I am currently writing my first book, After Inclusion: Poverty, Property, and Politics on Mexico's Financial Frontier (under contract with University of California Press). Ultimately, my book answers two questions: why has consumer credit become the cornerstone of development policy, and how does society change when poverty becomes productive for high finance?

I have two ongoing research projects. One is a multimodal ethnographic history of the financialization of water in Mexico that examines the relations between material scarcity, financial proliferation, and climate change. The U.S.-Mexico political economy can be seen as a set of extractive relations that led to the exhaustion of water in Mexico, but it also created a global trade in Mexican water contracts, licenses, and futures. Now, amidst a water-fueled nearshoring boom, water scarcity is increasingly naturalized in the name of climate change for some. How, I ask, are these forces related, and how are urban poor households and communities responding to a scarcity that is as apparently constructed as it is unequally experienced?

My other project reconstructs genealogies of capital, property, and labor in the wine-producing regions of California and Mexico. Part of what this research examines is how the pressures of wine production as a cultural industry — defined through notions of terroir, authenticity, and purity — have led to the erasure of Mexican and American entanglement. It also looks at how wine ideologies allow for the naturalization and culturalization of dispossession. Fun fact: before this project, I was trained in enology as wine steward of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

These are my publications. Please email me for a preprint copy.

2026 “When Property Becomes Rent: Mexican Patrimony and Social Reproduction on North America’s Financial Frontier,” American Ethnologist‍ ‍(showcased in the AE Forum, Property and Other Fictions).

2025 “NAFTA and the Making of the Mexican Subprime Lending Industry,” Free Trade Collection, American Ethnological Society Digital.

2025 “The End of Neoliberalism?” Aeon.

2024 "Pobreza y vivienda en Guadalajara, México, de 1980 a 2020." Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Vol. 86, No. 4.

2022 “From Inclusive Informality to Alienating Inclusion: The Rise of Mexico’s Debtfare Society on the Urban Fringes of Guadalajara." Critical Historical Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2.

2021 “L’informalité de l’inclusion: réforme, logement et finances dans les nouvelles périphéries du Mexique, le cas de Guadalajara.” In Habiter les villes latino-américaines: Débats, réflexions et enjeux de la recherche urbaine. Paris: L’Harmattan.

2016 "Empleo e intercambio social en México" (coauthors: Mercedes González de la Rocha and Martha Moreno). Perfiles Latinoamericanos 47.

My dissertation, Settlers of the Debtfare Society: Home, Property, and Social Relations after Mexico’s Housing Reform, won the Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize for the best anthropology dissertation at the University of Chicago. It’s available here. Please email me if you don’t have access.

Settlers traces the origins and outcomes of Mexico’s 2001 housing reform, a policy package that sought to consolidate the democratic transition by demolishing credit barriers and turning tens of millions of low-income Mexicans into homeowners through mortgage loans. For two years I carried out ethnographic research in the largest housing complex that emerged from the reform (Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco). Alongside fieldwork in this housing complex, I reconstructed the life histories of reform beneficiaries and interviewed government officials, policymakers, legal experts, business leaders, and financial traders in Mexico and the United States. My research also tracked the transnational paper trail of the new property regime, from the opaque terms and conditions of mortgage contracts and handwritten charters of community organizations to policy briefs, stock price histories, and investor spreadsheets.

This work situates the financialization of Mexican housing within longer histories of property, informality, and political economy. My dissertation committee was comprised by both anthropologists and historians, including Stephan Palmié, Brodwyn Fischer, William Mazzarella, and Emilio Kourí.