Investigación / Research

Colombia has experienced armed conflict for more than fifty years, resulting in a civilian population that has been deeply affected by displacement, disappearances, and death. My interdisciplinary research focuses on the urban peripheral community’s cultural production following the years of conflict, giving special attention to the proposals for peace in these works. Writers and filmmakers have examined violence from a historical and contemporary perspective, a large-scale literary movement including a surge of testimonial writings from marginalized urban communities. The study of these testimonial writings brings new perspectives to the understanding of how people from marginalized urban communities have coped with violence and resist it, especially as vehicles that bring women’s voices to the forefront as active peacemakers.

Much of my research explores these themes, including my study of La virgen de los sicarios (1994) and Rosario Tijeras (1999) by well-known authors Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco. My examination of these authors foregrounds the violence that took place in Medellín during the 1990s, placing emphasis on the crisis created in underprivileged neighborhoods known as los barrios. In contrast to these works, testimonials collected by journalist Alonso Salazar and Voces del Barrio (2007) by Róbinson Posada Vargas provide opportunities for survivors to tell their version of the story. In these testimonials, women emerge as community leaders and activists who transform traditional roles such as motherhood to demand their right to justice and to insist that the government reveal the truth concerning what happened to their disappeared relatives.

I am currently working on a book project on peripheral literary and cultural production in Colombia that promotes the study of violence, resilience, and proposals for peace, highlighting works from el barrio usually ignored or silenced in the literary canon and academia.