Migrating to the City: Negotiating Gender and Race in Marie Arana’s Lima Nights

This article examines Peruvian-American Marie Arana’s second novel Lima Nights (2008) in which she represents Amazonian indigenous migrations to Lima, Peru during and after the Shining Path civil war years (1986–2006). As part of a generation of transnational US Latina authors in the post-2000 period, Arana recovers the image of the Amazonian migrant woman through a revision of gender and race relations in the diverse metropolis of Lima. Arana focuses on this central female figure in the novel to demonstrate how she survives in spite of racial discrimination and physical violence through sexual exploitation. By migrating across the neighborhoods of Lima, Arana further shows how this female migrant must negotiate her indigenous and gender identity in the process of making Lima, a place with a colonial legacy, a home for herself.