Associate Professor of Spanish
About
My research focuses on colonial Latin America, with a special interest in questions of race, materiality, political economy, and indigenous studies/Nahuatl. My first book, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017), traces a genealogy of the forms and practices of spatial concentration as a technique of colonial governance. It argues that the sites at which specific bodies and objects were brought together for particular ends constitute the condition of possibility for the emergence and consolidation of new racial categories, racialized subjectivities, and theories of race. One of the key questions it considers is the relation between these social formations and specific spatial orders or infrastructures, such as centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Currently, I am working on a book project about the rise of racial slavery and the development of circulatory infrastructures, primarily roads, in colonial Mexico.
Books:
Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). [link]
Special issues:
Capitalism-Catholicism-Colonialism. Co-edited with John D. Blanco. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.2 (Spring 2019). [link]
Selected journal articles and chapters:
"Race and Domination in Colonial Latin American Studies." Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898). Eds. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 43-56. [link]
"Possessive Individualism and the Spirit of Capitalism in the Iberian Slave Trade." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.2 (Spring 2019): 101-129. [link]
"Introduction: Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.2 (Spring 2019): 1-15. [link]
"The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom." History of the Present 8.2 (Fall 2018): 117-139. [link]
“Triangulating Blackness: Mexico City, 1612.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 33.3 (Fall 2017): 344-366. [link]
“Eviction and the Archive: Materials for an Archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 16.2 (2015): 123-141. [link]
“Primitive Accumulation, Geometric Space, and the Construction of the ‘Indian.’” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24.3 (2015): 335-352. [link]
“Primitive Spiritual Accumulation and the Colonial Extraction Economy.” Política Común 5 (2014). Part of a special issue on Carl Schmitt and the Early Modern World, edited by John D. Blanco and Ivonne del Valle.
“Archaeology in the Lettered City.” Colonial Latin American Review 23.2 (2014): 197-223. [link]
“‘To Avoid This Mixture’: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City.” Food and Foodways 19.1-2 (2011): 98-121. [link]
Research Areas(s):
- Colonial Latin American studies
- History/historiography
- Indigenous studies/Nahuatl
- Marxism/political economy
- Race/racialization
