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Join us as we celebrate the publication of Sadistic Cholas: Transfeminist Provocations in Contemporary Peru (UT Press, 2026), Olga Rodríguez Ulloa's groundbreaking new book. Professor Rodríguez-Ulloa will be joined by special guests Simón Trujillo (NYU) and Cynthia Meléndez (NYU). 

Sadistic Cholas examines music, visual arts, literature, and grassroots organizing by self-identified cholas—in particular, Black women and trans and queer feminists. Under colonial domination, cholas were destined for sexual coercion, labor extraction, and reproductive exploitation. While exhuming historical traces of chola resistance, Rodriguez-Ulloa shows how today’s artists experiment with an aesthetic of sadistic vengeance, configured as rightful self-defense. Yet, in spite of their violent imagery, activist cholas pursue nonviolent goals, promoting a commons of care incorporating people, animals, and the environment.

Bios

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Latino Studies and American Studies Programs at Indiana University. Her research interests include race and feminist theory; Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and Latin American studies; and visual culture, music, literature, performance, and the visual arts. Rodríguez-Ulloa’s monograph, Sadistic Cholas: Transfeminist Provocations in Contemporary Peru (University of Texas Press, 2026), theorizes the racial slur “chola,” tracing its history from its earliest colonial uses to contemporary appropriations of the term by queer performers, authors, and collectives.

Rodríguez-Ulloa’s current research intervenes in a critical gap in American and Latine studies by centering Andean women as political actors whose stories and national histories unsettle dominant frameworks of Latinidad. By focusing on a diaspora often treated as marginal, the project advances a central analytical claim: in an era defined by immigration crises, border militarization, and hemispheric security regimes, no diaspora—and no history of colonization—can be considered peripheral. Her current project was awarded with the prestigious and competitive Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship at Indiana University. She is currently serving as the Interim Director of Latino Studies and is the Assistant Editor of Chiricú Journal.

Simón Ventura Trujillo

Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Associate Professor of Latinx Studies in the English Department at New York University. He is the author of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (U Arizona Press, 2020) and a co-editor with Alyosha Goldstein of the anthology, For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis (Common Notions Press, 2022). He is currently serving as the Editor of the American Indian Quarterly.

Cynthia Meléndez

Cynthia Meléndez is a Postdoctoral Visiting Lecturer at New York University, where she also obtained her PhD. Prior to this work, Cynthia earned a Master in Arts in Latin American Studies, a Certificate in Feminist Studies and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Photography. She uses these mediums to explore issues of gender, race, place, identity and belonging. A native of Peru, Cynthia attended Pontifical Catholic University of Peru where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic literature in addition to engaging in a professional Certificate of Photography. In her work, Cynthia examines how trans memory and radical archival practices from the times of political conflict in Latin America are constructed, negotiated and mobilized by cultural workers, artists and activists to complicate notions of historical truth and citizenship.