Precarious Displacements: Flávia Péret and Fernanda Trías' Trips to Buenos Aires

Abstract

The following article studies the travel narratives of contemporary writers Flávia Péret (Brazil), Introções para montar mapas, ciudades e quebra-cabeças (2021) and Fernanda Trías (Uruguay), La ciudad invencible (2014), both of which depict a stay in the city of Buenos Aires as a precarious displacement. In their texts, the writers construct a heterogeneous temporality plotted in the journeys of their protagonists for whom inhabiting a strange territory implies testing their traveling conditions as foreign Latin American women. The writing progresses by registering the political effects of this crossing in the continuities of a violence that links past and present in the Cono Sur to the extent that this space-time is marked by poverty and abandonment together with forms of politics that broaden the frameworks of cultural legibility for the recognition of loss. Their writings on displacement manage to capture in the city of Buenos Aires a zone of contact between the consequences of the 2001's economic crisis that marks lives of dispossession, particularly those of immigrant workers, while at the same time pointing to the emergence of instances that make possible a public mourning of the lives eliminated by the State terrorism of the 1970s.