welcome to my website
I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Royal University. My research and teaching integrate political and economic anthropology with migration studies, labour studies, justice and peace studies and critical criminology, with core transnational projects in Colombia and Canada.
Before becoming an anthropologist, I trained as an M.D. in Colombia and practiced for ten years before immigrating. Upon moving to Canada, I earned a B.A. in sociocultural anthropology and an M.A. in medical anthropology from the University of Toronto. I completed doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University in the United States.
At the University of Toronto Scarborough, I held a Fellowship in Ethnographic Writing (2021) and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2021-2022).
research
Forced Displacement, Debt and Credit, and Life in the Aftermath of Conflict
Gota a Gota focuses on relations of credit and debt in the lives of people internally displaced during the Colombian conflict from rural regions to cities. This monograph examines credit and debt relations through histories of paramilitarism, left-wing guerrilla insurgencies, state violence, drug trafficking and money laundering in Colombia; to show how conflict-driven class reconfigurations and systematic land dispossession create the conditions for capital accumulation through credit to poor populations.
Flows of People, Flows of Credit & Debt
Examining Informal Financial Schemes among Latin American Migrants in Canada
This project examines the innovative informal financial schemes Latin American migrants use and develop to support their migration to and subsistence in Canada. It follows transnational and local debt to examine the entanglements of migrants in illicit and licit global flows of capital, and in regulated and unregulated forms of labour relations.
Socioecologies & Economies of Migration
Latin American-born Canadian researchers, artists, and activists working together to examine Latin American migration to Canada.
Socioecologies & Economies of Migration is a collective of Latin American-born Canadian researchers, artists, and activists working together to examine Latin American Migration to Canada. We seek to address South-North human mobility through an interdisciplinary research-action method guided by principles of social justice. Using art as a knowledge transfer method, we mobilize our convergent interests in indebtedness, displacement and environmental racism to co-design meaningful research identified by the communities we work with.
Photo: Fabio Valiente & Sheyla Blanco