About
I specialize in Latin American literature and culture, with an emphasis on Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities, approached through the lenses of decolonial-anticolonial critique, Marxist theory, and ecocriticism. My areas of expertise include Andean, Amazonian, and Mesoamerican literatures with special interest in forms of anticolonialism, insurgency, environmental resilience, and philosophical constructions. My first book, *Insurgent Veins: Indigenismo, Indigenous Literatures, and Decolonial Cracks* (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026), explores the formation of Indigenous decolonial discourse in the Andes and Mesoamerica throughout the twentieth century, along with the anticolonial postulates that inspire the Latin American indigenista canon. I am also co-editor of *Worlding Latin America: Corpus, Praxis, and Global Networks* (De Gruyter, 2025), a book that offers a contribution to contemporary discussions in the field of Latin American critical theory and literary dialogues by incorporating understudied archives and opening new lines of inquiry from a global perspective.
I’m currently working on two projects that broaden the scope of my thematic inquiries by engaging with Environmental Humanities and Indigenous literature, respectively. First, *Ungreening Latin America: Abiayala Ecologies and the Aporia of Environmentalism* expands the archives and theoretical interpretations that permeate the Environmental Humanities in Latin American Indigenous cultural studies. Here, I employ analytical approaches from cultural criticism, anthropology, ecosocialism, and political ecology to study films, artworks, and literary texts to illuminate alternative philosophies and ecologies, post-extractivist imaginaries, and expose the limitations of dominant environmentalist discourses within Indigenous milieus in the Peruvian-Brazilian Amazon, the Southern Cone, the Andean corridor, and the Mesoamerican forest. Second, in *Fictions of Enunciation: Indigenous Novels and the Form of Self-Determination*, I examine recurring topics and the political content of contemporary Indigenous novels. This project argues that Indigenous narrative has reached a stage of development where the novel is embraced as an Indigenous genre and merged with the political principles of the Abiayala movement (as a plural locus of enunciation). By analyzing novels written by Quechua, Aymara, Zapotec, Maya, Mapuche, and Awajún writers, this study foregrounds a corpus that renews the thematic and ideological premises of the Indigenous literary tradition. It does so through distinct enunciative tropes that reframe the figure of the hero in the narrative epic, reconceptualize the sense of territoriality ascribed to the 'novela de la tierra,' and delineate a new form of authority inherent to anticolonial literary production in Abiayala’s political context.
