My dissertation “Affective Politics of Belonging” examines how claims to land and houses are articulated in affective idioms that, in conjunction with state plans in Bolivarian Venezuela, seek to transcend, yet are encapsulated within, market and rights-based forms of inclusion. By focusing on gender, property and citizenship in “Pioneer Camps” or “New Socialist Communities” this…

How does Latin American literature dialogue with the Latin American medical theory of its time? How do these physicians and writers get involved in the political destinies of their respective countries? Although some studies of this nature have been done on Argentina, there are no comprehensive studies unraveling the way in which physicians understand the…

During the summer of 2018, I will be continuing my fieldwork research in Puerto Rico, specifically in the Santurce metro area of San Juan. As an anthropologist, I am interested in the semiotic ideologies shaping urban spaces, at the critical junction between local gentrification processes and global processes of dispossession. These questions have become more…

During periods of economic crisis, discourses and practices produced within the social sphere that seek to represent subjectivities in either collective or individual ways can be transformed. Therefore, political institutions’ capacity to explain how society is, how it works and, most importantly, what it should be, tend to stall. In situations such as these, capital…

 I am a doctoral candidate in the political science program. My dissertation research examines narco-messages, thousands of which have appeared throughout Mexico since 2006. These messages range from a few words scrawled on a scrap of cardboard left at a crime scene, to massive, printed banners hung from highway overpasses during rush hour traffic. During…