Books projects
Between Walls and Wounds: How Women Navigate and Reproduce Violence at Peru’s Urban Margins
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Between Walls and Wounds examines how violence circulates through marginalized urban neighborhoods by centering the experiences of women living in Puerto Nuevo, a shantytown in Callao, Peru. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic research—including 16 months of immersive fieldwork, life-history interviews with women and men, focus groups with youth, and interviews with state actors—the book reveals how violence moves fluidly across private and public spaces, blurring conventional boundaries between home, street, victim, and perpetrator. Through the stories of women of different ages, the book shows how shared cultural understandings of race, gender, and class determine whose pain is recognized, whose resistance is validated, and who is criminalized. Women navigate this terrain as caregivers, strategists, mediators, and sometimes enforcers, simultaneously protecting and disciplining their families. By foregrounding these relational dynamics, Between Walls and Wounds challenges rigid distinctions between domestic and urban violence and highlights the limitations of punitive or compartmentalized interventions. Offering a feminist, intersectional, and ethnographically grounded framework, the book provides critical insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners committed to understanding and addressing the reproduction of harm at the urban margins.
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Peer-reviewed articles
Governing Through Exception: Managing Urban Violence through States of Emergency
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This paper explores the recurring use of states of emergency (SoEs) in Callao, Peru, as a response to escalating violence and criminal activity. Focusing on the 2015 and 2022 SoEs, the study draws on 16 months of fieldwork, including interviews and focus groups with local residents, government officials, and experts, to examine the role of SoEs in violence governance. While SoEs are often criticized as authoritarian and punitive, this paper argues that they also serve as pragmatic tools for state actors to address public crises and maintain legitimacy in the face of institutional weaknesses. By temporarily bypassing bureaucratic and legal constraints, SoEs facilitate inter-institutional coordination, temporarily enhancing police presence, and restoring a fleeting sense of state control. However, the increased enforcement capacity is short-lived, exposing the limitations of the state's long-term ability to address the root causes of violence. The paper introduces the concept of “governing through exception,” which views SoEs not just as a tool of repression, but as a pragmatic strategy to govern violence in moments of crisis. This analysis challenges conventional critiques of emergency powers by emphasizing the practical and contextual uses of SoEs.
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Motherwork at the Urban Margins:
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This paper examines how poor mothers living at the urban margins actively engage in survival-oriented maternal labor, or “curated socialization,” to protect and prepare their children for life in violent neighborhoods. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 38 interviews with women, and 12 focus groups with 66 youth in Puerto Nuevo, a shantytown in Callao, Peru, I show that women’s mothering extends far beyond conventional notions of nurturing or hands-off parenting. In a context marked by shootings, gang violence, extortion, and heavy-handed policing, Puerto Nuevo women deliberately cultivate children’s embodied and social dispositions, teaching skills such as walking safely through the streets, responding during violent incidents, selecting schools, regulating friendships, and imposing household discipline. Their labor is ambivalent—protective, caring, and political, yet also restrictive, disciplinary, and at times confrontational—challenging dominant portrayals of motherhood as purely sacrificial or individualized. By positioning women’s survival pedagogy as central to understanding life at the urban margins, this study revises frameworks of socialization and parenting, demonstrating how maternal labor fosters both child survival and community resilience while negotiating the structural inequalities, violence, and precarity that shape everyday life.
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Book chapters
Reframing the Urban Margins: Participatory Photography and Youth Agency amidst Violence in Peru
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This chapter examines how participatory research can challenge stigmatized narratives of marginalized urban communities by centering the voices of young people in Puerto Nuevo, an Asentamiento Humano in Callao, the district with the second-highest homicide rate in Peru. Using photography workshops, focus groups, and interviews with youth aged 8–25, the study highlights how participants document daily life, social bonds, communal spaces, and personal aspirations. The process of reclaiming representation was gradual, as youth confronted negative portrayals they had internalized and began to foster pride in their community. Photographs served as tools for discussion, guided by a field team of local residents who co-created and validated research instruments. Their dual role—as insiders and researchers—revealed both the strengths and tensions of participatory approaches, at times reinforcing stigma while generating nuanced insights. By positioning youth as co-creators of knowledge, the chapter demonstrates how participatory methodologies foster agency, contest exclusionary narratives, and illuminate the complexities of life amidst violence.
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