Trained in comparative Ethnic studies, I am an interdisciplinary and critical scholar who specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies and Latin American and Latinx studies. My research draws on multi-sited ethnography and discourse analysis to investigate the relationship between race, Indigeneity, migration, and environmental justice in the Americas. My current project analyzes Indigenous struggles for territory in Latin America. My future research will analyze environmental justice movements for Indigenous peoples in Central America and for immigrant Latinx communities in California.
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 originarios and Indigenous organizations mobilize contested histories of dispossession in order to unsettle the emerging state formation of multicultural citizenship. I argue that by restricting Indigeneity to national heritage, this new multicultural regime precludes the emergence of legal and political possibilities for the transformation of national territory into Indigenous territories. In doing so, I center the perspectives of Indigenous peoples who have long been dispossessed of their communal lands in emerging debates on Indigenous struggles for territory 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 (“Dispossessing the originarios for national agrarian development”) examines agrarian reforms since the end of the 19th century to explain how national presidential administrations and Legislative Assemblies have developed a national land tenure system based on private property that dispossessed the originarios of their communal landholdings and has excluded collective Indigenous land rights despite recent UN pressure and Indigenous advocacy. Chapter Two (“Indígenas? Indigenistas?”) analyzes national Indigenous law- and policymaking since the 2000s to show how unresolved questions of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy have constrained the possibilities for Indigenous organizations (e.g. El Consejo Coordinador Nacional de Indígenas Salvadoreños, La Red Nacional del Jaguar Sonriente) to place land and territory at the center of administrative and legislative agendas focused on national multiculturalism based on Indigenous heritage. Chapter Three (“Demanding justice for originario dispossession”) looks at museum exhibits, memorials, and commemorations of the 1932 Matanza to demonstrate how originarios and Indigenous organizations articulated counter histories of dispossession that foregrounded land and territory as Indigenous issues in the national public sphere and reframed dispossession as a historical injustice that required redress from the state. Chapter Four (“The arts of originario resistance”) examines Indigenous tourism development and welfare projects in the neighboring municipalities of Izalco and Nahuizalco to show how originario embodiments, performances, and refusals of Indigenous heritage situated in local social relations with settler Ladinos exposed the shortcomings of multiculturalism at providing just compensation for dispossession.
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 originarios and Indigenous organizations mobilize contested histories of dispossession in order to unsettle the emerging state formation of multicultural citizenship. I argue that by restricting Indigeneity to national heritage, this new multicultural regime precludes the emergence of legal and political possibilities for the transformation of national territory into Indigenous territories. In doing so, I center the perspectives of Indigenous peoples who have long been dispossessed of their communal lands in emerging debates on Indigenous struggles for territory 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 (“Dispossessing the originarios for national agrarian development”) examines agrarian reforms since the end of the 19th century to explain how national presidential administrations and Legislative Assemblies have developed a national land tenure system based on private property that dispossessed the originarios of their communal landholdings and has excluded collective Indigenous land rights despite recent UN pressure and Indigenous advocacy. Chapter Two (“Indígenas? Indigenistas?”) analyzes national Indigenous law- and policymaking since the 2000s to show how unresolved questions of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy have constrained the possibilities for Indigenous organizations (e.g. El Consejo Coordinador Nacional de Indígenas Salvadoreños, La Red Nacional del Jaguar Sonriente) to place land and territory at the center of administrative and legislative agendas focused on national multiculturalism based on Indigenous heritage. Chapter Three (“Demanding justice for originario dispossession”) looks at museum exhibits, memorials, and commemorations of the 1932 Matanza to demonstrate how originarios and Indigenous organizations articulated counter histories of dispossession that foregrounded land and territory as Indigenous issues in the national public sphere and reframed dispossession as a historical injustice that required redress from the state. Chapter Four (“The arts of originario resistance”) examines Indigenous tourism development and welfare projects in the neighboring municipalities of Izalco and Nahuizalco to show how originario embodiments, performances, and refusals of Indigenous heritage situated in local social relations with settler Ladinos exposed the shortcomings of multiculturalism at providing just compensation for dispossession.
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:
Future research
I will begin work on my next project, which will investigate how global climate change initiatives intersect with national migration and environmental agendas to create new limits and possibilities for advancing environmental justice for Indigenous peoples in Central America. I will focus on the relationship between the 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 RECLIMA program financed by the UN’s Green Climate Fund for the dry corridor in Central America. How have local, national, and international actors (originario leaders and communities; municipal governments; Indigenous organizations; national presidential administrations, Legislative Assemblies, and government ministries; and the World Bank and UN agencies) re-defined environmental problems as drivers of displacement and migration within the national territory since the 1992 Peace Accords? 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) to keep people in place? What are the limits and possibilities of these interventions for advancing justice for local originario communities on their own terms?
I will conduct ethnographic research and discourse analysis to answer these questions from the perspective of four related interventions: 1) the recent transformation of large coffee estates at the base of national oligarchic power during the 20th century into protected agroforests at the center of the reserve; 2) ecotourism development targeting small towns and local communities along a scenic route (La Ruta de Las Flores) that traverses the reserve; 3) Indigenous activism in the small town of Nahuizalco against an ongoing renewable energy project “Small Hydroelectric New Nahuizalco II” along the Sensunapan river, which cuts through the reserve and threatens to restrict water access for nearby originario residents; and 4) RECLIMA program distributions to create resilient livelihoods among small originario farmers located in the municipality of Tacuba outside of the reserve. To understand how key actors have negotiated their competing interests in the creation and implementation of these interventions, I will begin by analyzing archival materials digitized online, such as Indigenous activist statements; environmental policies by recent national Legislative Assemblies; environmental policies by the national Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources; annual reports by the Salvadoran Coffee Council; and policy reports on El Salvador by UNESCO, FAO, and the Green Climate Fund. 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 key local actors involved in the agroforestry, tourism development, Indigenous activism, and small-holder subsistence farming. To understand how the state situates the environment as a site of nation-building, I will examine the “Agriculture” exhibit at the National Museum of Anthropology and the exhibits at the National Museum of Natural History in San Salvador.
I have also begun to conceptualize another project based on my home community in Sacramento. This project will examine an emerging environmental justice movement for immigrant Latinx communities in the Central Valley of California.
I will conduct ethnographic research and discourse analysis to answer these questions from the perspective of four related interventions: 1) the recent transformation of large coffee estates at the base of national oligarchic power during the 20th century into protected agroforests at the center of the reserve; 2) ecotourism development targeting small towns and local communities along a scenic route (La Ruta de Las Flores) that traverses the reserve; 3) Indigenous activism in the small town of Nahuizalco against an ongoing renewable energy project “Small Hydroelectric New Nahuizalco II” along the Sensunapan river, which cuts through the reserve and threatens to restrict water access for nearby originario residents; and 4) RECLIMA program distributions to create resilient livelihoods among small originario farmers located in the municipality of Tacuba outside of the reserve. To understand how key actors have negotiated their competing interests in the creation and implementation of these interventions, I will begin by analyzing archival materials digitized online, such as Indigenous activist statements; environmental policies by recent national Legislative Assemblies; environmental policies by the national Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources; annual reports by the Salvadoran Coffee Council; and policy reports on El Salvador by UNESCO, FAO, and the Green Climate Fund. 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 key local actors involved in the agroforestry, tourism development, Indigenous activism, and small-holder subsistence farming. To understand how the state situates the environment as a site of nation-building, I will examine the “Agriculture” exhibit at the National Museum of Anthropology and the exhibits at the National Museum of Natural History in San Salvador.
I have also begun to conceptualize another project based on my home community in Sacramento. This project will examine an emerging environmental justice movement for immigrant Latinx communities in the Central Valley of California.