I am a PhD in History from UC Santa Barbara. I especialize in Caribbean and Latin America history, African diaspora studies, and digital humanities.
My doctoral dissertation, titled From Cumbes to Cofradías: Black Communities and Competing Normative Orders in the Province of Venezuela, 1552–1785 argues that people of African descent were constitutive in shaping the norms and geographies that made and remade the Province of Venezuela over more than two centuries.
My research examines the period from 1552 to 1785 and how these people engaged with colonial institutions and policies through a repertoire of interconnected strategies, from cimarronaje or slave flight to legal practices and institutions. My research reconstructs a rich social fabric that goes beyond the dichotomies of slavery/freedom and resistance/submission to understand how enslaved, free, and maroon peoples active, political actors in the creation of new normative orders. Through archival research in Venezuela and Spain, I examine marronage and institutional participation as intertwined dynamics, products of interactions among maroon, freed, and enslaved people across different political coalitions and legal processes.
As a digital historian I engage with digital tools to sort and examine historical data. I have created multiple datasets with and maps to trace the histories and movements of people who are seemingly “un-geographic” in archival sources. This counter-mapping exercise aims to visualize different forms of geographies (e.g., maroon settlement locations, river routes connecting maroon networks, and institutional-controlled spaces). I want to make evident what Spanish colonial maps and sources deliberately concealed: that the territorial presence of Africans and their descendants was not marginal or invisible but ever-present and constitutive of spatial configurations.