Department of American Studies

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa has recently co-edited the anthology Punk! Las Américas Edition, Intellect Books, 2021. The volume takes a hemispheric view of punk as a manifestation of a heterogeneous and contentious Americas. Contributors examine punk scenes all the way from Alaska to the Mapunkies in Patagonia. Punk! Las Américas Edition highlights the nexus between punk, queerness, and social class, and examines punk’s contaminating genre practices via its connections with cumbia and reggaeton. Punk takes on other established forms of artistic expression like literature, visual arts, and photography are articulated together in unexpectedly critical ways. “An academic book through and through, the transgressions this volume performs run the risk of becoming exemplary.” Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis).

Rodríguez-Ulloa’s current solo book project, Sadistic Cholas: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Peru, explores the political resignification of the racial slur chola as it is now deployed by queer trans-feminist performers, authors, and collectives who advance a transfeminist critique via their aesthetic use of violence in sex and politics. Using a hemispheric critical framework that incorporates Black, Latinx, and Indigenous studies, the manuscript theorizes the long durée of the chola’s racialization and sexualization in the Andean context alongside current reappropriations of the term. Departing from representations of Peru’s 1980s war, the book explores potential connections between women’s participation as armed militants and the feminist present.

In future research, Rodríguez-Ulloa plans to delve into US archival materials around South American immigrants and the largely dormant character of their stories within the dominant US imaginaries of Latinidad. In short, she is interested in how Andean and Amazonian peoples might represent conflictive or complementary notions of otherness that destabilize contemporary Latinx perspectives.