Biography

I am currently interested in the political recognition of Afrodescendent populations in Latin America to understand how processes of nation-state formation shape the emergence of political actors, cultural categories and social groups. I draw insights from the historical sociology of state-building processes, the political sociology of institutional fields and the cultural sociology of symbolic practices.

My recent empirical work focuses on the politics of ethno-racial politicization in Colombia and Mexico. My dissertation, Race as Culture and Color: Recognizing Afrodescendent Populations in Colombia and Mexico (1970-2018), seeks to explain in comparative perspective why only some Latin American states have extended ethnoracial rights to Afrodescendent populations while others have failed to do so.

In this research, I develop a three-fold research strategy that combines data from official reports, in-depth interviews, archival sources, and ethnographic observations collected during more than 16 months of multi-sited fieldwork in central and peripheral regions of Colombia and Mexico. For this research, I use a mix-methods approach that blends archival, ethnographic and quantitative methodologies.