In-Progress Book Manuscripts:

My first book project, Memory Labor: Literature, Indigeneity, and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict, theorizes the excessive work—both intellectual and more literal—required by historically deauthorized subjects to write their experiences of State violence, armed conflict, and/or dictatorship. The book models an intersectional approach to Latin American Memory Studies that takes seriously the reduced conditions of creative-authorial possibility available to subjects who have long been situated as peripheral or even exterior to their respective nations. Using literature of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (~1980-2000) as case study, Memory Labor follows the literary journeys of (ethnically) Quechua authors who endeavor to narrate their experiences of civil war within a public sphere still defined by anti-Indigenous racism and discrimination. Each chapter tracks their efforts to legitimize their respective points of enunciation, brace against stereotypes of indigeneity, publish their work, and keep their texts circulating. The book thus offers “memory labor” as a productive corollary to “memory work,” a term which has long been employed as a broad catch-all for memory-related activism and cultural production. Memory labor, as term and theoretical concept, denaturalizes the notion that responding to State violence, armed conflict, or dictatorship requires the same amount of labor, be it intellectual or more literal, for all subjects. It also calls into question hegemonic understandings of ‘memory’ proper. At the same time, and beyond its conceptualization of memory labor, the booktraces the literary and extra-literary strategies that (ethnically) Quechua authors employ to make literature labor on their and their communities’ behalf, as well as the varying stakes of their respective interventions. Rather than take their texts as mere invitations to remember or memorialize, the book argues that they address urgent Conflict-era and post-Conflict community needs and actively rally against anti-Indigenous racism, the same racism that informed the war’s disproportionate impact on Indigenous subjects in the first place.

In my second book project, Mobile Immobilities and Latin American Migrations, I focus my attention on the representation of Latin American migrant subjects who are physically mobile—in the sense that they quite literally move and migrate—but nevertheless immobilized by deep-rooted power structures that limit their possibility of escaping economic precarity, racial-ethnic discrimination, and exploitative labor practices. Turning to Latin American cultural production—novels, films, sculptures, poetry, etc.—produced over the course of the last eighty years, I analyze how a diverse swath of writers, artists, and filmmakers complicate and problematize the implicit association of migration with (positive) mobility. Moving from the Caribbean to Greater Mexico to the Andean region, I organize a corpus of works featuring migrant protagonists who are seemingly in constant physical motion but who, for all intents and purposes, go nowhere. These are migrants who never stop migrating, who find the same conditions of impossibility wherever they go, who seemingly rehearse transhistorical and ancestral immobilities, and who encounter new cities and spaces that are but mirror images of those they left behind. Taking a hemispheric view that places a diversity of national contexts and migratory forms—internal, international, land, sea, etc.—in direct conversation, I argue that Latin American cultural production provides essential insights into the simultaneous mobility and immobility of migrant subjects, particularly those who belong to historically marginalized communities. Alongside fine-grain analyses of individual cultural objects, I develop the term “mobile immobility” as a means of theorizing this very phenomenon, both within the realm of cultural production and beyond.