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.