Transgredir la dualidad: Las posibilidades performativas de American Chica de Marie Arana y The Peruvian Notebooks de Braulio Muñoz

Abstract

This essay examines the transnational racial and ethnic politics of Marie Arana’s American Chica and Braulio Munoz’s The Peruvian Notebooks, two literary writings that feature characters who navigate Peruvian, US American, and Latinx connections. As each text’s characters migrate between Peru and the United States, they perform a range of regional, ethnic, and cultural identities that are circumscribed within US American and Peruvian national markers, and in so doing, they expose the myth of national homogeneity. I utilize performance as a theoretical lens through which to examine, first, characters’ transmissions of multiple identities and embodied conflicts and, second, an understanding of ethnic and racial categories as constructed. I investigate the extent to which performativity can function as a space through which to explore alternatives to the otherness that is imposed on transnational subject positions that challenge the boundaries of Latinidad.