Decolonial Feminist. Scholar in Indigenous and Cultural Studies. Quechua Descendant. Relative.

Allillanchu. ¿Imaynalla kachkanki?. I am a 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. I am currently working on my book Race, Gender, Violence, and Memory in Peruvian Narratives of the Andes, developing and teaching courses, and mentoring students. I received my Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia in May 2020.  

My research creates a conversation between various fields of knowledge: Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies, literature, cultural studies on (de)coloniality, and gender studies through the analysis of a specific identity experience: Andean women’s identity formation from colonial times to the present. More broadly, my research interest includes Indigenous feminisms, memory studies, gender studies, film, and colonial, indigenista, and contemporary Peruvian literature.

At Rutgers, I have developed and taught two graduate seminars and one undergraduate course on indigeneity, Indigenous feminisms, and moves to the decolonial otherwise. In these courses we explore how Indigenous peoples in the Américas resist colonial domination and work toward liberation, re-existence, and resurgence of knowledge from within. Particular areas of focus include coloniality/modernity, settler colonialism, Indigenous feminisms, blackness and indigeneity, transness and indigeneity, immigration, and ongoing resistances to colonial violence.

“And so I look at myself, and at my Quechua-speaking brothers and sisters, at my Aymara brothers and sisters and at the more than 60 different Amazonian nationalities, the Mayans of Guatemala, the Mixtecas of Mexico, the Cree of Canada, the Navajo of North America, the Inuit of Greenland or Canada, the Maasai of Africa, at the indigenous nationalities of India, the Philippines and Hawaii, to name but a few, and I see myself reflected in each and every one of them.”

- Tarcila Rivera Zae, Quechua.
Photo Credit: CHIRAPAQ