Dimensions of Precarity and Possibility in Peru

This chapter describes contemporary Peru, and the highland Andean region, as the wider context in which the residence, Palomitáy, is situated. The chapter first explains the particularities of gender, racial, and class discourses in the postcolonial and neoliberal context of Peru. To recognize the multiple trajectories of inequality at various scales (from local to national and global) that configure this place and young women’s lives, the chapter considers three dimensions of everyday life. Recent historical events, social structures, and individual experiences of migration and mobility, reproductive politics and everyday violence, and humanitarianism and insecurity link the lives of girls in Palomitáy with the lives of girls and women in Peru, more generally.