My research theorizes the relationship between place, space, and power. I engage and contribute to emerging and interdisciplinary debates between Native American and Indigenous studies, Latin American and Latinx studies, cultural anthropology, and human geography. I draw on mixed qualitative research methods (ethnography, discourse analysis, archival research) to analyze intersectional, relational, and transnational formations of Indigeneity, race, migration, and the environment across the Americas. My current project investigates Indigenous struggles for territory in Latin America. My next project will explore environmental justice for Indigenous peoples in Central America.
Current Project
Precluding Indigenous Territory:
Originario Disposession and the Politics of Heritage in El Salvador
Originario Disposession and the Politics of Heritage in El Salvador
My current project analyzes how originarios and Indigenous organizations resist the state’s marginalization of territory as a political issue in the contemporary politics of Indigenous rights in El Salvador. After the state abolished communal landholdings and imposed mestizo erasure on the originarios by the mid 20th century, El Salvador has recently granted multicultural recognition to the originarios as Indigenous peoples within its national population. However, while collective land rights have become central to modern Indigenous movements throughout Central America, the Salvadoran state has yet to recognize such rights, re-establish communal landholdings, or legalize Indigenous territories within the national territory.
El Salvador is a neglected case in contemporary studies on Indigenous identities and politics in Latin America. Theorizing settler colonialism as a hemispheric structure, I demonstrate how originario communities and Indigenous organizations mobilize counter histories of dispossession in order to unsettle the emerging state formation of multicultural citizenship. I argue that by restricting Indigeneity to national heritage, the new state ideology of national multiculturalism precludes the emergence of legal and political possibilities for the transformation of national territory into Indigenous territories. In doing so, I place the perspectives of Indigenous peoples who have long been dispossessed of their communal organization and landholdings at the center of current debates on Indigenous territorial movements and settler colonialism in the Americas.
Following an Indigenous studies methodology, my dissertation draws from (1) ethnographic field research on policy consultations, public commemorations, tourism events, and welfare projects, which I conducted in originario communities and with Indigenous organizations in El Salvador in January 2019-March 2020 and at the 2016 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; and (2) discourse analysis of historical and ethnographic studies, legislation, policy papers, originario land petitions, Indigenous activist social media, and newspaper articles stored at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the General Archive of the Nation in El Salvador, or digitized online; and of museum exhibits in El Salvador.
This study is presented in four chapters. Chapter One (“Legalizing Indigeneity without communal lands”) examines national agrarian reforms based on private property since the end of the 19th century to explain why a prominent national Indigenous organization, the Consejo Coordinador Nacional de Indígenas Salvadoreños (CCNIS), was unable to lobby national Legislative Assemblies to include UN-style collective Indigenous land rights in the 2014 national constitutional reform that established the state’s formal multicultural recognition of Indigenous peoples in El Salvador. Chapter 2 (“Indígenas? Indigenistas?) analyzes the contentious politics of authenticity and legitimacy within national Indigenous policymaking to show why CCNIS and its rival organizational network, the Red Nacional del Jaguar Sonriente, struggled to place land and territory at the center of national executive agendas focused on the development of national multiculturalism based on Indigenous heritage. Chapter 3 (“Demanding justice of originario dispossession”) looks at museum exhibits, memorials, and commemorations of the 1932 massacre of originario peasants to demonstrate how the Jaguar Sonriente drew on counter histories of originario dispossession in order to demand historic justice within a national judicial system where land repatriation is not an option for the descendants of massacre victims from the small townships of Nahuizalco through an ongoing legal action at the National Supreme Court of Justice. Chapter 4 (“Local limits of national Indigenous organizing”) looks at Indigenous tourism development and welfare projects in the neighboring townships of Izalco and Nahuizalco to explain how originario resistance to take up the official Indigenous identity amid local contexts of subordination to their settler Ladino neighbors limited the ability of local Indigenous leaders from the Jaguar Sonriente to mobilize originario interest and action on national and transnational Indigenous issues.
I am currently working on an article based on Chapter 4 for submission to Native American and Indigenous Studies as part of the journal’s Writing Fellowship. I will then prepare another article based on Chapter 1 for submission to Antipode.
To learn more about how I developed the project and conducted research, listen to my recent podcast interview with the Social Science Matrix at U.C. Berkeley here.
Photographs of my ethnographic and archival research for this project:
El Salvador is a neglected case in contemporary studies on Indigenous identities and politics in Latin America. Theorizing settler colonialism as a hemispheric structure, I demonstrate how originario communities and Indigenous organizations mobilize counter histories of dispossession in order to unsettle the emerging state formation of multicultural citizenship. I argue that by restricting Indigeneity to national heritage, the new state ideology of national multiculturalism precludes the emergence of legal and political possibilities for the transformation of national territory into Indigenous territories. In doing so, I place the perspectives of Indigenous peoples who have long been dispossessed of their communal organization and landholdings at the center of current debates on Indigenous territorial movements and settler colonialism in the Americas.
Following an Indigenous studies methodology, my dissertation draws from (1) ethnographic field research on policy consultations, public commemorations, tourism events, and welfare projects, which I conducted in originario communities and with Indigenous organizations in El Salvador in January 2019-March 2020 and at the 2016 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; and (2) discourse analysis of historical and ethnographic studies, legislation, policy papers, originario land petitions, Indigenous activist social media, and newspaper articles stored at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the General Archive of the Nation in El Salvador, or digitized online; and of museum exhibits in El Salvador.
This study is presented in four chapters. Chapter One (“Legalizing Indigeneity without communal lands”) examines national agrarian reforms based on private property since the end of the 19th century to explain why a prominent national Indigenous organization, the Consejo Coordinador Nacional de Indígenas Salvadoreños (CCNIS), was unable to lobby national Legislative Assemblies to include UN-style collective Indigenous land rights in the 2014 national constitutional reform that established the state’s formal multicultural recognition of Indigenous peoples in El Salvador. Chapter 2 (“Indígenas? Indigenistas?) analyzes the contentious politics of authenticity and legitimacy within national Indigenous policymaking to show why CCNIS and its rival organizational network, the Red Nacional del Jaguar Sonriente, struggled to place land and territory at the center of national executive agendas focused on the development of national multiculturalism based on Indigenous heritage. Chapter 3 (“Demanding justice of originario dispossession”) looks at museum exhibits, memorials, and commemorations of the 1932 massacre of originario peasants to demonstrate how the Jaguar Sonriente drew on counter histories of originario dispossession in order to demand historic justice within a national judicial system where land repatriation is not an option for the descendants of massacre victims from the small townships of Nahuizalco through an ongoing legal action at the National Supreme Court of Justice. Chapter 4 (“Local limits of national Indigenous organizing”) looks at Indigenous tourism development and welfare projects in the neighboring townships of Izalco and Nahuizalco to explain how originario resistance to take up the official Indigenous identity amid local contexts of subordination to their settler Ladino neighbors limited the ability of local Indigenous leaders from the Jaguar Sonriente to mobilize originario interest and action on national and transnational Indigenous issues.
I am currently working on an article based on Chapter 4 for submission to Native American and Indigenous Studies as part of the journal’s Writing Fellowship. I will then prepare another article based on Chapter 1 for submission to Antipode.
To learn more about how I developed the project and conducted research, listen to my recent podcast interview with the Social Science Matrix at U.C. Berkeley here.
Photographs of my ethnographic and archival research for this project:
Next project
My next project emerges from Indigenous activism on environmental issues that I encountered over the course of my ethnographic research and discourse analysis for my current project in El Salvador. Whereas my first project analyzed Indigenous struggles for territory in Latin America, my next project will investigate how global climate change initiatives intersect with national migration and environmental agendas to create limits and possibilities for advancing environmental justice for Indigenous peoples in Central America. I will focus on the relationship between originarios situated within and outside of the boundaries of the Apaneca-Ilamatepec Biosphere Reserve in the western coffee-growing region of El Salvador and the localization of the “Upscaling climate resilience measures in the dry corridor agroecosystems of El Salvador” program financed by the UN’s Green Climate Fund. How have local, national, and international actors (originario leaders and communities; municipal governments; Indigenous organizations; national presidential administrations, Legislative Assemblies, and state ministries; and the World Bank and UN agencies) replaced war with environmental change as a driver of displacement and migration in the national territory since the 1990s, glossing over persistent racial and economic inequalities? In the past decade, how have these actors formulated and institutionalized climate change adaptation as the latest socio-environmental intervention alongside others (i.e. biodiversity conservation, sustainable tourism development, renewable hydroelectric energy) designed to keep people in place? What are the limits and possibilities of these interventions for advancing justice for originarios on their own terms?
I will conduct ethnographic and archival research to analyze these questions from the perspective of four related interventions: 1) the recent transformation of large coffee estates owned by historical elites into protect agroforests that form the core of the reserve; 2) the development of an ecotourism route, La Ruta de las Flores, targeting originario communities in the reserve; 3) a hydroelectric dam on the Sensunapan river that threatens a key water source for originario communities; and 4) a RECLIMA program to create resilient livelihoods among originario farmers living just outside the reserve in the municipality of Tacuba. To understand how actors have negotiated their competing interests in the creation and implementation of these interventions, I will analyze statements, policies, legislation, and reports by a broad range of local, national, and international actors. To understand how the project affects and is affected by the political interests of the originarios within and outside of the reserve, I will start by conducting participant observation and interviews with local actors. In doing so, this investigation will reveal whether these interventions ameliorate or exacerbate originario dispossession, displacement, and migration in El Salvador.
I will conduct ethnographic and archival research to analyze these questions from the perspective of four related interventions: 1) the recent transformation of large coffee estates owned by historical elites into protect agroforests that form the core of the reserve; 2) the development of an ecotourism route, La Ruta de las Flores, targeting originario communities in the reserve; 3) a hydroelectric dam on the Sensunapan river that threatens a key water source for originario communities; and 4) a RECLIMA program to create resilient livelihoods among originario farmers living just outside the reserve in the municipality of Tacuba. To understand how actors have negotiated their competing interests in the creation and implementation of these interventions, I will analyze statements, policies, legislation, and reports by a broad range of local, national, and international actors. To understand how the project affects and is affected by the political interests of the originarios within and outside of the reserve, I will start by conducting participant observation and interviews with local actors. In doing so, this investigation will reveal whether these interventions ameliorate or exacerbate originario dispossession, displacement, and migration in El Salvador.