My research bridges cultural and literary studies with the study of built environments across the Americas. I examine questions of urban design and infrastructure in order to understand how aesthetic forms respond to racial ideologies and the uneven distribution of environmental harms. Hemispheric in scope, my work attends most closely to twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil: two primary contexts in which culture, large-scale urban design projects, and racially-grounded modernizing ideologies operate in conjunction. Departing from the conventional focus on representation in literary studies, race studies, and the environmental humanities, my scholarship reads works of literature and visual culture to detect the structural and often less-visible elements of design as manifested in urban environments. I place mediums including architecture, film, and the literary chronicle into dialogue in order to elucidate their formal characteristics vis-à-vis pertinent urban designs, anchoring my interpretations with documents on the built environment drawn from archival research. I am particularly focused on cultural objects which probe the historical construction and reproduction of urban peripheries. These objects serve as vehicles for challenging dominant cultural articulations of race, such as mestizaje and “racial democracy,” as well as for identifying resistant forms of design knowledge and collective habitation among Black, Indigenous, and other historically subordinated groups.
In my current book project, tentatively titled The Inverse of Abundance: Design Aesthetics and Environmental Racism in Mexico and Brazil, I examine forms of aesthetic experimentation specific to the conditions of urban peripheries in Mexico City, São Paulo, and Brasília. The book traces a historical arc from the apogee of state-led developmentalism in the mid-twentieth century—manifested in the construction of Brasília and Mexico City’s Ciudad Universitaria, among other projects—through the mounting social and environmental crises of the subsequent decades culminating in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. Throughout this period, the book identifies urban design as a driving force in both social struggles over territory and aesthetic experiments in form. Each chapter asks how artists and writers modulated the forms and techniques of their practices in light of a broader disenchantment with the modernist city—rooted in extraction, social displacement, and racial stratification—as well as grassroots efforts to reinvent it in the name of racial and environmental justice. I argue that the period’s artists and writers unmoored dominant aesthetic paradigms that linked modernist design with the capitalist integration of territory in the name of mestizaje or brasilidade. In lieu of these paradigms, they devised aesthetic forms rooted in design knowledge autochthonous to peripheries, and in doing so, sought to revive design’s historical commitments to universal social emancipation.