Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, an associate professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, has been awarded Grant-in-Aid funding from the University’s Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). Grant-in-Aid funds are designed to promote independent research and support the University’s strategic plan MPact 2025.

Sumida Huaman’s project received a Multicultural Research Award. These funds support interdisciplinary research engaged with underrepresented communities and focuses on issues related to diversity, equity, and advocacy.

The project is titled “Labor, violence, and life aspirations across three generations of Quechua women.” In 17th century Peru, Indigenous lands held by Spanish settlers largely transitioned to haciendas designed for settler economic gain through agricultural and livestock production, further securing European descendant economic dominance through labor exploitation of landless Indians. This system continued until the late 1960s, wherein young Quechua women historically cycled through these and other systems of labor, specifically domestic labor, across the nation.

This participatory research project highlights Quechua women’s narratives across three generations—grandmothers, daughters, and granddaughters—whose experiences of labor, violence, and life aspirations are interwoven with haciendas, cities, and their own rural communities as interconnected spaces of difficult memory. It will address the confluence of Quechua women’s life aspirations and gendered violence, systematic maintenance of Indigenous women as bodies of labor and colonial and state repression of their intellectual/educational pursuits, and the role of Quechua women in Indigenous self-determination efforts. 

Quechua women are research advisors, co-researchers, and participants in this project. Through narrative and generational life story methods, visual methods, and archival research, they will document how Quechua women resist, envision, and enact possibilities for collective Quechua and Indigenous women’s futures.