Department of American Studies

Rodríguez-Ulloa’s monograph Sadistic Cholas: Transfeminist Provocations in Contemporary Peru (University of Texas Press, in press), delves into a theorization of the racial slur “chola” from its earliest colonial uses, when cholas were defined as a mix of indigenous and black and as promiscuous heathens, to current appropriations of chola by queer performers, authors, and collectives that develop a transfeminist critique via their figurations of revenge in sex, aesthetics, and politics. The book ponders cholas’ migrancy to rethink their racialization as traversed by mobility and transientness. In this context, sadism becomes a retaliatory aesthetic weapon against coloniality and patriarchy, used to pierce the caste and class logics and invert the European origins of the term. Using a hemispheric critical framework that incorporates Black and Indigenous studies, feminist theory, and Andean intellectual history, the book also seeks to position cholas’ overlooked anti-colonial aesthetics within the fields of American and Afro-Latinx studies. 

Rodríguez-Ulloa is the co-editor of 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. The volume highlights the nexus between punk, queerness, and social class, and examines punk’s contaminating practices across genre via connections with cumbia and reggaeton. In addition to music, literature, visual arts, and photography are articulated together as critical expressions of punk. 

Rodríguez-Ulloa’s future research analyzes memoirs and activist episodes that articulate a critique of US imperialism produced by Andean migrant women living within the US. Having experienced Peruvian coloniality in the form of the hacienda system and its structural anti-Indigeneity, in conjunction with US financial, cultural, and military interventionism in the Latin American region, these women represent an embodied and insurgent knowledge that became more critical with their immigration to the north. The case studies focus on the 20th century, situated in the Puerto Rican independence movement of the 1920s, New York's 1950s/1960s beat generation, and the 1960s Red Power Movement in the Bay Area. A tentative title for this book is “Disobedient Migrants. Andean Women against US Empire.

Her publications have appeared in e-misférica, e-flux, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and the Latin American Literary Review among others.