Bio

Journalist, writer, PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. I write about racism, literature, dogs and dreams.

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My research covers Quechua, Aymara and Mapuche literatures written in Spanish, and in particular how they respond to national projects of building countries without indigenous peoples or territories.

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I am a consultant on issues of racism and diversity. I have offered courses and workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, City University of New York, Knight Center for Journalism in The Americas – University of Texas, and also for organizations such as the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Ministry of Culture of Peru.

 

I have published the books Día de Visita (Visiting Day) (Seix Barral), about intimate life in the Lima women's prison; No soy tu cholo (I Am Not Your Cholo) (Debate), an essay about racism in Peru and the United States; and the collection of chronicles De donde venimos los cholos (Where Do We Cholos Come From?) (Seix Barral), which the newspaper La República listed as one of the 10 books to understand Peru and which the New York Times considered one of the most significant of 2016.

 

I directed the magazines Cometa and Etiqueta Negra, considered the best publication of chronicles in Spanish, and where I trained as an editor.

 

I began my career as a journalist at the newspaper El Comercio, in Lima, and I have collaborated with various media in Europe, the United States and Latin America, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Radio Ambulante, Smithsonian Magazine, VICE, Words Without Borders, El País, Internazionale, El malpensante, NUSO.

 

I was born in the city of Abancay, in the central Andes of Peru, in a Quechua family, but I feel that my homeland is in Chumbivilcas, in Cusco, where my mother was born. Like many people in my country, I emigrated to the capital and grew up and was educated in San Juan de Lurigancho, the district where the most Quechua is spoken in Peru.

 

In 2014, after creating and failing to run my own magazine, I immigrated to the United States. There I worked as a kitchen helper at the Tao Yuan restaurant, and was a Community Worker at the Maine Mobile Health Program, an organization that made it possible for migrant and immigrant food industry workers to access doctors and hospitals.

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I live with my wife and two dogs.