My first book project, Memory Labor: Literature, Indigeneity, and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict revises conceptualizations of “memory work” to theorize the excessive labor—both intellectual and more literal—required by historically marginalized and deauthorized subjects to narrate their experiences of State violence, armed conflict, and/or dictatorship. Using literature of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict as case study, the book models an approach to Latin American Memory Studies that considers the myriad of roadblocks to be overcome by these authors across all phases of the memory production process. I offer “memory labor” as a productive corollary to “memory work,” one that denaturalizes the notion that responding to State violence, armed conflict, or dictatorship requires the same amount of work (labor) for all subjects. At the same time, the book argues that Literature provides an important symbolic space from which to address and redress wartime violences, both due to the Conflict-exceeding imaginings of Indigenous Peruvians as unlettered, antimodern subjects and the anti-Indigenous racism palpable in hegemonic literary responses to the Conflict. Across each chapter, I follow the lifecycle of Conflict-related literary works produced by (ethnically) Quechua authors, both as a means of sensing various forms of memory labor and with an eye towards theorizing the ways in which individual authors appropriate the literary for decolonial, pro-Quechua means.

I am also at work on a second book-length manuscript that looks to read across Peru’s and Greater Mexico’s respective critical traditions of border and migration theory. The project emerges from an interest in reading Peru through Greater Mexico and Greater Mexico through Peru, drawing from each entity’s distinct approach to theorizing human migration. If Peru, on the one hand, has long theorized migrant subjectivities formed through processes of internal migration and Greater Mexico, on the other hand, has historically trained its focus on the concept of border, my manuscript asks what these two traditions might say to one another. The project considers literature, film, performance, and visual art from across twentieth and twenty-first century Peru and Greater Mexico.

Works in Progress:

Book-length Manuscripts

Memory Labor: Literature, Indigeneity, and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict

Peru by Mexico, Mexico by Peru: Migrations, Borders, and Dispossessions

Articles

“Rigoberta Menchú, Authorship, and Indigenous Literature”

“Migration and Mobile Immobility in José María Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo”

“Thinking la Generación de los Hijos from Bolivia: Revolutionary Dreams, Neoliberalism, and Giovanna Rivero’s 98 segundos sin sombra (2014)”