RESEARCH AGENDA - DESCRIPTION

Beyond my book project, I am developing new research agendas on the articulation of art, protest, and activism from diverse contexts and perspectives.

• Drawing on recent decolonizing initiatives from Abya Yala, my article “Decolonial Genealogies: Activism, Art, and Indigenous Feminisms in Abya Yala” will address recent works from Indigenous feminist collectives such as Chola Contravisual, Mujeres Creando,  Wiñay Wara (Diversidades Sexuales y de Géneros) and female and non-gender conforming indigenous peoples from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile to examine how they use decolonial and transnational frames to challenge, question, and undo coloniality/modernity. Through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical framework of Neplanta (in-between), María Lugones’ fractured locus, Catherine Walsh’s decolonial insurgency, Julieta Paredes’ communitarian feminism, Silva Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch'ixi (a parallel coexistence of difference), I argue that their work and activism not only reclaim spaces to visibilize indigenous languages in contemporary Latin America, but also contribute to disseminating indigenous women’s herstories of resistance, disobedience, struggle, and empowerment. Ultimately this project aims to illustrate how their praxis denotes an action of creation and intervention towards opening paths that lead to resignify historically excluded indigenous women in the Global South. 

• Transit Memories as Haunting: Andean Indigenous Women’s Led Activism and Protest in the Peruvian Diaspora: Through labors of memory, this research project uses multidisciplinary feminist frameworks, approaches, and methodologies to explore how memories hunt and transit in spaces, groups, generations, and time periods. I examine how local and diasporic memories of state repression during Peru’s massive protests (2022-2023) travel amid social struggles, migration, racism, and massacre through different forms of expression that include social media, cultural production, video archives, and testimony. More specifically, I explore the ways in which diasporic memories are utilized and constructed during protests in the New York-Peruvian diaspora following the assassination of Indigenous protesters by police. The project draws upon collaborative interviews, performative assembly theory, and decolonial feminism to explore how Andean Indigenous women envision alternative worlds by narrating their collective struggles, embodying assembly practices, and fostering transnational solidarity. Moreover, the project explores how they connect with those killed through public interventions and performances of indigeneity. In essence, this project highlights the role of diaspora communities in shaping and participating in global social and political movements.

• For a second book, tentatively titled Incarcerated Memories from the Margins: The Politics of Victimhood in Post-Conflict Peru, I intend to expand chapter four of my dissertation by incorporating numerous testimonies not yet analyzed nor published by other scholars. I aim to create new understandings of the complexity related to combatant women’s experiences during war.