). Dominated by a rational delusion, the paranoid subject scrutinizes his reality, starting from questionable premises in order to create a subversive and private project. The paranoid procedure makes the subjects studied suppress their moral beliefs for what they consider a greater good. Suppression that implies a fear or dread about the psyche that seems to lead to the emergence of autobiography and confession as concepts that coexist with the diary, biography, and memoirs. These scriptural practices have been linked to truth and to the incorruptible figuration of a subject by having privileged access to the subject’s life. Behind these conventions of the writing of the self as discursive genres, it was ignored that although a documentary purpose was intended, there were also other aesthetic and even cathartic aims. As a result, it is not unreasonable to affirm that in every paranoid and personal text there are pretensions of verisimilitude, condemnation, revelation, resistance, persuasion, the creation of atmospheres, as well as messianic visions and narcissistic intentions. It is under these reflexive agreements that the narrators of each of the works to be discussed make use of introspection and a questionable commitment to truth. My dissertation begins with the implicit threats and conditions of constant vigilance in the context of a pre-revolutionary Cuba in Pequeñas maniobras (1963) by Virgilio Piñera. A novel that is a transparent representation of fear in its purest sense, with a protagonist who never explains why is he always running away. His paranoid inclination is a message that the Piñerian universe wishes to convey: threats are ubiquitous. Frequently, the narrator will give the sensation of being a subject without a clear biography (even though the progression of the novel proves otherwise). However, these narrative facts serve as an excuse to represent his fear. The author of Pequeñas maniobras believes that, within the trap (real or not), things also happen that go beyond the forcefulness of the macabre and the contradictions of the personality. Likewise, in Piñera, the role of the conventional detective is destabilized to rethink the notions of crime and confession. The second chapter is devoted to “Nombre falso” (1975) and “Prisión perpetua” (1988), where Ricardo Piglia employs characteristics of the crime fiction genre to rethink the role of truth and secrecy in our societies. In both short novels, the narrator demands a suspicious reader, capable of identifying the instances in which the official story can be distorted. In this way, the main character seeks to revise all the reproductions of the experiences associated with the act of storytelling and of narration itself. Through memory and anecdotal recourses, art and life turn out to be a great mystery to be explored and intervened by the protagonists. In the first novel, both Piglia and the rest of the characters twist the truth in order not to reveal a secret that could transform the Argentine literary tradition. In the second novel, the autobiography of a biographer is transformed as well as the reflection on how to make a new literature from the reading of the archive and the practice of plagiarism. In the third chapter I compare how Puerto Rico has become an imperial laboratory under U.S. colonial control with the examples proposed in “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” (2003) by Pedro Cabiya. Through a complex system of narrative instances, the main story is presented as a letter written by an American pilot who, during a flight to the Roosevelt Roads military base in 1913, suffers an accident and ends up in a village at the interior of the island. As a result of his injuries, the pilot stays in the village, but he soon discovers some strange tests carried out by living beings of extraterrestrial appearance on a group of women. The tests comprised measuring the body of the “volunteers” to produce clones. The pilot concludes that because of the instruments that the alleged aliens possessed, they “must be North Americans”. In an article entitled “Imperial Laboratories”, José Quiroga establishes that the Caribbean continues to operate as a laboratory where metropolitan power is constantly reinvented. With that in mind, what were the author’s intentions when presenting these scientific practices to which Puerto Rican women were subjected? To what extent does Cabiya rewrites the past? Should his work be considered an alternate and unofficial history? The fourth chapter establishes how memory and testimony compose what I called a “paranoid archive”—an archive that, I propose, simultaneously discloses and hides various truths—in Boarding Home (1987) by Guillermo Rosales. The novel draws on the experiences of Guillermo Rosales, who lived in multiple halfway houses. It is possible that much of the viscerally disturbing descriptions he attains are due to his condition of first-hand witness. The biographical association between the historical author and William Figueras, the main character, is the result of certain agreements on credibility demanded by personal writing and fiction that balance the episodic circularity of the novel as an achievement at the structural level but also as a trap for both identities. With the ruins of his memory, a new personal and expiatory narrative is constructed that depends on questionable sources, such as dreams or hallucinations. In the text, Rosales fulfills the function of history and Figueras the function of the archive. The first paranoid signs are provided by the patients in the asylum, and serve as a prelude to the paranoid display that Figueras will exhibit throughout the novel. In this way, the historical author regarding his character, the hatching between both glimpses of life, and the diaristic function that materializes through the narration of dreams, are samples of the unofficial that attempts to become a counter-archive. From the Southern Cone to the Caribbean, this research proposes other ways of understanding the relationship between the formation of national and individual identity, as well as the role of literature as an archive of national trauma. Given the proliferation of information, fears, and uncertainties, the writing processes of these paranoid subjects is associated with the willingness to explore their unresolved traumas and the continuous manifestations of violence in the Americas. Thinking about the human-made nature of conspiracies, and then reading the works as expecting those conspiracies, can expose how the personal writing is used as a form of resistance, a declaration of principles, and the starting point for the exhibition of a certain morality.