TAPARACO MYTH

Taparaco Myth is a trilingual artist book written in Spanish, English and Chinese about artist Beatrice Glow’s auto-ethnographic journey into retracing the geography of nineteenth-century Chinese coolie labor in Peru. Initially inspired by how her family maintains connections within the diaspora via moths that serve as messengers when a relative passes away in her family’s native Taiwan, on this road, she is guided by the moth — and then by grasshoppers, bees, blue flies and the "taparaco" owl butterfly —, to traverse the historical realities and social imaginaries of Asia in the Americas. En route Glow resurrected memories from cemeteries, guano mines on the Chincha Islands, coastal sugar and rice plantations, and railroads that led into the Andes, until arriving by peque peque canoe to El Chino in the Amazonian Rainforest, where no Chinese live. 

A limited edition of the book includes an audio CD recording of the interviews with Chinese-Peruvian descendants.

Collections

Museum of Modern Art, Library; Poets House, Archive; The Center for Book Arts; Museum of Chinese in America, Archive; Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Library; Stanford University Library