I’m an anthropologist and historical ethnographer of Mexico and the Americas with a special focus on the social origins and effects of political economic transformation. I’m particularly keen on engaging these questions from the perspective of U.S.-Mexican entanglement, finding the great shifts of historical time in the minutiae of ordinary people’s daily lives.

My first book, After Inclusion: Mexican Poverty, Property, and Politics on North America’s Financial Frontier, is under contract with University of California Press. This manuscript traces the history of low-income households and communities in Mexico as they were incorporated into flows of global finance before and after NAFTA, asking how and why financial neoliberalism remade poverty on the global periphery. A showcase article on this project was featured in the 2026 American Ethnologist Forum, Property and Other Fictions (it’s open-access). I’ve also shared reflections on this work in public-facing, open-access magazines like Aeon.

My second project reconstructs genealogies of capital, property, and labor in the wine-producing regions of California and Mexico from 1800 to the present. At its broadest, it seeks to uncover a deep but ongoing history of Mexican and American entwinement beneath the purifying ideologies of vine and wine. Through archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, this project reveals the binational webs of debt, marriage, seizure, investment, and sweat holding a vineyard together across time. In the vineyard, we can delve into the belabored making of civilization, as both an ideology and force that naturalizes dispossession.

I’m an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Before SBU, I was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Williams College and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where my dissertation won the award for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology (Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize). At Chicago, I won two teaching awards. One for the Best Course and Syllabus in Ethnographic Methods, and another for the same things in Latin American Studies (Starr Lectureship Prize and Martín Baró Lectureship Prize).

Before Chicago, I studied an M.Res. at University College London and a B.A. at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Along the way, I have consulted for the Inter-American Conference on Social Security and the World Bank. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Mexico’s Council for Science and Technology, amongst others.

You can email me at ines.escobargonzalez@stonybrook.edu.