This project examines representations of dictatorship in contemporary novels by Latina/o writers to claim that these novels sketch out a complex spectrum of dictatorial power by exposing the links between authoritarianism, racism, and imperialism in the Americas. While race in the U.S. is constructed along the black-white binary and race in Latin America is constructed along a color continuum, the novels it examines use brownness as an in-between racial formation that challenges the dictatorship of white supremacy. It analyzes how these novels represent the specter of Latin American dictatorships in present day Latino communities alongside the oppressions that haunt people of color in the United States. The novels thus shift our politics of perception vis-à-vis dictatorship and interrogate intersectional modes of power that dictate marginalization.