Kinship by Coincidence: Episodes of arrival in travesti and transfeminine migration across Amazonian Peru

Abstract

Travesti and transfeminine migrants across urban Amazonian Peru uniquely refashion their sense of social relatedness in the city apart from the kinship ties of their rural home communities because of experiences of violence and banishment in their youth. Coincidence—the timely concurrence of two unexpected or unrelated events—provides a temporal logic through which some recount episodes of kin relatedness throughout their migratory trajectories. However, in contrast to the conventional sequences of normative kinship as well as to the temporal logic of the “chosen families” model, kinship by coincidence enables interlocutors to acknowledge intense personal traumas with their parents and siblings, to survive a constrained social world as they arrive in new cities, and to leave open the possibility of reconstituting ties of consanguinity in the future. This article draws on ethnographic data and interpretative analysis of Christian Bendayán's Fuerza Animal.