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During the devastating civil wars that took place across Latin America in the late 20th century, the widespread violence and human rights violations included sexual violence that targeted women, especially Indigenous women. Though women are often ignored and even punished socially for speaking out about their experiences, many nevertheless recorded their responses to these terrors, sharing their voices and uplifting others’ as well.

Two women who used their art to amplify the heartbreaking testimonies of Indigenous women who suffered from sexual violence are Rocío Silva Santisteban, a Peruvian poet, and Regina José Galindo, a Guatemalan artist who specializes in performance art. Their work is the subject of the latest book by Bethsabé Huamán Andía, MFA, PhD, assistant professor in St. ����ֱ�� University’s Department of Literature, Language, and Writing and the current Sister Mona Riley Endowed Professor in the Humanities.

Most recently, Hijas del horror: Rocío Silva Santisteban y Regina José Galindo received the 2025 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in Spanish or Portuguese. This is the second international recognition Huamán Andía has received, following her Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Award in 2024. 

Originally based on Huamán Andía’s graduate dissertation, Hijas del horror considers the representation of sexual violence during the civil wars in Guatemala and Peru as depicted in the poetry of Silva Santisteban and performance art of Galindo. Through her scholarship, Huamán Andía aims to magnify women’s narratives. 

“Representation is important, and especially representing [gendered] violence is important because most of the time, [agents] just reproduce the same idea that women are the one to blame, and there is not really a space where women can express their traumatic experience of the sexual abuse,” Huamán Andía said. “I think these pieces of art are trying to create a space of enunciation, a space in which women can say and narrate this experience from their own perspective.”

When it comes to speaking out about experiences of sexual violence, women often encounter tremendous pressure from patriarchal societies that doubt or dismiss their perspectives and protect the men who act as aggressors. Huamán Andía pointed to the research of influential feminist scholar Rita Laura Segato, who interviewed men imprisoned for sexual crimes and found they often didn’t understand why they were there. 

“From their narrative, they were just doing what the society told them that it's okay to do — that is, express their power in that way, over women's bodies,” she explained. “For Segato, the approach is never an issue of sexual desire…It's always a way to show power to other men or to themselves, because masculinity, the same as femininity, is a performance. You have to perform, and if you don't do it, then society won't recognize you that way. That is the narrative. So there's no space in our society in which that narrative is addressed from the perspective of women, in which this is a crime.”

Expanding that space for women’s voices is at the heart of Huamán Andía’s work. One of the central questions her research raises is that of how to represent violence without replicating it — a question that resounds in all mediums, but is perhaps most potent when applied to film. How do you do justice to the impact of a traumatic, violating experience without then inflicting that same violence on the viewer? 

Huamán Andía brought up the Salvadoran and Mexican director Tatiana Huezo as an example of an artist who successfully navigates that problem. “She has a whole movie about this, and there is not one single scene [featuring] explicit violence, because there's no need to do it,” she said. “You already know what we're talking about. And it's a very good movie and you feel afraid and so all the emotions happen, but you are not again feeling that this is happening to you…We have been exposed to these kinds of images for so long that we need to find other ways to do it.” 

With the help of the Sister Mona Riley Endowed Professorship in Humanities, Huamán Andía hopes to expand the scope of her research to include other forms of art by women such as film, narrative, and handicraft: “Especially the Indigenous women, maybe won't publish a book or create a movie, but they are all the time expressing themselves during this handmade art they do, so I'm interested to include that.”