Coloniality, belonging, and indigeneity in Peruvian migration narratives

ABSTRACT

Transnational lives include not only the mobility of individuals, but of racialized discourses that reinforce and sustain inequalities and exclusion. Building on the seminal work of migration scholars Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou, this article brings together Quijano's coloniality of power with cultural critic Aviles’s insights on contemporary forms of discrimination and anthropologist Briones’s conceptualization of ‘internal Others’ to center racialization in approaching contemporary middle-class Peruvian identities across borders. I suggest that similarly to how racialization is key to the processes of creating internal Others in Peru, middle-class Peruvians seek to assert higher status in relation to other migrants in the U.S. and Canada by employing discourses of indigeneity and internal Others. These forms of status-marking through racialization and differentiation are central to contemporary peruanidad within and beyond Peru’s physical borders, and to understanding the role of race, racism, and coloniality of thought among Peruvians outside Peru.

KEYWORDS:

• Coloniality
• middle class
• migration
• Peru

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

2. Scholars have engaged with coloniality of power to analyze postcolonial contexts and phenomena beyond Peru and Latin America. While developed in the context of European colonization of the Americas, coloniality of power has proven useful in analyzing the experience of coloniality within global matrices of power in other postcolonial contexts as well, including among Aboriginal peoples in Australia (Stead and Altman 2019), postcolonial Africa (Bertolt 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013) and even within the Caucasus and Central Asia (Tlostanova 2006).

3. Recently, the term ‘cholo’ has acquired more positive connotations as more individuals proudly self-identify as cholo and more Peruvians claim that Peru is a predominantly cholo nation.

4. In my earlier research in Lima in 2001–2002, one woman described to me and a group of other women how she angrily defended herself from her abusive husband because ‘I don’t know, the indio in me comes out, the cholo in me comes out, all my generations come out!’ In this case, cholo and indio are associated with wild uncontrollable forces of anger (and self-defense) from within.

5. Multiculturalism has been the official Canadian immigration policy since 1971, and civic duties and people’s sense of belonging are formally prioritized over assimilation in Canada (Armony, Barriga, and Schugurensky 2004).

6. The contrast between the preventative measures and the increasing number of covid-19 cases has been covered in the media, including in the New York Times article, ‘Virus Exposes Weak Links in Peru’s Success Story,’ published 12 June 2020, available online.

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Notes on contributors

M. Cristina Alcalde

M. Cristina Alcalde is Marie Rich Endowed Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Associate Dean of Inclusion and Internationalization at the University of Kentucky. Her research areas include gender violence, migration, exclusion, and race and racialization. Her publications include Peruvian Lives across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home; The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru; Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought; and numerous articles and chapters.