“Unobligated Bodies” Latin America’s Marginal Aesthetic Categories—El roto, Lo huachafo, and Lo jodido (The broken, ratchet, and “fxxxed”)

Latin American regional intellectuals have long struggled to evolve an aesthetics representing uneven development and racialized, settler colonialist oppression. Carlos M. Amador’s book project tracks contemporary works from the margins of “official,” national cultures that make visible their cultures’ most marginalized, excluded and vulnerable classes. He addresses “uncategorizable works” from Chile, Colombia, and Perú by unhoused and neurodivergent artists, and members of the informal, urban labor classes to document a vernacular aesthetic tradition built on the “unobligated” identities of marginalized classes, using representations of their status as “the broken,” “the ratchet,” and the “fxxxed”