Adrian Paci, “Moments of Transition,” 2016
Pablo López Luz, “Vista Aérea de la Ciudad de México, IX,” 2006
Christina Fernandez, “Map Maria's Great Expedition,” 1995/1996
Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, “Warehouse in Adelanto, CA,” 2023
Robert Adams, Santa Ana Wash, Next to Norton Air Force Base. San Bernardino County, California,” 1978
book Projects
My research interests include 20th and 21st c. U.S. Hemispheric American literature, Latinx studies, Migration and Border Studies, Critical Institution Studies, Environmental Humanities, Marxist critical theory and contemporary photography.
I am currently at work on my first monograph. Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition in the Americas adopts the interregnum, a concept imported into critical usage by Antonio Gramsci, as a periodizing framework for understanding cultural production today. Adapting this formulation to the era of neoliberal globalization, I argue for reading contemporary works of Hemispheric American art in relation to the long crisis of the 1970s, examining how writers, photographers and filmmakers across the Americas encode the “morbid symptoms” of the contemporary, which include the erosion of liberal democracy, the rise of mass migration, and the failure of economic modernization projects in the Global South. I argue for an approach that brings into focus the hemispheric lineage of neoliberalism as an economic and political project, from the U.S. backed Chilean coup in 1973 to the present crises and their manifest forms of appearance, foregrounding how artists in the Americas have made visible the historical limits of the state, citizenship, and economic development as definitive and universal abstractions. Inside of this period, which I recognize as an interregnum—a historical moment marked by the erosion of the postwar liberal compact with no viable alternative in sight—the work of Roberto Bolaño, Francisco Goldman, Karen Tei Yamashita and Juan Villoro, among others, encodes the indeterminacy of the present and the necessity of imagining democratic alternatives to neoliberalism.
My next project, Landscapes of Dispossession: Latinx Photography and the Administered World, analyzes a set of contemporary Latinx and Latin American photographers—Alejandro Cartagena, Livia Corona Benjamin, Monica Arreola, Ingrid Hernandez, Anthony Hernandez, Christina Fernandez and Pablo Lopez Luz—who turn their cameras away from people and toward the administered landscapes of neoliberalism, documenting the emergence of infrastructure, exurban sprawl, tourist enclaves and impermanent housing in the Global South and U.S. Southwest. Embracing the legacy of the New Topographics in the mid-1970s, these photographers attempt to make visible the real abstraction that animates the construction of our built environments, revealing forms of domination and racialization, both concrete and abstract, immanent in landscapes, from peripheral border spaces to urban landscapes. Landscape as a genre, I argue, has been recuperated by contemporary photographers of color to critique ongoing forms of economic dispossession, settler colonialism and racial inequality that structure social reproduction under capitalism. Ultimately, these artists represent an alien world made not for us, but one made according to the needs of capital.
Latinx Marxism: Excavations of the Latinx Revolutionary Left
I am currently co-editing a two-volume anthology with Ben Olguín (UC Santa Barbara) and Jennifer Ponce de Leon (University of Pennsylvania) titled Latinx Marxism: Excavations of the Latinx Revolutionary Left. This anthology will highlight original scholarly essays, as well as testimonials, oral histories, and interviews, in addition to historical photos and images, that explore the long and complex legacies of Marxism and revolutionary praxis in U.S. Latinx history, politics, and culture. We seek to offer an expansive overview of proto-revolutionary and outright revolutionary paradigms that punctuate the history of the multiple Latinx heritage groups in the U.S., with due attention to interconnections between Latin American and US-based Latina/o/x histories.
Volume I will foreground the history of Latinx communist and marxist revolutionary organizations and movements in the United States, including essays and important debates on cultural nationalism, proletarian internationalism and the so-called woman question.
Volume II will recover the lineage of marxist methods in Latinx studies across a broad range of disciplines, from political science and history to literary and cultural studies.
UC Alianza MX Grant
Growing out of the Latino Political Economy Working Group at the University of California, Riverside, which was funded through the Mellon Latinx Futures grant, I am collaborating with colleagues from UC Berkeley, CETYS University in Tijuana and Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, in Mexico City on a two-year project titled “Logistics Corridors and Culture in the Mexican American and Mexican Periphery.”
The central thrust behind this collaboration is to advance a transnational approach to Latino labor studies and politics, highlighting the ways that logistics capital has reshaped local landscapes, working conditions, and connected the economies, politics and culture of the peripheries of Mexico City, Tijuana and the Inland Empire of Southern California.
As part of this research initiative, I will curate a bi-national photography exhibition at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) in the Fall of 2026.
Essays in Progress
“Plenty of Dirt: Peripheral Experiments in Adelanto, CA” explores the way a small town in the Mojave Desert, on the periphery of the Inland Empire and Los Angeles, is being remade by radical capitalist experiments, from for-profit prisons and legalized marijuana cultivation to solar panel farms and logistics. This essay will appear in an edited collection titled Latina and Latino Futures in Southern California's Inland Empire.
“Landscape at the End of the World: Alejandro Cartagena’s Lost Rivers” is a contribution to an exhibition catalogue for a mid-career retrospective of photographer Alejandro Cartagena (opening in Madrid, summer 2026, at Fundación MAPFRE). The essay will trace resonances in Cartagena’s landscape photography with the work of New Topographics photographer Robert Adams, highlighting themes of environmental destruction and capitalist development.
“Race, Subjection and the Politics of Neoliberalism: On Harry Gamboa Jr.’s Chicano Male Unbonded ” is a study of the photography of well-known Chicano artist Harry Gamboa Jr., framing his project Chicano Male Unbonded in the context of the post-1970s neoliberal restructuring of Los Angeles, as well as approaches to Latinx cultural studies that posit race within the domain of visuality and performativity.