My research is interdisciplinary and international in scope. It uses ethnographic methods that are attentive to history and that cultivate radical, situated listening as a practice. I have published in different formats and venues, including a single authored monograph, co-authored and co-edited books, journal articles, reviews and commentaries both in English and in Spanish.

Broadly, my research specializes in understanding the social, spatial and ecological inequalities produced by the tourism industry when it is employed as a state development tool. This research builds on four different but closely related longstanding projects that I have put in conversation in Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán (UC Press, 2020).

Ecotourism Development, Conservation, Labor Mobilities

Ecotourism Development, Neoliberal Conservation, Natural Protected Areas, Labor Mobilities, Space Production, Environmental Managerialism, Commodification of Nature, Spectacle.

 

Heritage Politics, Colonial Imaginaries, Indigenous Luxury Tourism

Community Development, Cultural Heritage, Landscapes and Materiality, Public Policies, Space and Place, Colonial Continuities, Social Inequalities, Elite Mobilities, Indigenous Governance.

 

Ecological Crisis, Urban Governance and Informality 

Urban Governance, Built Environment, Tourism Infrastructures, Enclave Geographies, Space and Resource Enclosures, Disaster Capitalism, Moral Economy.

 

Domestic Maquila, Souvenir Production, Debt

Global Production Networks, Crafts and Commodity Chains, Maquiladoras, Cosmopolitanism, Emergent Rural-Urban Forms, Financial Capitalism, Debt as Sociality, Ethnographic Documentary.