Chapter Outline:

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s overall objectives, arguments, theoretical framework, and significance within various fields. Positioning the book in existing scholarly conversations regarding colonialism, modernity/coloniality, and gender, it explains how looking at the past can shed light to the mechanisms behind indigenous women’s dehumanization in current times. It then outlines key theoretical contributions to scholarship on historiography, gender theory, testimony, and post-colonial and literary studies. Finally, it explains the book's structure.

Chapter 1: Andean Chronicles of Violence, Coloniality, and Gender

In this chapter, I analyze the mechanisms of coloniality behind the construction of gender systems in the colonial Andes and provide a literary history of gendered violence that illustrates the ways in which female bodies have been symbolically constructed during colonization. The main objective of this chapter is to illustrate, through numerous drawn examples from conquest chronicles, the objectification of Andean women and elucidate the ways in which coloniality of power and gender, mechanisms that operate together in the racialization and sexualization of women, transformed indigenous female bodies into available, rapeable, and destructible objects. This beginning leads me to analyze how the contact between pre-Columbian and colonial gender systems made possible the institutionalization of a racialized and gendered hegemonic order that transformed white men into superior beings, white women inferior to them but superior to racialized men, and indigenous women into a category characterized by sub-humanity.

Chapter 2: Constructing Indigenous Female Identities in Peruvian Indigenista Literature

This chapter takes on literary productions shaped during indigenismo, an artistic, literary, and political movement that sought to vindicate indigenous peoples and solve the Indian problem in Peru. The texts that I analyze in this chapter not only speak of the exploitation of campesinas, but also reveal, almost implicitly, the place indigenous women occupied during the Peruvian modernizing project of the 20th century. I argue that indigenista writings of this period reproduced tales that denounced indigenous women’s oppression and sexual exploitation during nation-building while institutionalizing discourses that conceived them as infantile, vulnerable, backward, and incapable of contesting their oppression. Through examining how these texts configure indigenous female figures as marginal subjects without thoughts, knowledge, or desires, docile lovers, sacrificed mothers, obedient wives, and good savages resigned to endure abuse, I demonstrate how indigenista literature founded fictions that racialized, sexualized, and commodified women imagined as more indigenous.

Chapter 3: Gender-Based Violence in the Fiction of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000)

This chapter takes on the prevalence of rape, a core manifestation of the interlocking of gender with race, nation, and political violence, during Peru’s conflict and considers its representation in literature. I analyze Red April (2009) by Santiago Roncagliolo and Blood of the Dawn (2016) by Claudia Salazar Jimenez, both published after the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report. The purpose of this chapter is to raise critical questions about the figuration of rape as a trope in Peruvian novels about internal armed conflict. From there, I examine if these novels configure new meanings of rape representations by challenging myths and assumptions about sexual violence. My analysis is organized according to five main factors: The construction of the rape story, the use of the raped body as a metaphor to represent a modern nation in crisis, the manifestation of coloniality, the reconstruction of female figures after experiencing rape, and the dismantling of victim/perpetrator binaries. I also show that these novels portray women who stand up against violence through the use of intricate fictional characters that challenge the typical portrayals of Indigenous women. Lastly, I explore the possibilities of reading Blood of the Dawn through the lens of decolonial feminism. In doing so, the book illustrates how Indigenous women make spaces for memorializing their stories of survivance and rebuilding their worlds.

Chapter 4: Arpilleras of Hope: Indigenous Herstories of Resurgence, Memory, and Decolonial Love
My chapter contributes to research on Indigenous women’s activism through arpillera making. Arpilleras are pieces of art that are handmade by women who collaborate to embroider illustrations on colorful pieces of cloth. In the context of Peru’s conflict, arpilleras became a tool to document human rights violations, demand justice, and hold actors of violence accountable for their actions. In this chapter, I draw upon arpilleras crafted by Mama Quilla Association, a non-profit organization led by displaced women from Andean regions that were the most heavily impacted by political violence. I argue that these arpilleras commemorate and honor victims and survivors of Peru's conflict, weave stories of survivance, and represent the resilience of Andean women before, during, and after the conflict. I also note that these arpilleras are memorials and archives that go beyond the written word and tell engendered memories of survival, communitarian resurgence, and decoloniality. I close the chapter with a close reading of the arpilleras and show that Mama Quilla's work reclaims spaces to amplify Indigenous cosmologies in contemporary Latin America and share women's herstories of Indigenous futurities and resurgence. Overall, these arpilleras provide a lens into the power of popular art made collectively by Indigenous women.

Conclusions

Weaving together these chapters, the conclusion reiterates the book’s overall intentions, arguments, and contributions. It also traces emerging cultural productions that capture indigenous subjectivities. As I argue, these artifacts shed light on alternative forms of citizenship that signify and visibilize women’s resilience in the imagined community of Peru. Thus, this concluding chapter contributes to the dissemination of new artistic forms that interpret and reconfigure indigenous women’s identities and positionalities.