Education
2021 University of Pennsylania, PhD, History
2016 University of Pennsylvania, MA, History
2014 Columbia University, BA, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
As a first-generation Latina PhD from a working-class immigrant family, I understand academia as a space in which diversity has historically been underprioritized, but where a greater commitment to inclusion and equity has the potential to make education a primary catalyst of social change. At Haverford College, I have been fortunate to have my engagement with DEI initiatives be guided by the existing activism of our sagacious students. I’ve been inspired by students who are vocal in their demands for institutional change that would address the gaps in knowledge that they feel they need to excel in today’s sociopolitical climate. It has been my distinct pleasure to teach BIPOC students and their allies in the classroom, and to mentor them when they seek my help in their individual academic pursuits. I have also had the honor of sharing my experiences as an Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship alumnus with the Haverford and Bryn Mawr cohorts. Through my pedagogy, mentorship, scholarship, and organizational experience I have developed dedicated practices of inclusion and diversity. By challenging students to reconsider the myth of objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge, by guiding student research, and encouraging student-faculty collaborations, I have and hope to continue to enrich the academic community with all who wish to contribute.
My book project, Recording Resistance: Indigenous Literacy, Archives, and Narrative Power in 20th-Century Ecuador, brings critical archive studies, oral history, and intellectual history approaches to the study of Indigenous mobilization in twentieth-century Ecuador, arguably the most organized Indigenous movement in the history of the Americas. I argue that Indigenous labor activists on the haciendas (plantations) of Cayambe, Ecuador remade literacy to include historicity and political expertise. Building on organizational efforts to form unions in the 1920s, Indigenous labor leaders--particularly women--created socialist schools in the 1940s to teach their communities to read and write in Spanish to be able to read, understand, and defend their political and social rights. In the 1960s they recorded oral histories, printed books and visual images, and championed local leaders as icons for the next generation. This work laid claim to new forms of political participation in the 1970s, as alliances with the traditional Left unraveled and government functionaries limited activists’ power. Challenging the notion that they were incapable of articulating an autonomous political agenda, Indigenous labor organizers in Ecuador asserted the power of Indigenous expertise on issues of class and cultural resistance, nationalism, modernity, and even global Cold War politics. By placing oral history and subject formation at the center of my work, I contribute to scholarship that recognizes the central role narrative forms play in enabling grassroots political consciousness.
Courses Taught
Spring 2022
HIST 271: History of the Andes
HIST 317: Land and the Left in the Americas
Fall 2022
HIST 291: Indigenous Women: Gender, Ethnicity and Feminism in Latin America
HIST 309: Knowledge, Power, and the Production of History in Latin America