Ph.D. Rutgers University 1991

 curriculum vitae

My research and teaching interests concentrate on the interaction between human populations and their physical environment with special attention paid to the role of national and transnational economies, state policies, institutions, and class and gender in shaping the manner in which natural resources are utilized.  My formal training in Marine Biology and Human Ecology buttressed my interest in the study of coastal communities and the manner in which they rely on coastal ecosystems such as estuaries, lagoons and mangrove forests and fishing resources to develop local and regional economies and to procure sustainable livelihoods. In this regard I have conducted research in the Caribbean, Coastal United States, and Mexico.

             

One component of my research focuses on the analysis of the social impact of fisheries management policies upon coastal communities and households, as well as how these policies are integrated into broader economic national and transnational development schemes. One specific aspect of this interest involves the economic and technical study of the development and implementation of aquaculture projects and their ecological, spatial, economic, and social impact upon local communities and coastal ecosystems.

A second component of my research focuses on the efficacy of various theoretical positions, and especially political ecology, to understand the role of states, transnational economy, and natural resource utilization, and their interrelated impacts on the physical environment and the formation of regional coastal areas and local level communities and households. For more than a decade I have carried out intensive longitudinal empirical research in coastal northwester Mexico treating different aspects of these interests. I have developed a long-term intellectual and methodological program that now incorporates aspects of economic and political anthropology with an emphasis in understanding the globalizing links of colonial expansion on Latin America to the most recent transnational expansion of post-modern capitalism on the physical, social, economic, political and cultural environments of human populations. Within this broad construct, I concentrate great attention to the evolving colonial, national, and post-revolutionary state policies that support these expansions and their ultimate impact on local-level community formations and the households of which they are comprised. Moreover, my book Lives of Dust and Water: An Anthropology of Change and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2004) is the culminating treatise for these theoretical, environmental, economic interests and concludes over eleven years of archival, demographic and ethnographic research.

A third component involves collaborative fieldwork to understand the relationship between water and human societies. Specifically this research focuses on the development of irrigation agriculture, conflicts surrounding the use and consumption of water, and the formation of Mexican ejidos along the U.S.-Mexican border.  At an incipient stage, this research will be of continuous interests as water usage is moved from a common property status to private and transnational domains in the midst of increasing scarcity and multiple use demands.

Last, my current research focuses on the manner in which global fish markets develop and how globalization influences the development of local markets. I am currently carrying out anthropological research in the Mazatlan (Mexico) area to examine the history of the formation of the local shrimp market and how this interacts with other sectors of the regional formal and informal economy such as tourism, fishing, aquaculture, and shrimp trading. The research also examines the manner in which class and gender shape the local and regional structure and function of the Mexican fishing industry.  This research will become the basis of a book manuscript tentatively titled : Gender, the Environment and the Informal Economy in Northwestern Mexico.

I am also a participant in a National Science Foundation interdisciplinary, transnational collaborative research project focusing on the links between human and biophysical processes in coastal marine ecosystems in Baja California, Mexico. The main goal of this project is to understand the dynamic and complex interactions between fisheries and their biological resources in order to develop a scientific framework for the sustainable management of the coastal fishing industry.

Before joining the School for Global Studies at ASU I was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Riverside.  We will be moving to Tempe this fall with our daughter Nayely Luz, age 10, and my husband, Carlos Vélez-Ibañez, an anthropologist who is joining ASU as well.