Christopher Loperena

Christopher Loperena is a sociocultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Texas) and Associate Professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. His scholarship examines indigenous and black struggles for territorial autonomy in Central America, ethicality and subject formation, racialization, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. His research has been published in American Quarterly, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. He was the César Chávez Fellow at Dartmouth College before assuming his position at the University of San Francisco. He has received additional support for his research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation.

His current book project is titled, A Fragmented Paradise: Blackness and the Limits of Progress in Post-Coup Honduras.

• Black and indigenous social movements
• Latin America
• Race and gender
• Environment, land and development
• Ethnographic research methods
• Anthropology of ethics and morality

• PhD, Social Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
• MA, Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
• BA, International Studies, University of Chicago

• Cesar Chávez Fellow in Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies (2011-12), Dartmouth College

• Forthcoming "Adjudicating Indigeneity: Anthropologist as Expert Witness in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights." American Anthropologist. Accepted April 2018

• Forthcoming “Introducción: Dilemas del Peritaje Cultural.” Aida Hernández Castillo, Christopher Loperena and Mariana Mora, eds. Desacatos. Accepted February 2018.

• 2017 "Settler Violence: Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras." American Quarterly. Special Forum on Settler Colonialism in Latin America. Vol. 69(4).

• 2017 "Honduras is Open for Business: Extractivist tourism as sustainable development in the wake of disaster?" Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Vol. 25(5):618-633.

• 2016 "Conservation by Racialized Dispossession: The Making of an Eco-destination on Honduras’s North Coast." Geoforum. Vol. 69:184-193.

• 2016 "A Divided Community: The Ethics and Politics of Activist Research." Current Anthropology. Vol. 57(3):332-346.

• 2016 "Radicalize Multiculturalism? Garifuna Activism and the Double-Bind of Participation in Postcoup Honduras." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Vol. 21(3): 517-538.