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My
dissertation, Contested Territories: The Aesthetics and Politics of Urban
Design in Mexico and Brazil, 1963-88, studies confrontations between
experimental art and urban infrastructure in the wake of developmentalism. The
project demonstrates how artists working in various mediums challenged the standardizing
postulates and extractive underpinnings of modernist design. Responding to the
designs of highway networks, drainage systems, and other infrastructural works,
these artists revealed links between dominant imaginaries of social integration—mestizajeand brasilidade—and long-standing forms of spatial segregation and
environmental racism. I draw from a broad archival corpus including architectural
manifestos, underground films, public art commissions, written crónicas, and
popular newspapers, identifying key sites of friction between modernist design
forms and the embodied comportments of marginalized subjects. Research support
for the project included year-long Fulbright-García Robles, FLAS, and James B.
Duke fellowships, among other awards.
I am revising the dissertation into a book manuscript on cultural
responses to different forms of environmental racism experienced in Mexican and
Brazilian cities since the 1960s. The project introduces the built environment
into discussions in Latin American environmental humanities, and shifts the discipline’s
methodological vantage point from questions of representation towards material problems
of design. The manuscript inquires—alongside cultural producers such as Sérgio
Ferro, Ozualdo Candeias, Ángela Gurría, and Daniel Manrique—into concepts of
race and racial subordination premised less on identity than on territory and
subjection to ecological violence. I endeavor to read spaces in Mexico City,
São Paulo, and other urban centers not as cultural artifacts or texts but as land,or as sites of dwelling and habitation by bodies unclassifiable according
to legal and architectural norms. I am presently at work on an article stemming
from this research which addresses bodily sense perception as a limit to racial
representation in public artworks and crónicas produced in response to
Mexico City’s drainage infrastructure.
A
subsequent book project stems from my article “From the Favela to the Slum:
Race, Nation, and Realism in the Photographs of Gordon Parks and Henri Ballot,”
forthcoming in Latin American and Latinx
Visual Culture. The article
examines a polemical confrontation between Life magazine and its
Brazilian counterpart O Cruzeiro over the depiction of urban peripheries, the
nature of photographic realism, and the mapping of race onto bodies and
environments. Moving outward from the polemic, the book project traces
the instrumentalization—and subversion—of urban photography amidst Cold War-era
urban renewal initiatives spanning the hemisphere. The project extends the
purview of my research to include cities in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and
assesses the use of realist and surrealist aesthetics as modes of indexing
displacement and ecological change.