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Since the Discovery of the New World, virtually every writer in Latin America has expanded our ideas about human mobility. Christopher Columbus, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Ariel Dorfman, Luis Sepúlveda, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the chicano writer Gloria Anzaldúa are only a few examples. Human mobility is one of the most salient features of our contemporary experience and, even within single countries, such mobility reflects the complexities of our globalized world. In Peru and Bolivia, for example, the portrayals of indigenous migrants in recent decades suggest a significant change in western epistemic paradigms from which postcolonial theory has approached subaltern groups and sheds light on long-standing critical questions at the heart of Latin American studies such as the colonization of knowledge, race, and class.
My research on the aesthetics of migration seeks to answer how do cultural productions on migration reflect different epistemic experiences and resistance to different forms of colonialism? It offers a close look at the ways in which narratives from Andean countries construct the migrants’ imaginary and pays special attention to the ways in which this aesthetics correlates, reflects, and produces an epistemic disobedience. Such disobedience, as Walter Mignolo explains it, consists of questioning the limitations of a postcoloniality that aims to integrate the other in western ways of thinking while encompassing multiple non-Eurocentric paradigms--other's paradigmes-- of knowledge as a result of the expansion of western geopolitical understanding.
CURRENT RESEARCH
I am currently working on my book project Fictions of Migration: Aesthetics of Displacements in Peru and Bolivia. It bridges the aesthetics of migration across the Andes and takes contemporary cinema and literature in Peru and Bolivia as two key narratives to read the region’s migrant imaginary. It proposes that Peruvian and Bolivian stories emerge as competing discourses portraying migration and epitomize a prevailing Manichean construction of the migrant’s image. While monstrosity prevail in Peruvian narratives, people's knowledge emerges as a main feature in Bolivian narratives. As I explain in my manuscript, these stories represent a new social moment in Bolivian society and also a new face for Latin American narratives so long characterized by its magical realism and everlasting crisis.
Also VISUAL ARTS AND MIGRATION
I am currently gathering materials for an article about VISUAL ARTS AND MIGRATION and have been photographing different forms of public art in Peru and interviewing some of the artist {podcast...coming soon..]. Here are some of my first thoughts:
An Exploration of Public Art and the Migrant’s Imagery
As a transnational community, graffiti artists create complex multi-striated connections of people, citizenship, technology, social movements, and art across borders. In the case of the Peruvian capital, these artists have stimulated new cultural representations around rural migrants’ relationships with the capital as a response to the institutional limitations of integrating cultural changes into the city and into the nation at large.
The Latido Americano festival (2013), for instance, shows how graffiti art in Lima has created the possibility for what Arjun Appadurai’s calls ‘netscapes,’ i.e. social networking that helps us imagine forms of communities and the consolidation of identities in specific locations. The festival, organized by Lima-based muralists Entes and Pesimo (E&P) who are well-respected among their peers as painters and social activists, congregated street artists from around the world in the old colonial capital to revitalize it with new forms, colors, and motives. The event is significant because national and international artist brought a new aesthetic that suddenly revealed faces and cultural elements of an internal migrant culture that the city had invisibilized for decades. Although some walls have their own spontaneous meaning, many artists highlighted the hybrid nature of icons resulting from the fusion or juxtaposition of modern urban and Andean cultural traditions as a visual reflection of contemporary life in Lima.
In 2015, as official authorities erased most of the works painted during the 2013 festival, a complex questioning of the role of transnational art communities in the new urban aesthetic and cultural identity emerged in national debates. Lima’s mayor Luis Castañeda Lossio argued that the murals “did not fit” into the city’s aesthetic. It was unclear if he referred to the artistic techniques, to the contents of the paintings, or to the work of his predecessor due to political rivalry. In any case, the erasure of the walls made visible peoples’ positive sentiments in regards to the new cityscape.
As a rise in cultural pride is currently occurring in Peru, street art in the capital has become a bridge to this inward re-evaluation of national identity. Graffiti in Lima has a marked social agenda due to a series of interrelated factors such as rural migration, class struggle, and racial discrimination. Many street works reflect the living conditions of migrants, the racial mixing process, and economic struggles. Murals constitute, then, a political intervention that try to relocate the presence of the Andean world in the city by making the public look at representations of those who populate the streets but who so often pass unnoticed.
PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH RECORD
Throughout my academic career, my interest in migration has formed a cohesive set of research issues ranging from the representation of cultural conflicts and socio-economic inequality to human rights violations. For instance, my article “Internal Migration, The Publishing Industry, And Transnational Identities In Two Peruvian Writers” accepted by Revista Hispánica Moderna analyzes narratives of long-distance nationalism that allow for the cultural relocation of their authors—wherein long-distance nationalism manifests as the other side of nostalgia. Another article appeared in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies argues that the image of Cuban homosexuals metaphorized politically corrupted individuals who should be dis-located from revolutionary Cuba. Likewise, my article about two of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels published in Tropos contends that grotesque descriptions of the mestizo body—its internal organs and fluids—replace the depictions of external racial features by the racialization of spaces which are described as dirty, obscure, and marginal. In another article accepted by Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, I argue that the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s commentaries about landscape transformations represent a sophisticated environmental discourse that connects him to the ideology of an indigenous insurgent movement, the Taky Onqoy. In addition to these publications, I have two more articles under submission in peer-review journals; both of them also deal with different ways in which the migrant’s image is being constructed in Andean countries.
Research Agenda
Expanding the scope of my research on Andean migration, my next two endeavors deal with other phenomena of mobility. One examines the migration of Afro-Peruvian cultural productions and the other explores the cultural confluence of the Chinese and African diaspora in the Andes.
I am particularly interested in analyzing the ways in which black populations working in haciendas interacted and reacted to the first Chinese migratory wave of the 19th century, also known as the Chinese Diaspora or Tusan.
Studies on African influence are a growing field in Andean countries. I will research the cultural mechanisms that allowed writers of African descent such as Antonio Galvez Ronceros and José Santa Cruz, as well as musicians such as Susana Baca to come to the fore of the Peruvian cultural scene. I will explore what were the cultural resources and obstacles in place at the time of their works’ production. In a preliminary manuscript, I explain that Galvez Ronceros’s works, for example, have not received a great deal of attention due to the fact that they were released by small local publishing houses available for non-mainstream intellectuals. Yet, his work, a compelling mixture of ‘español bozal’ and black and white vignettes representing the toils and troubles of black communities, deserves thorough analysis.
Following the trace of the African diaspora in the Andes, I will also explore the cultural contact between black communities and Chinese enclaves during the mid-19th and early 20th-centuries. I am particularly interested in the first migratory wave of the 19th century, also known as the Chinese Diaspora or Tusan. This project requires significant archival work to register the number, ascendance, and social status of Asian migrants in the South. I have spent some time in Lambayeque’s regional archive, located in the north of the Peruvian coast, and found initial documents that can help me to reconstruct the story of Chinese coolies and their contact with black communities through the story of Enrique Baca, the fugitive son of one of these indentured laborers who got married with a mulata worker from the northern coast of Peru.
I bring all these interests not only to specialists in the field, but also into the classroom by drawing students’ attention to the reverberations and ongoing legacies of colonialism, as well as to the connections between neoliberal agendas and cultural production in the age of migration. I am committed to furthering scholarly dialogue on these issues by transcending disciplinary and regional boundaries and making productive connections between geographic displacements and indigenous studies. The strong emergence of migratory literature in recent decades reflects a significant turn in literature and literary culture and is sparking conversations on long-standing critical questions at the heart of Latin American studies.