Cultural Anthropologist · Author · Educator
Assistant Professor · School of Management, Universidad de los Andes
I study how power, identity and culture take shape inside organizations and communities — from corporate elites in Latin American business to the untold history of indigenous settlers in the Galápagos.
About
I am a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Organizations area at the School of Management, Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. My research and teaching sit at the intersection of organizational studies and anthropology, asking how meaning, hierarchy, and belonging are produced — whether in the boardrooms and in the corporate rituals of transnational corporations or in indigenous communities negotiating their place in a changing world.
My path is unusual by design. After training in economics and business and working for years in media, marketing, and business intelligence with companies including Procter & Gamble and Bayer, I turned to anthropology to understand the human worlds behind the organizations I had been part of. I earned my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at New York University and an M.A. at FLACSO in Ecuador, and I have carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork from corporate elites in Latin America to the Salasaca communities of the Galápagos Islands.
That combination — the insider's eye for how businesses actually work, and the anthropologist's attention to culture and power — runs through everything I write and teach.
Research
My work spans two connected worlds — the cultures of corporate life and the histories of indigenous communities — held together by questions of identity, power, and belonging.
How gender and masculinity are performed and rewarded among managerial and corporate elites, and what it means to be "good at being a manager" in transnational business.
Bringing ethnographic method to organizations — studying corporate rituals, culture, and hierarchy from the inside to understand how companies really operate.
The history, migration, and cultural recognition of the Salasaca people in the Galápagos, and questions of governance, race, and conservation in the archipelago.
How states and institutions define, protect, and sometimes erase cultural heritage — and how communities reclaim it.
Rethinking organizational theory from Latin American perspectives, challenging assumptions embedded in dominant management thought.
Telling rigorous scholarship as human stories — writing that reaches both academic readers and the wider public.
New Book · 2025
Colonización indígena, gobierno y conservación del archipiélago
This book reconstructs a largely untold history: that of the Salasaca indigenous community in the Galápagos Islands. Beginning in the nineteenth century, indigenous laborers from Ecuador's central highlands arrived to work on the islands' haciendas, and from the late 1960s a major wave of Salasaca families settled in Santa Cruz — yet their presence in the Galápagos was almost entirely absent from the archipelago's official history.
Drawing on years of fieldwork, I trace the difficult process of integration and "cultural whitening" — the way many Salasaca downplayed their origins and adopted mestizo identities to navigate persistent discrimination. This book follows the turning point of 1996, when the community founded its own association, reclaiming indigenous heritage, led by figures such as Margarita Masaquiza.
Through their memories, contributions to the archipelago, and journeys between the highlands and the islands, this book contributes to debates on identity and memory, while offering a critical look at the interplay of race, law, science, and governance in the Galápagos. Ultimately, I argue that you cannot understand the Galápagos without the Salasaca — that the island's human heritage deserves to be told alongside its celebrated natural history.
Beyond the Page
Selected public conversations from my research on corporate rituals, gender, and organizational culture — complementing the work at the heart of my book.
Selected Publications
Additional book chapters (2014–2020) and international conference presentations are listed in the full CV.
Background