Diana Karina Soto was born in Guadalajara, Mexico but grew up in Michoacán and Ciudad Juárez where she received her BA in Economics from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez (UACJ). Later, she received an M.A. in Government from New Mexico State University (NMSU). In New Mexico, she worked with several human rights advocacy groups for immigrants. Soto has focused on contemporary Mexican politics and social mobilization in Latin America. She has presented her work in several conferences and conducted field research on social mobilization with grants funded by the Stone Center in Ciudad Juárez and in Mexico City during the period of drug-related violence and during the 2012 electoral period respectively.

I am a Latin Americanist specializing in social mobilization and how cultural and religious practices facilitate it. I originally went to Caracas, Venezuela for my dissertation research on Evangelical conversion in the 1990s. I did fieldwork in the barrios of Caracas and cities in the interior during Venezuela’s neoliberal period when popular religious groups were the most robust, sometimes the only, forms of civil society that were active. I published my dissertation as Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism (California 2007). It received the 2008 book award from Section on the Sociology of Religion of the American Sociological Association.

Having witnessed the rise of Hugo Chávez during my dissertation project, I began to focus more squarely on the phenomenon. I had previously researched and written a book on street protest during the first year of Hugo Chávez’s presidency with Margarita López Maya and Keta Stefany Protesta y Cultura en Venezuela: Los Marcos de Acción Colectiva de 1999 (UCV 2002). Subsequently, Daniel Hellinger and I published Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: Participation, Politics and Culture under Chávez (Duke 2012), an edited volume which brought together chapters from social scientists and humanists looking not only at social movements and social policy, but media, poetry, and religion.

In 2012 I began to curate the blog Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights for the Washington Office on Latin America where I am a Senior Fellow. Since 2012 we have published approximately 100 pieces per year that seek to sift through the wildly polarized information on Venezuela to make sense of complex events for journalists, policy-makers and activists. Blog pieces lead to media contacts and I frequently comment on the Venezuela crisis for the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and National Public Radio, among others. I have also written op eds and analytic pieces for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill and The Conversation.

I currently have several book projects. With my colleagues Verónica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson I am finishing an edited volume called The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela that seeks to understand how and why, during the Chávez government, violence soared at the same time that poverty and inequality declined. I am working on a two volume book called Venezuela’s Failed Transition to Socialism. Volume I looks at the second term of Chávez in which socialism became his governing metaphor. Volume II will look at the Maduro presidency. Both books will look at issues of participation, democratic institutions, crime and violence, corruption and international relations. While most of my previous work has been ethnographic, this project is an exercise in comparative historical sociology and uses Michael Mann's neo-Weberian framework. I also have a project with my colleague Hugo Pérez Hernáiz on students and socialism in Venezuela. We interviewed 80 socialist activists in Caracas over several years, to understand how they became active and what socialism means to them. We seek to demystify and demythologize activism in illiberal movements.

I still work on religion as well. I co-edited Religion on the Edge: Decentering and Recentering the Sociology of Religion (Oxford 2013). In 2014 I published, with Jeffrey Rubin and Benjamin Junge, a special issue of Latin American Research Review called “Lived Citizenship and Lived Religion in Latin America’s Zones of Crisis,” which brought together articles presented during three conferences on this topic at Boston University. I was also one of the authors of the chapter on religion for Rethinking Society for the Twenty-First Century: Report of the International Panel of Social Progress (Cambridge 2018). I am currently working with Hugo Pérez Hernáiz on the Catholic church during the Venezuela crisis for Cambridge University Press’s new Elements series “Politics and Society in Latin America.” I also have a translation project with Hugo Pérez Hernáiz in which we are translating into Spanish twelve articles published in Qualitative Sociology during my period as Editor-in-Chief (2011-18).

At Tulane I teach undergraduate social theory, and seminars called Latin American Social Mobilization and Comparative Historical Sociology of Latin America.

At its core my research focuses on state-society relations and the politics of policy change. A core question that runs through most of my work could be summed up as follows. Under what conditions do authorities either implement policies that address the needs of relatively powerless marginalized subaltern groups or continue to uphold policies that exploit them? I generally apply a political economy framework to social coalition building where explanation stresses competing coalitions that stress alternative policy preferences.

Although my first project focused on business elites, it applied a social coalition argument to explain Chile’s shift from an import substitution to a market driven economic development model, as well as adjustments to latter during the military government (1973-1990). I argued that in addition to dictatorship and a core of market fundamentalist technocrats (the Chicago Boys) shifting coalitions of capitalists were also a necessary condition. This project yielded several articles and culminated in my first book, The State and Capital In Chile (1996).

I then turned to researching issues in environment and development with a focus on forest policy and environmental institution building. Although a book did not materialize, the research yielded a strong series of articles between 1994 and 2004.

In forest policy, I compared Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. I was interested in uncovering conditions that favored adoption of competing models of sustainable development, a market-driven interpretation and an alternative model more firmly rooted in ecology and community and that took the social equity component of sustainable development seriously. In addition to forest policy I also analyzed the construction of state environmental institutions in Chile after the dictatorship.

Since then my work has focused more directly on the relationship of social mobilization to policy change. Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (2009) was an explanation for the emergence of anti-market fundamentalist mobilization in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Latin America. I was interested in uncovering the factors that explained how a heterogeneous landscape of subaltern social groups gradually coalesced in cycles of mass mobilization that brought down governments in Argentina Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela and helped usher in left governments.

This book led to a collaborative follow-up effort to research the extent to which the politically marginalized social movement organizations that had led anti-neoliberal struggles were incorporated in the political arena in the left governments they had helped to power. Based on a conference held at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research, the work yielded a co-edited volume titled Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America (2018), along with a solo article explaining these outcomes in Politics and Society (2017). I am currently working on a book length version of that article.

A research project to explain the policy consequences of social movements and contentious action (protest and more institutionalized activities) rounds out my current work. To this end, with the institutional support of Tulane’s Center for Inter-American and Policy Research (CIPR), an interdisciplinary, cross-regional team of scholars founded Research Group MEGA (RGM). RGM investigates the policy consequences of social mobilization against mega extractive development projects in Latin America. Our work is published in a CIPR working paper series and a special issue of the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 100 (July-December) 2018.

My research focuses primarily on how traditional and experimental music is intertwined in the Americas, with a specific interest in post-plantation areas with heritage tourism economies (Northeast Brazil; New Orleans). I have developed a multidisciplinary approach involving fine-grained ethnographic research, oral histories, and narrative-centered writing that weaves cultural theory together with the everyday details of musicians’ lives.

My first book Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book’s focus on samba de coco families, marked as bearers of tradition, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, marketed as pop iconoclasts, offers a portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictatorship period of democratization and neoliberal reform. In it, I explore how festivals, museums, television, and tourism steep musicians’ performances in national-cultural nostalgia, which both provides musicians and dancers with opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship and hinders their efforts to be recognized as part of the Brazilian here-and-now. The book charts how Afro-Brazilian samba de coco became an unlikely emblem in an interior where European and indigenous mixture predominates. It also chronicles how Cordel do Fogo Encantado—drawing upon the sounds of samba de coco, ecstatic Afro-Brazilian religious music, and heavy metal—sought to make folklore feel dangerous by embodying an apocalyptic register and exposing the foundational violence that underlies stories of Brazilian regional and national origins. Publication of this book was supported by AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

My second book revolves around Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos’s 1980 album Saudades. My goal is to situate his reimagining of percussion and voice in the context of his itinerant life in New York, Europe and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. Of all the recordings in his extensive catalog, Naná was most proud of Saudades, which showcases his evocative, cinematic soundscapes on the berimbau and other percussion, working in tandem with his vocalizations, which he used as another musical instrument in the stereo mix. Naná’s longtime collaborator and roommate Arto Lindsay praised Naná’s impeccable time this way: “Naná has this kind of crystal clear time—it illuminates everything around it. It’s the time itself that is just glorious. It breathes, but never lets you down.”

The book’s focus on the Saudades record allows for an exploration of Naná’s trajectory from 1969 up until 1979, a pivotal time for him artistically, as well as in the arc of his life. During this decade prior to the recording, Naná began in Brazil, moved to New York City, then to Paris, and then back to Manhattan, touring extensively throughout Europe all the while. The record Saudades—a word for bittersweet longing deeply associated with the migratory Brazilian experience—captures the mixed emotions of the Brazilian far from home, while showcasing the vocabulary of techniques that he had been accumulating during this period. Based on numerous oral history interviews with his collaborators, the book’s themes include the relationship between popular music and cinema; the emergence of the category of world music in the 1970s and its relationship to free jazz and jazz-fusion; the relationship of Naná’s worldless vocalizations and body percussion to his work with neurodivergent children in a Paris hospital; and the ways in which Naná’s work was refiguring notions of the primitive in 1970s NYC and Paris.

In addition to my Brazil-centered work, I am also working on a New Orleans-centered project that explores many of the same themes of experimentalism, traditionalism and cultural tourism. For this project, Musical Architecture: Community Arts and Experimentalism in New Orleans, I am documenting an ambitious artistic collaboration called the Music Box Village. The Music Box Village is a project that brings together many visual artists, architects, musical instrument makers, and musicians in the service of the theme of “musical architecture.” It is an interactive visual and sound art installation by day, and a one-of-a-kind concert venue by night. Musicians experiment with sound and timbre on ingenious musical instruments embedded into the walls, ceilings and floors of small houses arranged throughout the outdoor space. The installation has been covered in glowing terms by Smithsonian Magazine, NPR and the New York Times. I am interested in questions surrounding both the creation of the art and the curation of the project. I am researching the unique musical instruments embedded in the buildings, and also the process of the project‘€™s funding and production. I interpret the Music Box Village, with its focus on sound, community and collaboration, as a nuanced response to the art of post-industrial ruins that places urban decay within a mournful tragic narrative. The project represents a convergence between approaches to avant-garde experimental music and art that are restless to break free from the confines of the museum and the concert hall, and the social aims of a non-profit community organization in a post-disaster zone. It is in the friction between these worlds that this work centers.

Currently a first-year MA student at the Stone Center, Allison Scribe graduated cum laude with a BA in Latin American Studies and Communication from Tulane University in 2017. She studied abroad in Brazil and Cuba as an undergraduate and has lived and worked in Guatemala. Allison worked in media as a content creator and manager before receiving a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Brazil in 2020. She is interested in the production and consumption of Latin American cultural products on digital platforms. Her research focuses primarily on user-generated content and her favorite topic is memes. When COVID-19 is over, she hopes to return to Brazil and conduct fieldwork.