Migrant Performativity and the Coloniality of Gender in Huaco retrato by Gabriela Wiener

Abstract

This article analyzes Huaco retrato by Gabriela Wiener from an intersectional perspective, understanding migration as a gender performance that activates a process of identity decolonization. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Butler, Lugones, Fanon, and Hartman, it argues that the protagonist embodies a subjectivity marked by racialization, foreignness, and affective dissidence, turning her body into a living archive of colonial violence. The novel subverts traditional narratives of mestizaje, motherhood, and the heteronormative family through practices such as polyamory and autofictional writing. In contrast to discourses that seek to integrate the migrant subject, Wiener presents structural and unresolved foreignness, where identity is rebuilt through conflict. Huaco retrato, therefore, becomes a space of critical experimentation that destabilizes normative categories of gender, race, and belonging, situating itself within a dissident migrant literature that challenges hegemonic ways of narrating the body and memory.