Research
I am devoted to research as an important part of my professional work. I have developed research projects on Afro-Latin American Cultures, including oral tradition, dances, and popular religion of the African descendants in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Spain and Peru. Simultaneously, I also do research on contemporary Latin American Literature and Latino/a Studies.
My current research project is about black and Mulatto confraternities of Latin America and Spain. This is a multidisciplinary project that involves ethnographic data and historical archive data from the sixteenth century until present days. I study the origin and evolution of black and mulatto religious confraternities, the way they cope with slavery and how these corporative organizations were used by Africans to preserve part of their original traditions including religion and folklore. In addition, my research study informs about the enormous -tough negated- contribution of African descendants to the formation of contemporary Latin America's nation-states. In this manner, my research contributes with new historical and ethnographic data to the field of Afro-Latin American Studies. For data collection purposes, I have visited rural and urban communities in the countries studied where I hace carried out recordings on video and mp3 formats. In addition, I have spent several hours consulting original documents at the main historical archives of the countries studies since 2005 until present.
