Frida Camille Melgar is a first-year student in the Latin American Studies MA program. She is from El Paso, Texas, and has a BA in Global Studies, with a minor in International Business from St. Edward‘€™s University. Frida is a Fulbright Scholar who participated in the 2019 Binational Business Program in Mexico City. There she worked with the NGO Ashoka, helping social entrepreneurs in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Her academic interests include international development, immigration studies, and human rights. Frida is fluent in English, Spanish and is also learning Portuguese. She hopes to travel to Brazil and continue to improve her language skills.

Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Martín Mejía is currently a Ph.D. Student in the Latin American Studies program. He received his BA in Political Science at Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He also attained a Master of Arts in Political Theory at University of Essex in England, United Kingdom. Most recently, he worked as a political advisor at the Buenos Aires city legislature and has additionally served as a campaign advisor for a city deputy. Since his undergraduate preparation, Martín has been researching populism, democracy and religion in Latin America. As a result, he has published articles related to populism, religion, International Political economy, democracy and democratization. In addition to his studies, Martín has participated in multiple conferences of Latin American Politics and holds a graduate certificate in Political Communication by the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. At the Stone Center, he continues to research populism, democracy and religion in South America.

Amy Medvick holds a BA in Jazz Performance awarded jointly by Humber College and Thompson Rivers University, and an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her Master’s thesis, entitled “Testing the Boundaries of ‘Women’s Music’: Grupos Femininos in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” examines how gender, race, and class are conceptualized at the boundaries of musical groups formed of only or predominantly women. She has performed extensively as a vocalist, flautist, and percussionist in many of Toronto’s Brazilian music acts. Her PhD research will continue her examination of issues of gender, race, and class in musical practice, focusing on the roles of women and gender politics in the Afro-Brazilian drumming tradition of maracatu-nação.

Valerie McGinley has been with the Stone Center since 1995. Her responsibilities include providing administrative and operational support for all aspects of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies including program planning, budgeting, human resources, space management, and other operations, in addition to overseeing all grants, sponsored projects, and their fiscal management and compliance, and supervising public relations, media initiatives, and the international programs of the Stone Center. Previous to her current position she coordinated educational outreach activities through the Latin American Resource Center. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and a M.Ed. in Second Language Instruction, both from Tulane University, and taught high school Spanish and adult ESL in the metro-New Orleans area.

Erin L. McCutcheon earned her Ph.D. in the joint Latin American Studies and Art History program in May 2021. Her expertise lies in modern and contemporary Latin American art and history, global twentieth century feminist art and feminist theories, postcolonial and gender studies, and social movements in Latin America. She received her B.A. from Boston College in 2005, with a dual major in Art History and English Literature and a minor in Studio Art. From 2006-2009 Erin worked as the Curatorial Department Assistant for the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She earned her M.A. in History of Art and Feminist Theory in 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Griselda Pollock at the University of Leeds. Since arriving at Tulane, Erin has taught for both the Latin American Studies and Art History Departments, as well as founded the Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Graduate Colloquium, Food for Thought. Her Ph.D. research centered on women artists involved in feminism in post-1968 Mexico City. In relation to this topic, Erin conducted an oral history project with key feminist artists in Mexico, for which she was awarded research grants from the Reed Foundation, Organization for Research on Women and Communications and School of Liberal Arts at Tulane. Erin also assisted in planning the first retrospective of the works of feminist artist Mónica Mayer, held in 2016 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

I am driven to understand how and why people work with media and through media and communications industries. This research agenda ranges from questioning the micro-dynamics of media production—who are media producers, how do culture, identity, and community influence their work—to the political economies of communications industries and infrastructures support or deter media production. All of this research has been place-based, generally using ethnographic or human-subjects’ insights in addition to other archival, quantitative, or textual analyses. While I do not consider myself a Brazilianist or a regional specialist, I find that case studies in Latin America or Latino America provide important counter-examples to the normative assumptions found in dominant communication and media discourses and theories.

I began doing fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the 1990s with grassroots video producers working to achieve social goals through media production. From there, I became a participant in Mexican-American community media in San Antonio, Texas, using many of the techniques and methods used in Brazilian communities. My action research agenda was to continually improve the community media project while, at the same time, I was studying Mexican Americans as media producers and consumers. That work became a dissertation on how different generations of Mexican Americans used media to express differing notions of cultural citizenship.

That work also led to a research subdiscipline in media studies known as ‘production studies.’ That subdiscipline focuses on the cultural aspects of different job roles and work in media industries, how the structures of work produces the normative labor force in terms of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and class. My first and second books theorize identity and media labor grounded in my fieldwork in San Antonio, Texas; Davis, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Manaus, Amazonia.

In the newest chapter of this trajectory to understand media production and communications industries, I have working on new field projects to illuminate the ways that the largest media and communications industries in the world use public monies to control and manage labor and production cultures. Although this work has not advanced in Latin America yet, I hope to do fieldwork there again soon.

I am a development economist with a focus on Latin America interested in studying the dynamics of economic inequality and poverty and the public policies most effective in combating them. I have also worked on the economic history of contemporary Mexico. More recently, the scope of my research has broadened to include fiscal redistribution analyses in low- and middle-income countries around the world.

I founded and also direct the Commitment to Equity Institute, a project I began in 2008, before joining Tulane. The CEQ Institute works to reduce inequality and poverty through comprehensive and rigorous tax and benefit incidence analysis, and active engagement with the policy community. With the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (US$5 million for 5 years), the Institute has completed studies for all seventeen Latin American countries plus close to thirty in other regions of the world. As CIPR’s Senior Associate Research Fellow, I collaborate on research initiatives, conferences, and speaker series focused on Latin America. I am also a nonresident senior fellow of three Washington-based think tanks. At the Brookings Institution Global Economy and Development Program, I am a contributor to their research projects on development policy after neoliberalism and on the implementation of the inclusive growth agenda. My current collaboration with the Center for Global Development is centered on advocating for a domestic resource mobilization agenda that does not impoverish the poor. After partnering with the Inter-American Dialogue since 1990, our current collaborative initiatives (with Tulane’s CIPR) include the Latin American Economies Roundtable and a forum on US-Mexico relations with the Colegio de México.

I started my career as a faculty member of El Colegio de México where I spent fourteen years before joining the Brookings Institution as senior fellow until 1997. I left Brookings to become Senior Advisor on Poverty at the Inter-American Development Bank. Subsequently, and before joining Tulane, I was president and professor at the Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Director of the global Poverty Group at the United Nations Development Programme, and Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University. My experience as an academic in Mexico and the United States, a researcher at Brookings, and in senior positions at multilateral organizations has given me a unique perspective on how knowledge can inform policymaking and how to translate research results into policy actions. In particular, as a senior staff member of international organizations I was able to help reshape the global anti-poverty agenda and pioneered the use of cutting-edge methods to guide policy.

My teaching is inspired and informed by my research interests which I describe below in some detail. In particular, I teach courses on inequality and poverty in Latin America, the economics of poverty, and the analytics of fiscal redistribution.

Research and publications. As a native from Argentina, from very early on, I was intrigued by the causes of persistent inequities within countries and why some countries were rich while others remained poor or stuck in the middle of the road. Thus, a large portion of my research and publications is on the determinants of inequality, poverty, and economic growth, and how public policy contributes to their evolution. My doctoral thesis at UC Berkeley (1979), for example, examined the relationship between the distribution of income and economic growth in Mexico. After graduation, I spent fourteen years as professor of Economics at El Colegio de México where I published my first book Distribución del ingreso y crecimiento en México: Un análisis de las ideas estructuralistas (El Colegio de México, 1981) and the article “Characteristics of Mexican Economic Growth: Empirical Testing of Some Latin American Structuralist Hypotheses,” (Journal of Development Economics, 1982), both based on my dissertation. Fast forward thirty years, my co-edited volume Declining Inequality in Latin America: A Decade of Progress? (Brookings Institution Press and United Nations Development Programme, 2010; Spanish translation by Fondo de Cultura Economica) and several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters were devoted to identifying the factors that were behind the pervasive decline in inequality in Latin America during the first decade of the XXIst century. In particular, with a team of co-authors, I explored the extent to which the increase in supply of workers with higher skills and institutional factors such as minimum wages and unionization rates explained the observed decline in labor income inequality. We also analyzed how much government cash transfers targeted to the poor influenced the decline in overall income inequality. We were able to determine that a common feature in countries were inequality fell was the decline in the skill-premium associated with the rise in supply of workers with higher levels of education and, to different degrees, the expansion of progressive cash transfers.

While living in Mexico, I witnessed the harmful consequences of economic crises and austerity programs first-hand. I became a researcher, and eventually a relentless advocate, of safety nets for the poor and those hurt by fiscal cutbacks and market-oriented reforms. I published several articles documenting the social costs of adjustment and proposing policy measures to protect the poor. This research theme has been recurrent throughout my career and gave rise to several publications including the journal articles “Economic Crisis, Adjustment and Living Standards in Mexico: 1982-1985,” (World Development, 1990) and “Crises and the Poor: Socially Responsible Macroeconomics,” (Economia,, 2000); the edited volumes Coping with Austerity. Poverty and Inequality in Latin America (Brookings Institution, 1995) and Shielding the Poor: Social Protection in the Developing World (Brookings Institution and Inter-American Development Bank, 2001) and the report Social Protection for Equity and Growth, (Inter-American Development Bank, 2000). As co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report Attacking Poverty 2000/1, I was also able to give the subject of protecting the poor against adverse shocks global prominence.

In 1989, I joined the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC where I was a Senior Fellow until 1997. At Brookings, in addition to the items mentioned above, I published Mexico. The Remaking of an Economy (first edition 1992; second edition 1998; translated into Spanish by Fondo de Cultura Económica) which sold more than six thousand copies and was selected by the magazine Choice. Current Reviews for Academic Libraries as an Outstanding Academic Title in 1994. The book, which could be described as economic history of contemporary Mexico, examines the causes of recurrent economic crises in Mexico and the challenges the government faced to bring inflation down and restore equilibrium in the fiscal and external accounts, describes the important market-oriented reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and puzzles on the fact that—in spite of achieving macroeconomic stability and introducing market incentives in significant portions of the economy—growth did not ensue (which is still true until the present). A synthesis of the book’s findings was published as a peer-reviewed article: “Life is not Easy: Mexico’s Quest for Stability and Growth,” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2001).

Brookings was a unique window to policymaking in the United States. I quickly realized how little the broader Washington think tanks’ community knew about Latin America. With colleagues from the Inter-American Dialogue and other organizations we launched the Washington Exchange in 1990. The series featured ministers of finance from LA who engaged in candid exchange with leading researchers and opinion-makers in Washington. I also was an active researcher and participated in discussion and debates—including testifying in the US Congress—on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). On this topic, I was co-editor of North American Free Trade: Assessing the Impact (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1992) and Coming Together? Mexico-U.S. Relations (Brookings Institution, 1997).

Measurement issues related to inequality and poverty have also been the object of my strong interest. In particular, I have analyzed the implications of alternative assumptions for poverty measures (“Do We Know How Much Poverty There Is?,” Oxford Development Studies, 2004), the advantages and limitations of multi-dimensional poverty indicators (“Forum on multidimensional poverty,” Journal of Economic Inequality, 2011), the assessment of the quality of inequality data (“Appraising Cross-National Income Inequality Databases, Special Issue,” Journal of Economic Inequality, 2015), the development of new poverty indicators (Can a poverty-reducing and progressive tax and transfer system hurt the poor?. Journal of Development Economics, 2016), and the controversies surrounding poverty lines (“Global Poverty Lines, Special Issue,” Journal of Economic Inequality, 2016). Since 2017, given the potentially huge impact that including the rich can have on inequality measures, I have centered my attention on the issue of undercoverage and underreporting of top incomes in household surveys (The Rich Underreport Their Income: Assessing Biases In Inequality Estimates And Correction Methods Using Linked Survey And Tax Data. CEQ Working Paper 70, 2018).

Since 2010, as part of the research agenda of the CEQ Institute and in collaboration with my graduate students and other scholars, I have published extensively on the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in low- and middle-countries. “The Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Social Spending in Latin America. Special Issue,” (Public Finance Review, 2014) and a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters on the impact of fiscal policy on inequality (including ethno-racial inequality) and poverty in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Iran, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Uganda, and Uruguay as well as cross-country studies. In addition, I edited the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty, (Brookings Institution Press, 2018). This over 900-page long handbook examines both the theory and the practical methods that determine the impact of taxation and public spending on inequality and poverty. In particular, it provides a step-by-step guide for policymakers, economists, and social planners on how to conduct a fiscal incidence analysis and a broad range of indicators to gauge the impact of fiscal policy on equity. The goal of this manual is to make fiscal incidence analysis accessible and easy to apply for policymakers, researchers and students around the world.