Writing
Most of my writing begins with something that bothers me. Or puzzles me. Usually both.
Why does a bucket in a parking space tell us something about the state? Why are Saudi cows eating Arizona alfalfa? Why do we remember highways as freedom instead of infrastructure?
I follow questions through history, policy, institutions, and everyday life—looking for the systems hiding underneath things we’ve learned to take for granted.
Sometimes the answer is stranger than the question.
Featured Writing
Selected essays on history, place, infrastructure, and the Americas.
Nursing Clio, 2017
Buried Secrets, Living Children: Secrecy, Shame, and Sealed Adoption Records
Inkstick Media, 2025
The Quiet Displacement and Disappearance of Colombia’s Children
64 Parishes, forthcoming
Across the Gulf: The Deep Cultural and Economic Ties Between Mérida and New Orleans
The Research Office
BUCKETS—
INFRASTRUCTURE—
SUPPLY CHAINS—
DESERTS—
WATER—
BORDERS—
PARKING—
PORTS—
CITIES—
SEMICONDUCTORS—
HIGHWAYS—
FAMILY—
MARKETS—
POLITICAL ECONOMY—
ALFALFA—
POWER—
MOBILITY—
BIKES—
HISTORY—
EMPIRE—
BUCKETS— INFRASTRUCTURE— SUPPLY CHAINS— DESERTS— WATER— BORDERS— PARKING— PORTS— CITIES— SEMICONDUCTORS— HIGHWAYS— FAMILY— MARKETS— POLITICAL ECONOMY— ALFALFA— POWER— MOBILITY— BIKES— HISTORY— EMPIRE—
Some questions refuse to leave me alone.
The Research Office is where I keep the ones I’m still chasing: essays in progress, research rabbit holes, arguments taking shape, and ideas that have not yet decided what they want to become.
They range from parking spaces and semiconductor fabs to water, gentrification, global commodities, and the cultural politics of death. What connects them is a fascination with the systems we build, the stories we tell about them, and the considerable distance between how things are supposed to work and how they actually do.
Consider this a look at what’s currently on my desk.
My work always circles four basic questions:
How does power become normal?
Who made this? How did it get here? Why have we forgotten that somebody made it?
How do we learn to love what harms us—and others?
What happens between the rule and real life?
CUBETISMO— Who owns the curb? This project follows the buckets, cones, chairs, and other objects people use to claim public parking spaces in Mérida to explore how everyday negotiations over public space reveal the gap between formal rules and how cities actually work.
THE ABSURDIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DESIRE— What do Saudi alfalfa, Azorean pineapples, and Valentine’s Day roses have in common? This project follows the strange geographies created when desire—not simply supply and demand—organizes the global economy, asking who gets what they want and who pays the price.
DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM?—Why has it become so difficult for ordinary Mexicans to afford ordinary lives? This project looks beyond tourists, digital nomads, and Airbnb to a deeper failure: a public sector that stopped providing basic goods and a private sector that never delivered what was promised in its place.
THE TIES THAT BIND— A strand of binder twine connects the henequen plantations of Yucatán to the wheat fields of southeastern Colorado and the Dust Bowl. This project follows that unlikely commodity chain to explore how mechanized agriculture, global capitalism, and environmental destruction bound two distant landscapes together.
THE CULTURAL ROMANCE WITH DEATH— Why do we accept preventable deaths on dangerous roads as the price of mobility? This project examines how cultural stories about freedom, speed, and the open road teach us to normalize—and even defend—the systems that kill us
GROWING INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN THE DESERT— What happens when farms, cities, and semiconductor fabs all need the same scarce water? This project examines the collision between industrial policy, agriculture, and water in the deserts of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands—and asks what we are willing to sacrifice to build the industries of the future.
Field Notes
Not every question becomes an essay. Some become research detours, arguments in progress, old lecture notes with new problems, or things I simply cannot stop thinking about.
Bridging the Americas is where I write through them.
Like this but, more organized for your convenience.
Selected Scholarship
Before I started writing primarily for public audiences, I spent years writing for scholarly ones. My academic work explores Latin American history, gender, childhood, violence, and the politics of everyday life.
“Come and See Guatemala at Macy’s! Indigenous Aesthetics and Informal Empire on Display in the Heart of the American Home.”
Journal of Cultural Economy 15, no. 2 (2022): 184–199.
“Crafting the Secrets of the Ancient Maya: Media Representations of Archaeological Exploration and the Cultural Politics of US Informal Empire in 1920s Yucatan.”
Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 31, no. 1 (2021).
“Bridging the Gulf: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina on Display at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”
Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (2010).
“World’s Fairs: An Historiography.”
Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (2010).
“Finding Footholds, Finding Your Way.”
In Succeeding Outside the Academy: Career Paths Beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM, ed. Kelly J. Baker and Joe Fruscione. University Press of Kansas, 2018