About Me

I was born and raised in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

In my academic and journalistic work, I describe the effect of state-led development initiatives in post-conflict Central and South America. I want to understand a region marked by similar historical and political processes better.

I am currently working on two overlapping projects in the disciplinary subfields of political ecology, development sociology, and social movement studies.

The first concerns a Gramscian analysis of Indigenous and territorial movements institutionalizing post-extractivism in unlikely Latin American contexts. How do subaltern groups dismantle dominant ideologies and material practices through cultural struggle, coalition-building, and territorial resistance?

The second concerns how grassroots environmentalists coordinate future-oriented collective action in a shaky temporal landscape marked by political and symbolic violence. How do drawing and mobilizing historical and collective memory play a role in unlikely political victories across the region?

I write monthly op-eds in elPeriódico (now EP Investiga), one of Guatemala’s largest Spanish-language daily newspapers. Before this, I wrote a monthly column on CNN en Español commenting on contemporary Central American affairs. My essays have appeared in NACLA, El País, El Faro English, Agencia Ocote, the Global Observatory, the Latin Dispatch, Plaza Pública, and Nómada. I have been featured in articles in Americas Quarterly, Associated Press, the New Humanitarian, and de Volksrant.

I served as a Counsel in the Congressional Committee on Labor for the 9th Legislature of the Republic of Guatemala, with direct oversight on projects like the push for part-time labor and domestic workers’ rights, ILO’s Convention No. 175, and No. 189, respectively.