I am an assistant professor in Bowling Green State University’s Department of History. I ended up in the Midwest after a long journey. I was born and raised in Buenos Aires (Argentina), a twelve-million-people city surrounded by the legendary flat Pampas. Interested in the rural history of the Pampas, an intellectual respite to the stressed life in such a crowded city, I moved to lovely New England for my doctoral studies. I became interested in Mexican social history. I eventually stayed two years in Mexico to conduct the research for my dissertation—and travel extensively. Through a series of serendipities, I ended up in Bowling Green, Ohio, a small city in the middle of flat farmland that is now my home.
I teach undergraduate classes on Latin American and World History both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. Undergraduate students have survived my courses on The Modern World, Latin America Before Independence, Latin America After Independence, Modern Mexico, Environmental History of Latin America, and Famine in the Modern World. Problems in Latin American History has bewildered graduate students; we’re currently venturing in the muddy lands of Quantitative Methods.
My research deals with living standards and colonial policies of food supply in Latin America. My major project is a book manuscript entitled “The Political Economy of Hunger in Bourbon Mexico.” It is about how Mexico became a country with more inequality and less food security in the decades preceding independence. I argue that the rural population was the most affected in their access to food by policies that increased the reliance on grain markets (instead of, say, the traditional reliance on subsistence agriculture). These policies, which became more notorius in the 1770s and specially after the 1780s, favored those had more resources to gain the upper hand in the market —the affluent, and more broadly the cities and the mines. The project is based on my dissertation entitled “Grain Markets, Food Supply Policies, and Living Standards in late Colonial Mexico” (Department of History, Harvard University, 2007) which won the Gerschenkron Prize for best Economic History Dissertation outside the US and Canada in the year 2007-2008. Besides my major monographic project, I am working on two publications on biological wellbeing from 1750 to 1840, and I am editing a book with Ricardo Salvatore and John Coatsworth on Living Standards in Latin American History (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies–Harvard University Press).
Beyond my involvement in the Department of History, I coordinate the Institute of Culture and Societies’ Cluster on Latin American and Latino Studies (2008-9) and participate in the academic committee of Inter-University Consortium of North American Studies.
