The article looks at the conversations and ideas exchanged between US and Mexican architects and planners in the early 1960s and their vision of redesigning the borderlands. Through a reading of Robert Evans Alexander's archival material (donated to Cornell University) and primary source material written by Guillermo Rossell, I argue that broader ideas of spatial justice influenced their conceptions of design. Moreover, Rossell brought to the table the idea that the border was a region and thus required a binational, regional design. The binational commission on planning developed in the midst of the Cold War and this was an element in their minds. And a part of this conversation, especially on the part of Mexican architects and planners, was development. Yet it was development through tourism, not industry. The article should be of interest to scholars working on the border, architecture and planning, development, tourism, and collaborative planning.

Published in Journal of Historical Geography, 2024

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Image from the Robert Evans Alexander Papers, Rare and Manuscript collection, Cornell University.

This article centers cross-border solidarity in the post–War of the Pacific (1879–83) context in Peru and Chile. I examine the ways in which some maritime and port workers in these countries in the early twentieth century created bonds of solidarity despite the reigning nationalism of the day. The article analyzes labor struggles and the move toward industrial organizing in Mollendo, Peru; Chilean Industrial Workers of the World efforts at creating links with Peruvian workers; and police repression after a 1925 strike in Mollendo. I combine an in-depth view of local organizing with the transnational political moves and connections forged by maritime and port workers. They lived and organized in their own ports while also forming bonds with other working-class people in the shared space of the Pacific littoral. Their organizing locally and transnationally challenged the chauvinistic nationalism of the era.

Published in Hispanic American Historical Review, 2019

Winner, Premio José María Arguedas, Peru Section, LASA

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Interview on the article.

Image of Mollendo via California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside.

On August 16, 1906, the people of Valparaíso and central Chile experienced a massive earthquake and raging fires. In the aftermath of the event, the local authorities in Valparaíso sought total control of the city population, lashing and killing many and requiring written permission to traverse the city. Meanwhile, in Santiago, the prolabor Partido Democrático first interpreted the disaster as affecting all classes equally. But party leaders soon recognized that the state was abandoning their working-class comrades. Using archival documents and periodicals, this article follows the path of recent scholarship that has denaturalized “natural disasters.” I emphasize how a political party with roots in working-class activism interpreted and integrated the social disaster into its politics. The state and local elites attempted to use the earthquake and fires to their advantage, yet in so doing they pushed a portion of the labor movement to the left. By working to help the victims of the earthquake and of the state, the organizers of the Partido Democrático forged bonds of “affective solidarity” that enabled workers to advance economic demands and to produce a radical critique of the state.

Published in Journal of Social History, 2018

Winner, Best Graduate Student Paper, Labor Studies Section, LASA

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Image from Alfredo Rodríguez Rojas y Carlos Gajardo Cruzat’s La catástrofe del 16 de agosto de 1906 en la República de Chile at memoriachilena.com.gob.cl