My first book project, Decolonial Memory Work: Indigenous Writing and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict examines how ethnically Quechua Peruvians confront the challenge of writing literature in the wake of Peru’s most notorious explosion of anti-Indigenous violence: its Internal Armed Conflict. Importantly, I understand this anti-Indigenous violence to be simultaneously literal, symbolic, and discursive. Across the manuscript, I argue that Literature provides an essential symbolic space from which to address and redress these intersecting 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. Rather than view Quechua turns to narrative as an abandonment of traditional—and primarily oral, non-textual—discursive mediums, I propose that they represent a powerful expression of decolonial memory work. This memory work, I suggest, is not so concerned with helping Quechua communities remember, as critics have long argued, but with doing the more urgent work of addressing longstanding, Conflict-exceeding colonialities and racisms, those which made possible the genocide of some 70,000 Indigenous Peruvians in the first place. On the other hand, and thinking beyond the Peruvian context, my book calls for a broad reconsideration of memory work and Memory Studies in and of themselves. Recognizing the excessive amount of work required for Quechua authors to write, produce, and circulate their narratives of Conflict, the project points to a dire need to develop critical frameworks that not only look beyond Western Europe and the Southern Cone, but that actively account for the challenges faced by Indigenous and racialized authors and practitioners.

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. Tentatively entitled Peru by Mexico, Mexico by Peru: Migrations, Borders, and Dispossessions 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. That is, what would it mean to sense the borders—physical, socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, etc.—lurking within Peruvian migration literatures and what might we, as critics, gain from zooming-in on Greater Mexico’s internal migrations? 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

Decolonial Memory Work: Indigenous Writing 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”