Mónica Cerda Campero is an academic, writer, and dance practitioner. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, and holds a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her dissertation, Chichimeca: Becoming the Body of Violence (1540–1616): Mining, Biopolitics, and Renaissance in the Northern Borderlands of New Spain, reinterprets the concept of “Chichimeca” not as an ethnic identity but as a colonial paradigm that shaped ideas of violence, territoriality, and governance in northern New Spain. Integrating historical and art historical methodologies, her work offers a cultural analysis of how this paradigm emerged through the intersections of mining, resistance, and biopolitics.
