Speakers

Alejandro Echeverri is co-founder and director of URBAM, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies, at EAFIT University, Medellín, Colombia. He believes in the ethical responsibility of designers to contribute toward a better society. His experience combines architectural, urban, environmental projects, and planning. Since 2010, at URBAM, he delves into the urban, environmental, and social issues of emerging developing countries, particularly those with weak political and institutional structures. He is also active in design through his studio, Alejandro Echeverri + Valencia Arquitectos, focusing on projects with low environmental impact for tropic regions. He has collaborated as a professor, lecturer and juror in various international and national institutions.

Barbara E. Mundy is an art historian, best known for her work on the history of cartography, urban history, and the history of the book. Her work focuses primarily on Mexico and New Spain, and the interactions between Indigenous peoples, settler colonists, and their environments across the colonial period, roughly 1520–1800. Her first book, The Mapping of New Spain: The Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (2000), brought to light the largely overlooked colonial mapping traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. Her 2015 book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (2016 LASA Book Prize winner), chronicles the great urban metropolis of Mexico City to reveal the Indigenous foundation that lies beneath one of the largest cities in the world, past and present. 

C.J. Alvarez is associate professor in the departments of History and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT Austin. An environmental historian, he writes about deserts, the built environment, and the U.S.–Mexico border.

Javier Auyero is professor of Sociology at UT Austin and the founder of UT Urban Ethnography Lab. His research is focused on urban marginality, political ethnography, and collective violence. 

Dean Chahim is assistant professor of Environmental Studies at New York University. An anthropologist, his research and teaching broadly trace the interactions between political power, engineering, and the urban environment. 

Seth Denizen is assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis. He is an interdisciplinary researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography.

Ana María Durán Calisto is Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University. A designer, planner, and scholar from Quito, Ecuador, she is co-founder of Estudio A0, which designs a diverse array of multi-scalar projects in collaboration with clients and community partners. 

Guadalupe Garcia is associate professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in the history of cities and colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research examines the intersections of colonialism, empire, and urban space, and focuses on free, Black, and enslaved peoples in Havana.   

Alex Hidalgo is associate professor of Latin American history at Texas Christian University. His areas of interest include Mesoamerican ethnohistory, print culture, archives and collecting, sound, Iberian Atlantic, and the history of cartography. 

Marixa Lasso, a historian, is the spring 2025 Tinker Visiting Professor at LLILAS. She is a researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales, Panama, and author of the award-winning book Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard, 2019), among other books.

Lorraine Leu is professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at LLILAS and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UT Austin. Her research focuses on Urban Brazil, racialized geographies, visual culture, and cultural theory. She is also co-chair of Archiving Black América, a LLILAS Benson initiative.

Zannah Matson is assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her areas of interest include green infrastructure, social justice, environmental justice, speculative design, and history.

Hannah Meszaros-Martin, PhD, is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She co-directs the Plano Negativo Studio in Colombia and is part of the Latin American Network of Forensic and Visual Investigations. She led a two-year forensic architecture investigation with the Colombian Truth Commission that culminated in the exhibition Huellas de desaparición, which is currently touring Colombia.

Adela Pineda Franco is Lozano Long Endowed Professor in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, and director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarly work situates the study of specific literary and cinematic phenomena within transnational contexts and comparative, interdisciplinary frameworks, addressing the relationships between culture, politics, intellectual thought, and technology. 

Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus on the interactions between Indigenous peoples and European empires in the early modern Atlantic world, combining material culture, agrarian history, and the history of books and maps. He is author of Costumbres en disputa. Los muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI (2015), and the forthcoming (2025) book The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain’s Atlantic Empire. He is co-founder of Neogranadina, a Colombian non-profit organization that makes digitization and digital tools available to local archives and community groups in Latin America.  

Juana Salcedo is assistant professor of Practice at the UT Austin School of Architecture. As an architectural designer and scholar, she works at the intersection of architecture and urbanism. Her work critically reflects on the meanings, uses, and shapes of public space and the diverse ways the spatial arts can contribute to the making of caring and convivial responses. As a designer, Salcedo has led and worked in projects at a range of scales, from residential projects to schools and community centers, to urban-scale projects including urban waterfronts and green corridors. Her current project, Infrastructures of Care: Jaguars, Humans and the Design of Urbanscapes in the Americas, was awarded a Research and Development Grant from the Graham Foundation (2020) and a Production and Presentation Grant (2024) to develop the exhibition Jaguar Lens. Salcedo is the Meadows Centennial Fellow Center for American Architecture and Design 2023–2026.

Paloma Díaz is Assistant Director of Programs at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She has extensive experience developing and coordinating international initiatives throughout the Americas and working in coordination with higher education institutions as well as government institutions and nonprofit organizations. An active member of the Latin American Studies Association, she served as social media coordinator for that organization between 2014 and 2023.