My academic trajectory has taken me in two very different directions, starting with my graduate work in the Cultural Anthropology department at Harvard and culminating in my current role as Director of the Portuguese Language Program here at Tulane. I like to think of myself as a social anthropologist who specializes in teaching Portuguese language and as someone who has long encouraged colleagues across disciplines to acknowledge the importance of teaching culture in the language classroom as well as the importance of teaching language to students and scholars of culture.

My research in the ethnomusicology realm focuses on music and dance from the Northeast of Brazil as well as regional/national migrations and the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition in Brazilian popular music. I’ve studied the button accordion with world-renowned musician Arlindo dos Oito Baixos, an experience out of which grew the ethnographic research for my dissertation. That project explores forró music in the cities of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and New York to show mutations in popular music production and consumption across time and space. I examine Luiz Gonzaga as the creator and disseminator of forró at its most “traditional” and iconic and the discourse of forró as a “roots” genre. I then look at more recent permutations—namely forró estilizado and forró universitário—to determine how the roots discourse has remained a constant even while the music production itself has changed. My understanding of the genre comes not just from its change over the years, but also across different nodes in Brazilian migrations, from the rural to urban migrations of the mid-twentieth century to the north-south migrations of the age of industrialization and finally international migrations as a result of Brazilian financial crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately I propose that Brazilians have approached the age of globalism with gusto while still reveling in the memory, many times never actually experienced, of a traditional rural upbringing in simpler more rustic times. It is this imagined “forróscape” that I argue accounts for the great surge in popularity of forró on stages across Brazil and the world from the turn of the 21st century.

Prior to my work on Brazilian music, I lived in Salvador da Bahia, where I researched the afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé and wrote the first English-language work on the culto dos eguns, an ancestor-worship cult within the larger religious complex of candomblé. Though candomblé is well known to be a matrilinear religion (and the city of Salvador a “city of women”), the culto dos eguns is markedly male-centered and my work examined the interplay of these two gendered philosophies and how they converge within practitioner communities in the city and its satellite areas. I also focused my research on the introduction of modern pop culture phenomena into what was defined as a highly traditional and “pure” religious heritage.

I discovered, even while working in the field of anthropology, that the language classroom is in fact an arena in which we can not only describe and analyze culture but actually perform culture and teach it through example, thus beginning my transition to Second Language Acquisition and Portuguese as a foreign language. I taught at Princeton University for over ten years before I came to Tulane, all the while developing materials meant to take advantage of new media and expanding a music-based curriculum that incorporates Brazilian popular music into every class in order to analyze and discuss key vocabulary and grammar from each unit. A major contribution I’ve brought to my work is the importance of developing an on-campus community that offers extensive extra-curricular opportunities to use language in context, and I’ve founded groups built around conversation, music, board games and more as a way to draw students out of the classroom and into the community.

Today our Portuguese language curriculum is a vibrant space that emphasizes music, popular culture, new media as well as innovative technologies inside and outside the classroom. One of the special programs that we have spearheaded here at Tulane are weekly telecollaboration sessions that happen in real time between our intro and intermediate students and partners from the State University of São Paulo. Other current projects include community-based learning activities, ludic learning in the language classroom, development of strategic competence, proficiency-oriented program materials, literacy in L2/L3, and incorporation of African and Asian linguistic and cultural content into the curriculum.

Javier Lopez is a first year Guatemalan-American student at Tulane University’s Latin American Studies MA program. He started at Tulane after the cancellation of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship he had in São Paolo, Brazil. He graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in Spanish and International/Intercultural Studies and hopes to get a PhD from Tulane’s Latin American studies program following the completion of his Master‘€™s degree. He hopes to learn Maya Kiche through Tulane’s Mayan Language Institute to fuel his future dissertation research and to connect with this roots/origins. He enjoys meeting new people in new places often through cycling adventures that allow him to experience the world on two wheels.

Ana María López Caldwell received her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies in May 2021. She holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Stevenson University. While an undergraduate, she founded a non-profit organization called Feed-the-Mind focused on contributing to the education of displaced children in a peripheral neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia. In the spring of 2011, she interned at the Organization of American States (OAS) in the department of Cultural Affairs. She worked as an Admissions Counselor for her alma matter for two years and specialized in recruiting at-risk youths from Baltimore City Public Schools. Throughout her career Ana María has demonstrated a desire to work with and support underrepresented students. Additionally, she has been part of various mentorship programs for high school and college students.

Ana María also earned an M.A. in Latin American studies at Tulane University and wrote her thesis on the Socioeconomic Stratification System in Colombia. She presented her research at the Southern Political Science Conference in 2015. She has been awarded two FLAS fellowships for the study of Brazilian Portuguese; these included a two year language program and culminated in a summer immersive program in Salvador, Bahia. She has been awarded multiple grants to conduct ethnographic research from the University of New Orleans and Tulane University since 2015. Additionally, Ana María participated in the 2015 Witness for Peace delegation that engaged in political incidence in La Guajíra, Colombia, to advocate for Wayúu and Afro-Colombian victims of capitalists and extractivist practices of the Cerrejón coal mine. She is a member of the Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society. She has attended a variety of conferences in fields ranging from academic, to higher education administration (NACAC), to public engagement (Imagining America).

Ana María expanded her M.A. thesis topic into her dissertation by incorporating issues of social dynamics, identity, and urban migration in Colombia. She worked with Dr. James Huck, Dr. David Smilde, and Dr. Steve Striffler. She was a board member of JCFA since August 2017, she was the Vice President for GAPSA uptown campus, and she was also a Mellon Graduate Fellow. Most recently, she was the Executive Director of BECNO New Orleans.

My first book told the history of the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) from the point of view of Cuban base workers. Based on rich and previously untapped regional Cuban archives, U.S. government documents, and oral histories, Guantánamo argued that historians must “count” working people as diplomatic actors and that overseas military bases are critical nodes of political power. Guantánamo was a prize-winning book, reviewed in the London Review of Books and numerous scholarly journals, and adopted in graduate and undergraduate courses across the country. After publication, I was asked to be an advisor to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a traveling exhibit which brought questions related to U.S. empire, U.S-Cuban relations, refugee camps, and post-9/11 detention practices to more than a dozen universities and communities. I initiated bringing this exhibit to Tulane and the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in 2014, and organized three months of on-campus and community events related to Cuba, migration, and human rights.

Although my work now focuses more on Southeast Asia, it continues to engage with questions, which have relevance for the Caribbean, namely the legacies of U.S. empire and migrations between the Caribbean and the United States. To this end, I spearheaded two collaborative projects that included substantial Latin American content. First, I co-edited American Quarterly’s Special Issue “Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure,” which investigates the interconnected relationships between the military and tourism. This included soliciting, selecting, and editing the Special Issue, which included an essay on understanding child adoptions in Guatemala and unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America in the same frame, an article on the legacies of slavery in Jamaica’s tourist industry, and a review on early American borderlands and travelogues. Second, I co-edited Making the Empire Work: Labor and U.S. Imperialism (NYU Press, 2015), which was the first book-length volume to conceptualize U.S. empire through its network of workers and labor. It too contained substantive essays on the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Costa Rica, a banana massacre in Colombia, coffee workers in El Salvador, and Caribbean migrants throughout the region. In both cases, my expertise in Latin America and the Caribbean enabled these projects to recognize the relationships between U.S.-Latin America and the legacies of U.S. economic and military power elsewhere. (My co-collaborators largely studied the U.S. and the Pacific).

I continue to write about Caribbean topics and mentor graduate students in Latin American Studies. I recently wrote an essay for Modern American History on Haitian refugees in the United States and an article about the Cuban representations of “Guantánamo” in its state run media. Next year, I plan to write a new article on British Guyanese MP Bernie Grant and his support for Hong Kong Chinese citizenship petitions. My expertise on the Caribbean is also recognized by senior colleagues, and this fall, I was invited to provide extensive commentary to Harvard University’s Global American Studies post-doctoral students, one studying Caribbean and Central American refugees and the other religion and race-making in Hispaniola. At Tulane, I mentor graduate students studying U.S.-Cuban relations, Puerto Rican hurricane relief efforts, the Latinx population in New Orleans, and Latin American economic overtures to the Gulf Coast cities during the Cold War.

I work in the areas of economic sociology and the sociology of law, with a comparative focus on the U.S. and Latin America. Theoretically, I examine the institutional and ideational supports of legitimacy, trust, and ignorance. My main line of research surveys the rise and fall of the Stanford Financial Group fraud, a decades-long Ponzi scheme that left roughly 20,000 victims with $7.2 billion in losses. My doctoral research traced the scheme’s development in Stanford’s two largest markets, the U.S. and Venezuela, and accounted for the fraud’s longevity in light of years of regulatory and negative media attention toward the firm. Research on trust tends to spotlight the characteristics of the trustee-trustor pair. I sought instead to explain Stanford’s “trustworthiness,” conceptualized as the collectively produced image of that firm’s probity. By widening the usual trust-theoretic focus, I captured the often-unwitting collaboration of an assortment of third-party actors across the Americas who, together, rendered the firm trustworthy. This research draws on in-depth interviews with 124 respondents, mostly defrauded investors, conducted in six cities in the U.S. and Venezuela, as well as a rich mix of legal, regulatory, and corporate documents.

This project has since evolved into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Truth’s Chimera: Trustworthiness and Ignorance in the Stanford Financial Group Fraud, that complements my previous work on trustworthiness with a focus on the social production of ignorance. Existing scholarship documents how organizations both cultivate ignorance internally (as a strategy to ward off culpability) and foist it on the public (to maintain advantage). My work, however, illustrates the accidental, or non-strategic, production of ignorance in expert organizations, and the active role that laypeople play in authoring their own ignorant accounts of the world. Moreover, in comparing the “expert ignorance” of U.S. federal securities regulators with the “lay ignorance” of Stanford’s U.S. and Venezuelan depositors, I show that both stem from such actors’ reliance on unstable forms of normative and epistemic authority. With its combined focus on the production of trustworthiness and ignorance, Truth’s Chimera sheds new light on a topic of real-world, sociological, and theoretical consequence: how individuals and organizations—malfeasant and upstanding, alike—acquire and maintain legitimacy.

In addition, my research plans for the near future include a comparison of the normalization of tax evasion and wealth expatriation in the U.S. and Latin America, and a study of the sale of citizenship to wealthy foreign nationals in Caribbean microstates.

I am a sociologist interested in the political economy of the environment in Latin America. I am curious about the power dynamics that fuel development projects in the region and their uneven impact on society and the environment. I thus pay attention to the corporate and state actors who promote these natural resource extraction projects, the technologies they implement, and the socio-environmental movements that have emerged to contest them. My research focuses on Argentina. Some of it has been published in journals like The Journal of Peasant Studies, Latin American Perspectives and Geoforum.

My book, Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2020) tells the story of Argentina’s swift agrarian transformation based on the early adoption and intensive implementation of genetically modified soybeans. While soy has brought about modernization and economic growth, it has also created tremendous social and ecological harm: rural displacement, concentration of landownership, food insecurity, deforestation, violence, and the negative health effects of toxic agrochemical exposure. In Seeds of Power I explore why Argentines largely support GM soy despite the widespread damage it creates. I reveal how agribusiness, the state, and their allies in the media and sciences deploy narratives of economic redistribution, scientific expertise, and national identity as a way to elicit compliance among the country’s most vulnerable rural residents. In this way, I demonstrate that GM soy operates as a tool of power to obtain consent, to legitimate injustice, and to quell potential dissent in the face of environmental and social violence.

My teaching is informed by my research interests. My goal as a teacher is to help students develop and apply their sociological imagination to environmental problems. At Tulane University, I teach courses such as Environmental Sociology, Sociology of Food and Agriculture, Sustainable Development in Latin America and Latin America and the Environment.

I am a historian specializing in the history of the Andes region of South America. Going back to my 1996 dissertation at the University of Minnesota, most of my scholarship has focused on extractive industries and their local, regional, and global effects. I have worked extensively in Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and more recently in Peru, Argentina, and Chile. The Andes Mountains have a very long history of providing humans with metals and other minerals, and understanding the evolving and sometimes violent relationships built around mining—plus this activity’s manifold environmental consequences—have not ceased to intrigue me.

In my 2002 book, Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (University of New Mexico Press), I attempted to tell the story of this equatorial Andean city and its vast hinterland in terms of Quito’s early fame as a producer of gold. A former Inca capital, San Francisco de Quito became the seat of a royal Spanish appeals court and legislative body and ultimately the nucleus of the Republic of Ecuador. The early search for gold took Spanish conquistadors and thousands of native Andeans deep into the backcountry of the Pacific watershed and the upper Amazon, only to quickly exceed the limits of sustainability and to test the patience of native peoples and newly formed runaway slave communities. Quito 1599 is an experiment in using a pivotal year to trace longer-term transformations in society and economy.

In my book Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (Yale University Press, 2010), I followed the path of Colombian emeralds from the remote north Andean mines of Muzo and Chivor to the courts of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires, linked by multi-ethnic trading clans and other globe-trotting go-betweens. I also traced emeralds as they flowed to the courts and gem bourses of Europe. My basic model was that of a commodity-chain history, but I attempted to expand on this production-circulation-consumption approach in order to explain the complex shifts in meaning that emeralds underwent in their long journey from source to consumer – what some have termed the social life of things. The emerald in this “gunpowder” age was in no way a simple, bulk commodity.

My most recent book, Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World (University of California Press, 2019), treats the rise and fall of colonial Latin America’s richest mining boomtown, an early modern marvel and an environmental nightmare. By 1600, the Imperial Villa of Potosí was one of the largest cities in the Western Hemisphere and one of the highest anywhere. My main aim in this book is to reorient early modern world history by placing this improbable, multi-ethnic city and its silver mines and refineries at the center of the world. Potosí was the globe’s number-one silver producer for many years, lubricating trade from Moscow to Macau, but it was also a major consumer of global products and an important regional slave market and redistribution hub. In social terms, the book examines how a remote Andean mining camp became a cosmopolitan stage that made space for people of all nations and classes, upending norms of race, gender, and sexuality even as fortunes rose and fell overnight. It was also a site of intense indigenous exploitation and mass death. I end by bringing the story of Potosí up to the present day.

In moving from raw commodities to semi-manufactured products, my current project, tentatively titled Royal Scam: The Great Potosí Mint Fraud of 1649, traces the global significance of a major debasement scheme that arose within the royal mint at Potosí in the mid-seventeenth century. It so happened that the fabled silver mines of Potosí’s Cerro Rico were not inexhaustible, or rather that their ores became more expensive to extract and refine. A resulting debt crisis hobbled silver refiners and their creditors, sparking an illegal form of financial innovation: debasing the king’s coinage to cover the deficit. The secret could not long be kept given the global flow of Potosí silver, yet it took the king of Spain’s ministers over a decade to break up the great mint fraud of the 1640s. I trace the local crime, its corrupt circles, and its eventual punishment along with the fraud’s global implications, revealing once again the complex backward and forward linkages that tied a remote Andean mining town to nearly every major economic center in the world. It is, in a sense, a tale for our times.

My other interests include the world history of piracy, which inspired me to expand an earlier book into Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750 (Routledge, 2015). I am currently at work on a piracy documents reader with co-author Arne Bialuschewski of Trent University in Ontario, Canada. I am also planning to return to my earlier research on gold mining in colonial Colombia, from which my book on emeralds grew. The green Andes keep tugging at my heart.

As a teacher, I have always tinkered with textbooks, and with Matthew Restall (Penn State) I co-authored Latin America in Colonial Times (Cambridge, 2018), now in its second edition. An abiding interest in world history led me to work with co-authors Bonnie Smith, Richard Von Glahn, and Marc Van de Mieroop on the textbook World in the Making: A Global History (Oxford, 2018)—a fun and exhausting challenge.

As service to my profession, I have been General Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Colonial Latin American Review since 2010. I also serve on the editorial boards of several U.S., European, and Latin American journals, including Fronteras de la Historia and Itinerario. With Matthew Restall I edit the Cambridge Latin American Studies monograph series and on my own I edit the Diálogos series of books with broader appeal for the University of New Mexico Press.