Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Law Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. My research and teaching interests are crime and punishment, policing, empire and colonialism, social theory, ethnography, and Latin America. As a sociologist by training, I study the co-production of the state’s punitive social control and imperialism, and its consequences for social inequality. As a member of the UIC Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), I recently co-authored a book titled Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press).

My current book project, Behind the Allure of Accuracy and Development: The Imperial Making of Policing in Santiago, Chile, explores how and why the domestic shift to predictive policing was the result of global power relations that constrained and facilitated imperial flows of economic capital, policing expertise, and penal policies between the US and Chile. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including ethnographic observations within the national police, 68 in-depth interviews, and over 2,000 pages of archival materials, this project demonstrates that predictive policing emerged from large-scale macro-institutional arrangements between the Inter-American Development Bank, US policing experts, and Chilean bureaucrats.

My research has received generous financial support from the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Research and Development Agency (ANID) from the Chilean Government, among others. 

In a second line of research, I also investigate how sanctuary city policies constitute a regime of racialized urban governance that strengthens rather than contests the legitimacy of the state and police power. Some of my other works have been published in Law & Social Inquiry, Oxford Bibliographies in Criminology, Persona y Sociedad (Original in Spanish), and Revista Latinoamericana de Teología (Original in Spanish). Before joining Marquette, I was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. I hold a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  

In addition to research, I am passionate about teaching. I understand education as a praxis that aims to help students from multiple biographies and social positions to (re)read the world in a way that allows us to scrutinize power and social inequality. In the United States, I have taught over 500 college students, either as a teaching assistant or instructor of record, in the UIC Sociology Department. Over the last years, I have developed a variety of pedagogical skills, methods, and forms of evaluation that pay attention to several disciplinary backgrounds, learning styles, and knowledge, and explicitly address my students’ unequal social positions in the classroom.