Anthropological Research Interests
My research focuses on environmental anthropology, with interests in the anthropology of water and development, the social lives of rivers, political ecology, and the co-production of land, watersheds, space, and place. I am also nurturing a growing interest in sound, sounded ethnography, and audible environments. Soundscapes, I believe, can tell us something of the river spaces we make, especially when set beside the situated knowledge of people socially embedded in a watershed.
Sounding the River Project
Sounding the River merges sound recordings with ethnographic interviews and writing to consider the Rio Grande as a more-than-human actor involved in societal conflicts and projects of place-making. I ask how the Rio Grande is both a river of hope and a river of violence, or, more specifically, what cultural formations have changed the ‘river of hope’ into a ‘river of violence?’ With situated interviews and soundscape recordings, listeners will hear a river with a life and a voice of its own, however, one that is everywhere impacted, transformed, and produced through the ambitions and imaginations of the human societies through which it interweaves. Accordingly, Polyphonic River questions the objectivity of the human/nature divide by geographically placing the voices of people within the watershed itself. How do people within the watershed view, value, and refashion the Rio Grande? How might these values and the sociotechnical imaginaries to which they are attached shape the watershed now and into the future? And, finally, what does it mean to think of the Rio Grande itself as a being with agency, with voice, and with rights, even as the river is deeply enmeshed in human political-economic schemes? I plan to study these questions by conducting a multi-sited ethnographic project along the Rio Grande in 2023-2024.
Household Water Insecurity Project
In 2018, I received a MA in Latin American and Border Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso. My master’s project examined household water insecurity and residents’ perceptions of decentralized water infrastructure in low-income communities along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In connection with this work, my thesis and subsequent publications examined the:
Causes and consequences of water insecurity in colonias on the U.S.-Mexico border through the lens of political ecology;
A potential pathway for improving situations wherein low-income households lack reliable access to water and sewer services, known as “the soft path to water”.
The lived experiences of water insecurity in colonias households, which I theorized as the household water insecurity nexus;
And the discourse around water projects at multiple scales, showing how colonias residents aspire for water access, mobilize for water access, and yet are continually excluded from such access.