My research explores how performance becomes a staging ground to construct a sense of group cohesion across cultures, distances, and geographic imaginaries. While my earlier scholarly research focused on the New Orleans’ Latin American community as a point of departure, my current scholarly research embarks on an exploration of issues of belonging, identity, and intercultural performance in the context of global exchanges in the field of higher education as well as in Brazilian peripheral communities.

My first book, Post-Katrina Brazucas: Brazilians in New Orleans (UNO Press: 2012), cut across disciplinary methodologies by using the lenses of literary and cultural studies, performance, dance, and ethnography to approach my research subject of migration. I engaged with contemporary cultural theory related to the construction of hybrid identities through migration and literary theory surrounding the discourses of testimonio fiction. This research also became the subject of a subsequent book chapter concerning artistic performances by Brazilian immigrants in New Orleans in Performing Brazil edited by Kathryn Sanchez and Severino Albuquerque.

My second book, Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the 18th Century (co-authored, LSU Press: 2015), is marked by my sense of activism and active involvement in the local Latin American community in New Orleans. I was awarded the Cervantes Award in 2016 for my contribution to the local Hispanic American Arts Foundation of New Orleans and the book was awarded the J.B Jackson book prize for contribution of the year to the historical and ethnic geography of the United States by the Association of American Geographers in 2015. This research inserts itself in the escalating debates about immigration, informing theories of assimilation, social capital accumulation, and identity formation. It provides the first study of how diverse Hispanic and Latino communities have helped to create the Crescent City as a distinctive US place over several centuries, with an emphasis on the period leading up to Katrina to the present.

Currently, my research has moved towards immigrant communities in the peripheral communities of São Paulo where, in the last decade, beginning in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, literary saraus (soirees) have become spaces that reconceptualize public relationships to literature. I am particularly interested in the body as a component of the literary text offering visual, auditory, and kinesthetic knowledge

Finally, my administrative responsibilities at Tulane have instilled an interest in researching interdisciplinary approaches to methodology that link critical studies of immigration to student mobility in study abroad through intercultural development theories, performance, film, literature, and popular music analysis. The impact of how external factors such as class size; study abroad program model; level of immersion; living situation (with locals, U.S. Americans or international students); second language acquisition; areas of study (major/minor); the extent to which students travel; and the occurrence of traumatic events affect students’ intercultural growth and development are covered in my current research in the field of international education.

Cynthia M. Garza holds a Bachelor’s degree in Languages and Cultures from Loyola University, and completed a Master’s degree and PhD coursework in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. In 2017, she was selected as one of ten educators from across the country as a Harvard University Globalizing the Classroom teaching fellow. Cynthia's career in education began in Peru, as a child advocate for working children who were an average of 2-5 years behind in traditional schooling. For the past two decades, Cynthia has worked in diverse school environments throughout New Orleans, most recently through Tulane SOPA's PreK-12 Education Program as Clinical Placement Coordinator. Before Tulane, Cynthia taught middle school Social Studies and ELA at Ecole Bilingue de la Nouvelle-Orléans, where she led study abroad trips to Martinique and France, and Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University. At Warren Easton High School, Cynthia led a cultural exchange program to Peru, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. In addition to her career as an educator, Cynthia worked in Washington, DC as Director of Advocacy and Community Relations for the DC Immigrant Coalition and as After School Programs Director at Casa del Pueblo Community Program.

Megan Flattley is a student in the joint Art History and Latin American Studies PhD program. Her research looks at the artistic influence and exchange between Mexican and Soviet artists in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the application of montage theory by artists in Mexico. At Tulane, she has helped to curate exhibitions in the Latin American Library as well as at the Newcomb Art Museum which included the exhibition, “Beyond the Canvas: Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico,” as well as “Per(sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana.” From 2018-2020, Megan was a Mellon Fellow for Community Engaged Scholarship.

Maisoon Fillo earned her M.A. in Latin American Studies at the Stone Center in August 2019. She also graduated in 2015 with her bachelors in Psychology and Hispanic Studies at The College of William and Mary. She studied abroad in La Plata, Argentina to learn more about the legal, political, social and psychological dimensions of Argentina's dictatorship. During her scholarship in Argentina she interned with La Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, working closely with the high school outreach program, Jóvenes y Memoria. After graduating from William and Mary, Maisoon spent the summer in Vermont studying Spanish at Middlebury Language Schools. Shortly following Middlebury's language immersion program, she taught English at La Universidad de Cesar Vallejo in Lima, Peru. These opportunities of global citizenship led to an internship with the Inter-American Dialogue's Education Program in 2016. Through the Stone Center, she has been awarded two FLAS fellowships for the study of Brazilian Portuguese; these included a two-year language program and a summer immersive program in São Paulo, Brazil. Maisoon's graduate research concerned the subject of transitional justice through the Afro-Brazilian lens.

I was born in South Carolina and grew up in Clemson, in the northwest corner of the state. My parents were both academics and my father served as dean at Clemson University. I spent a year in Brazil as a Rotary Exchange student when I was 17, and this experience ignited my interest in Latin America and international relations. I enrolled in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in August 1996, and graduated in 1999 after studying abroad in Morocco and the UK. After Georgetown, I spent a year working in Denver with the National Civilian Community Corps, as a year of Americorps service. I then moved to California in 2001 and worked in Stanford University’s Overseas Studies Program. In 2002 I enrolled in a Master’s Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Transatlantic Master’s Program involved study of the European Union and European politics. As part of this program, I spent most of 2003 at the University of Bath. After completing my Master’s thesis on the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, I returned to Chapel Hill in the fall 2004 to pursue a doctorate in political science. My dissertation field research took me back to Brazil many times in 2008 and 2009. I moved to New Orleans to complete my dissertation writing, as my wife was granted a scholarship at Tulane law school. While writing, I worked as an adjunct and Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane. I defended my dissertation in summer 2011, and started as a tenure-track assistant professor at Tulane that fall.

As an assistant professor at Tulane, I wrote papers and conducted research on foreign direct investment in developing countries, particularly Latin America. I also received grants to study investment patterns in Ireland, which ultimately became a case study chapter in my book. I have used other grants to advance my research on the determinants of innovation-intensive investment in emerging economies. I am currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane, having received tenure in July 2018. I am involved with the various political economy groups at Tulane, and I enjoy working with the Stone Center.

My research so far has resulted in a book that was published by MIT Press in 2017 (Globalizing Innovation: State Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment in Emerging Economies) and in various journal articles and book chapters. Currently, my top research priority is to execute a book project on monetary politics in late 19th century/early 20th century America, along with a number of articles on the domestic politics of monetary regimes. However, I also have long-term research agendas including a political economy treatment on the role of the United States in Central America.

While my research interests go beyond Latin America, I began my scholarly career as a Latin Americanist and feel comfortable working on Latin American political economy issues. I have published works on foreign investment in Latin America, in such outlets as Latin American Politics and Society, Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, and others.

I am a microeconomist with a strong interest in Latin America. I grew up in Uruguay and I am bi-lingual in Spanish and English and I speak Portuguese fluently. My academic degrees include B.S., F.S from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and an M.A., Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland. I have over 30 years of hands-on field experience in the region but I have devoted most of my time to academic research.

As a microeconomist, my interest centers on understanding how the complex web of incentives which forms the economic universe people live in affects their behavior. I am especially interested in finding instances where existing policies are having unintended effects that worsen poverty or prolong the transition out of it. All too often parts of this incentive-web, with strong motivational effects, are discovered to have been spun involuntarily as by-products of well-meaning policies that may have altogether unrelated purposes. For instance, a 12-year education curriculum may be divided into 3, 4-year segments instead of 2, 6-year segments, in order to focus on early education. Or primary school coverage may be expanded to include a country’s most isolated rural areas. But my work has shown that splitting an educational system into 3 equal segments can cause poor parents to pull their children out of school after 4 years of schooling instead of after 6. Similarly, my work on the Maya of Guatemala has shown that the expansion of school coverage to “under-served minorities” is the strongest force currently contributing to the disappearance of Mayan as a mother tongue; the school expansion policy may end up extinguishing the very cultures that were to be served by the expansion.

A substantial portion of my work in the region concerns various aspects of the nexus between education and poverty. This includes several papers on delayed school entry and school attainment. I have also worked extensively—both in research and in applied work commissioned by governments in the region—on the impact of school quality on adult wages and labor market performance, on teacher absenteeism, teacher wages, on differentials in public school quality across economic strata, and on the role of formal public education in the extinction of indigenous cultures.

My work also deals with other aspects of the economic environment of the Latin American poor. In two papers with co-author Christian Langpap we explore energy use in the region and its consequences for the poor. Bio-fuels are the major source of energy use for the poor throughout the world and a major contributor to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses and global warming. In Latin America, bio-fuel means firewood and firewood-based charcoal. The rate of deforestation in the region is alarming and well-known. Less well-known is that the major cause of this deforestation is not major commercial cutting for timber, but small-scale harvesting for firewood. This wood fuel is used mainly by the poor, and mostly by the urban poor—not just the rural poor. In one paper, we use Guatemalan data to document the level of firewood use and show that the firewood use problem is quite complex. Firewood is often used by people who have easy access to gas. In fact a high proportion of wood-users also own gas-burning stoves. We therefore go on to examine the cost and effect on wood-use of various policy alternatives—like subsidizing gas, providing credit to purchase a gas stove, or subsidizing gas stoves. In a companion paper that was published several years later, we show that—in addition to its effects on deforestation and global warming ‘€“firewood use has very serious detrimental health effects that are concentrated on women and young children.

My current research on the region explores two new aspects of economics for the poor. In one, I am examining domestic service. The story of economic development—with its transition from rural-based agricultural production to urban-based industry and services and sub-theme of rural-urban migration—is mainly a story about men. My current work focuses on the role of domestic service in ushering women through the great economic transformation of society.

The second topic I am currently working on concerns financial exclusion. In a modern economy, the ability to participate in financial markets—by borrowing and investing or by saving—plays a central role in the lives of wealthy people. The poor face interest rates so low on their savings and rates so high if they want to borrow, that their participation in formal financial markets is essentially nil. Ethnic minorities and women may be excluded outright. I am devising a mechanism that will help bridge the financial exclusion gap and self-select the financially excluded at a very low administrative cost.