I research the articulation of race, nature and migrations across the Américas. From my engagements with Guatemalan and Q'eqchi' communities, I have published Tierra, Migración y Vida en Petén (2012) and Green Wars (2017) / Guerras Verdes (2020). In the US Pacific Northwest, I have examined the role of Tacoma's Tideflats in radical placemaking for abolition geographies on Indigenous Puyallup land. Thinking relationally across the US, Mexico and Guatemala, I am also researching and writing on transnational Latinidades.

I serve on the editorial/advisory boards of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; and The Professional Geographer. I also serve on the Committee for Annual Honors of the AAG (elected as of July 1, 2021).


​Green Wars

Green Wars critiques the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders in settler colonial Guatemala and calls for a material decolonization building from Q'eqchi' Maya territoriality. The book is published in English (distribution in the US) by UC Press and Spanish (distribution in Guatemala) by AVANCSO.

Winner, 2019 Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Outstanding Publication Award, American Association of Geographers.
Photo of a mural at night reading "Illegal, for-profit, every day" (Mural by David Long, Tacoma, WA)



​Abolition Geographies

My research imagines what abolition geographies mean in practice -- a Tacoma without a detention center? a Seattle without a police department? All too often, seeking to end violence ends up relying on hierarchies of oppression, the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), and individualized charismatic leadership. Instead, I think about radical place-making that is centered on relationships of solidarity rather than individualism, an abolition that means that no person --and no land --  is disposable, and building non-hierarchical relations across communities on the same place.



​Transnational Latinidades

My research working with Q'eqchi' land activists challenged my assumptions about a singular Chicanx / Latinx identity. I am particularly committed to revealing what is at stake in Latino studies' cultural appropriation of Indigenous language and art for Indigenous nations' material claims to their homelands.