Grace Alexandrino Ocaña, PhD

Chancellor´s postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract

Precolonial sites in Peru, called huacas, have long been under attack by destructive forces, from Spanish colonizers to commercial developers. However, state officials and archaeologists tend to hold informal settlers–called “invasores,” or invaders–responsible for the destruction of these huacas. This talk explores how mainstream approaches to huaca conservation, enforced by Peruvian authorities and archaeologists, discriminate against the lower-, middle-, and working-class residents who self-created their neighborhoods on or around huacas. It also shows how residents organize and respond to these heritage protection policies by making huacas into vehicles for political claim-making. I, therefore, trace a more recent trajectory of huacas’ transformation from “empty” spaces to important sites for political struggles over the right to the city and rights to the past. My analysis upends the conventional thinking about archaeological preservation in Peru and in the Andes more broadly by arguing that incorporating neighboring residents’ knowledge and expectations into heritage management is key to huaca survival.

Bio

Dr. Grace Alexandrino Ocaña is a Chancellor´s postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Anthropology in 2021 at Stanford University. Before doing her graduate studies, she received her bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP).  Her current research funding includes support from Wenner Gren Foundation, US State Department.

As a Peruvian anthropological archaeologist with more than fifteen years of experience in the field, she has participated in numerous excavation projects in the Central and South Andes regions. She is member of the Peruvian Center for Maritime and Underwater Archeology and recently has co-founded a Cultural and Natural Heritage multidisciplinary working group at PUCP.  

In the past eight years, she has focused her research in investigating how cultural and natural heritage are both restrictive and mobilizing elements of human, citizen, and cultural rights, particularly for migrant communities. As a specialist in heritage studies, Dr. Alexandrino Ocaña uses a mix of in-person and virtual ethnographic and archival research methods. Her broader interests include migration and citizenship, coastal cities in Latin America, the relationship of cultural heritage, natural heritage and precarity, civil society cultural heritage organizations, cultural rights, and heritage bureaucracy. 

Recently she just edited a special issue on cultural heritage management in Peru and is now co-editing a special issue focus on transcending colonizing archaeologies in Latin America.