My Research
I am a qualitative researcher of race and ethnicity, racism, migration, identity, and belonging with a focus on the United States and Latin America, as well as Dominican and Dominican-American communities. My published works are listed below. Across my papers, I deal with topics such as researcher positionality, Latinx panethnic community building and the ways it perpetuates exclusions, Blackness and anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic, and how online spaces facilitate cultural production across diaspora.
My current book project, Black, but “Not Black,” takes on the question of Dominican Blackness in the U.S., how Afro-Latinxs more broadly are situated in the U.S. racial landscape, and the rise of the “diaspora wars” amid increased calls for Black ethnoracial solidarity in recent decades.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Researcher street race-gender in qualitative field work (2026)
#PeroNoSomosRacistas: examining Dominican (anti)blackness in a time of global racial reckoning (2025)
Black like this, not like that: how Afro-Latines navigate Black and Latine ethnoracial hierarchies in the U.S. (2025)
“We’re Expected to be Homogenous:” Contesting Latinidad and the Myth of Panethnic Inclusion (2024)
The Social Aftershocks of a Migration Crisis: Racial Threat and Racial Drift in the Dominican Republic (2023)
Connectivity, contestation, and cultural production: an analysis of Dominican online identity formation (2022)
Research-Adjacent Public Writing
4 things the Biden administration should pay attention to with the border crisis
Deportados: En Guatemala solo hay carencias, por eso quieren volver
Identities Blog - “Connectivity and Contestation”
Online Lectures and Presentations
Here is a small selection of online panels and speaking engagements that I have done.
In this presentation, my colleague Anna Holleman and I present our project on race in the third wave of the U.S. sanctuary movement on February 26, 2022 at the The Boisi Center's 2nd Annual Virtual Graduate Conference on “Religious Activism, Political Change; Political Activism, Religious Change.” We also presented this work at the 2022 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, CA.
The Theological Foundations of Theological Foundations of Civil Disobedience and Racial Awareness in the Sanctuary Movement
In this presentation, I highlight the role of archival research in her 2017 honors project on incidents of racial bias at Bowdoin College. I discuss how access to archival materials allowed her to contextualize the incidents at the center of her project within the broader historical context of race and racism at Bowdoin. I also discuss some of her current graduate research on race and discuss the pros and cons of using archives in sociological research. My research materials are preserved and available at the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archive at Bowdoin. Read more here.
Beyond the Reading Room: Archives in the World with Sociologist Pamela Zabala '17