A Japanese Peruvian boy's urban wandering in search of a proper place: Reading "Extranjero" by Augusto Higa Oshiro as "the chorus of idle footsteps"

Augusto Higa's story, "Extranjero," portrays a Japanese Peruvian Nisei boy, growing up in Lima during the post-WWII era, who "walks in the city" to find a "proper" place. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of pedestrians' footsteps as a form of everyday practice that provokes illegible and unruly spatiality within the structure of power, this study explores how and why, as the boy walks, a sense of labyrinthine disorientation arises, temporarily disturbing the Peruvian government's project to integrate him into society as an assimilable, obedient and quiet foreigner.