Research

My research lies at the intersection of urban political ecology and critical agrarian studies. It explores the politics of land and water under real estate market expansion in Central America by tracing the connections between speculative urbanism, resource grabbing and authoritarian power structures. Currently, I am working on two projects. The first is a book manuscript about the politics of real estate development in Nuevo Cuscatlán, El Salvador, a coffee-producing town whose forested lands have been targeted as a site of peri-urban gentrification. This project examines how the institutionalized system of land and water dealing constructed by Salvadoran elites during the post-war period paved the way for the emergence of what I call real estate populism, a conjunctural convergence of real estate speculation and authoritarian populist politics. My second projects focuses on the emergence of libertarian city experiments in Central America.