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A single day in a semilegal market in Lima, Peru, reveals a social world that defies conventional economic logic.

In the heart of Lima’s historic center, the markets of El Hueco (“The Hole”) and sprawling Mesa Redonda pulse with life, with thousands of vendors selling everything from knockoff electronics to religious icons. In A Day in “The Hole,” anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo immerses readers in a single, tumultuous day—the thirty-fourth anniversary of a vendors’ cooperative—while examining the dynamics that sustain these marketplaces.
 
Through a blend of cinematic storytelling and incisive anthropological insight, Gandolfo reveals a world with its own unique codes. She inspects how vendors embrace expenditure over profit and instability over order, and moving through the sights and sounds of El Hueco and Mesa Redonda, she finds a dissident economy that is as much about survival as it is about spectacle. Gandolfo redefines how we think about urban economies and the unexpected ways these defiant communities thrive in this textured portrait of Lima’s markets and the people who animate them.

An exploration of how Indigenous and Black communities shaped religious imagery and navigated life in colonial Lima.

Colonial Lima was steeped in Christian devotional imagery. While Spaniards set the norms for these works, it was the city’s Black and Indigenous majority that engaged with them most. As members of lay societies of worshippers called confraternities, subalterns were Lima’s key promoters of religious art, surpassing the colonial hierarchy.

Ximena Gómez argues that, by commissioning and exhibiting sacred images—in chapels and urban processions, adorned with clothing and accessories—Indigenous and Black confraternities created Lima’s visual culture. In one case study, the Indigenous confraternity of the Virgin of Copacabana "invisibly" transforms a sculpture into an object that reflected its multiethnic Andean caretakers. Another case study, that of the confraternity of the Virgin of the Antigua, finds Black worshippers initially united in their interpretation of a Spanish image and later fracturing when some of its members applied a West African interpretive lens. Taking advantage of Lima’s rich documentary record, In the Hands of Devotees centers the ritual practices of Black and Indigenous people and opens possibilities for incorporating subalterns into the history of Lima’s art when limited extant visual evidence has survived.

A study of the production and movement of prints in colonial South America.

Printed images have had a central place in art-historical studies of colonial Spanish America, but scholars have typically focused on imported prints, designed and produced in Europe. The Mobile Image focuses instead on works printed in colonial Lima, generating there a distinctive print culture that served local and regional needs, while also appealing to European print consumers.

Inexpensive, easily transportable, and numerous, Lima’s prints traversed the varied geographies of the Viceroyalty of Peru both as loose sheets and within the protective covers of printed books. In the process, limeño devotional prints encouraged the development of shared regional imaginaries about the sacred Andean landscape, a space marked by miracle-working Virgins, potential saints, and powerful images of Christ. These same prints traveled abroad, where they promoted iconographies developed in Lima and influenced European conceptions of the Andes. Simultaneously, the visual language of limeño prints often challenges conventional approaches to interpreting colonial depictions of race. In analyzing limeño prints, and the identities of their makers, patrons, and consumers, The Mobile Image demonstrates that race is harder to recognize in colonial images than we might think. Unearthing hundreds of forgotten prints, Emily C. Floyd provides a fresh resource for interpreting colonial artworks, troubling established understandings of their aesthetics, and compelling us to reexamine colonial South American material cultures.

Focusing on the experiences of women who are predominantly poor, nonwhite, rural-to-urban migrants with little or no formal education, The Woman in the Violence addresses a range of serious concerns. What types of violence do women experience at different stages in their lives? Which identities and roles are manifested throughout their lives, and do some of these increase their vulnerability to different forms of violence? What strategies do women employ to gain some power and control in these situations, and how can we conceptualize these strategies?

In examining these questions, The Woman in the Violence contributes to our understanding of violence, gender, race, resistance, and urbanism as it exposes and analyzes systemic violence against women. The everyday forms of resistance these women employ provide significant insight for students, scholars, and health professionals.

2024 Flora Tristán Book Award, Sección Perú, Latin American Studies Association

How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru.

Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing, internationally endorsed "war on poverty" shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima’s largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru’s efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians’ faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians’ everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.

The only full-length ethnography written about Lima’s iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.