An essay on the melodrama of having brown skin and being treated as a foreigner in your own country.
From chronicles and vignettes, Marco Avilés describes how racism distributes privilege and subordination among people. The chronicler takes us by the hand through restaurants, hospitals and schools in Donald Trump's United States and, back in Peru, reflects on the connections with racism that he witnesses and experiences in his own city. What is the problem of being brown?

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About the book:

History always forgot the most important thing: the people. Marco Avilés rescues in No soy tu cholo the country's true revolutionaries. The group that endured the outrages of all the previous ones. Avilés makes us notice how white and Spanish was always literature and politics. And its endless queues in the signing rooms reflect a country that wants to be in books at last.
-Santiago Roncagliolo. El Comercio

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I liked it very much and it seemed to me that you took up an urgent and necessary subject of which we know very little in these parts. Today I talked about the book and the situation you describe so well in a column I have on the radio and had many messages from listeners commenting on it. I hope it reaches Argentina and many can read it.
-Claudia Piñero

 

Marco Avilés opens I Am Not Your Cholo with his visit to a school in Maine, where he is invited to talk about his experience as an immigrant (…). The surprise in his audience (wasn’t it true that only Latinos migrated and settled in a country that was not their own? First World citizens also cross borders in search of a better future) provides a starting point for the disturbing question about skin color and privilege, both in Peru and in the United States, and how that combination motivates and at the same time impedes the essential human impulse to migrate.​

-Susan Harris. Words Without Borders​​