As a sociocultural and visual anthropologist specializing in Latin America and in Latino communities in the U.S., my research focuses on historical and contemporary processes and experiences of migration and mobility within Latin America and between this region and the United States. My first monograph Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (NYU Press, 2015), employs ethnographic methods and anthropological theories of exchange, circulation, and social and racial formations, to examine the conditions under which Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru and migrate to the United States and how they strive to communicate across multiple borders. By exploring how racialized and indigenous migrant populations through a variety of communicative practices create new renderings of themselves to overcome the class and racial biases that they face throughout the migration process, the book contributes to understanding technology’s role in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. Mobile Selves was translated into Spanish and published in 2016 by the Institute for Peruvian Studies in Lima, under the title Sujetos Móviles: Raza, Migración y Pertenencia en Peru y los Estados Unidos.

My current work centers on the detention and deportation of South American migrants from the United States in the Obama and Trump eras. I examine the current deportation regime as a set of social practices occurring over time and as a transnational social system which begins long before the migrant is apprehended and which continue long after an individual is removed from the US and exiled to their country of citizenship. By examining ethnographically the experiences and long-term effects of deportation and the dynamics of post-deportation life in both rural and urban communities in Ecuador and Peru, I seeks to expand the scope of anthropological studies of immigrant detention and deportation to consider the role of multiple actors and infrastructures in both “sending” and “receiving” locations.

I am also a practicing filmmaker and have directed, produced and edited the documentary Waiting for Miracles (2003), which follows a Peruvian Catholic brotherhood in NYC as it prepares for its yearly procession honoring the Lord of Miracles. My camera work is also featured in the film La Fiesta de la Asunción de Sarhua [The Festival of Our Lady of Assumption in Sarhua], directed by Luis Millones and Delia Ackerman (2011), among other productions. I am currently working on two documentary film projects: the first is an hour-long portrait of the Peruvian poet Domingo de Ramos– a film project which draws on visual material that I have shot over a twelve year-period. The second film is a collaboration with Zaire Dinzey-Flores, about memory and infrastructures in the Caribbean. This latter film traces the travels and imprints of Juan Vicente Dinzey Hazle, an octogenarian Dominican “cocolo” civil engineer of West Indian descent, and follows his laboral trajectory which traverses the ruins/remnants of a sugar mill in a West Indian enclave outside of San Pedro de Macorís in Dominican Republic, to technical training in the public University in Santo Domingo amidst political dictators and unequal racial landscapes, to the migration to New York City and later Puerto Rico. This short film explores how space—cities, buildings, infrastructure, built forms—are housed in the constructor’s labor—in its everyday experiences and in its landscapes of memories.