Alexander Huezo

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Alexander taught at an arts and social justice high school in Oakland, CA for several years before deciding to pursue graduate studies. He earned his MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA, where he conducted his thesis research on violence, forcible displacement and elements of the supernatural in Cali, Colombia. He then completed a PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University, shifting his research from the effects of forcible displacement to one of its causes. His dissertation chronicles how Afro-Colombians have resisted the US War on Drugs through ecologies of difference rooted in ancestral land claims. He joined UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department as a full-time lecturer in the Fall of 2019 and is currently writing a book manuscript –Necropolitical Ecologies: Mythmaking and Environmental Justice in the Colombian Afro-Pacific— influenced by the courses he teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Since moving to San Diego, he has also volunteered with Allies to End Detention and is currently consulting for an environmental justice court case in Colombia. His research has been funded by UCLA, Florida International University and the Social Science Research Council.

PUBLICATIONS
Journal Articles:
Huezo, Alexander. 2019. “Contested Natures: Coca, the War on Drugs, and Ecologies of
Difference in Colombia’s Afro-Pacific communities”. Journal of Political Ecology.
26(1): 305-322. https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.23060
Huezo, Alexander. 2017. "Eradication without prior consultation: the aerial fumigation of
coca in the black communities of the Colombian Pacific". Canadian Journal of Latin
American and Caribbean Studies. 42(3): 375-399.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2017.1378406
Huezo, Alexander and Gerardo Bazán Orobio. 2020. “Corrective Lenses for a Myopic State:
Unseeing Coca or Not Unseeing Comunidades Negras in Colombia?”.
World Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105265

Interviews:
Huezo, Alexander. 2014. “Dominican Hip-Hop in Spain” (interview with Arianna Puello). In
Roorda, Eric, Lauren Hutchinson Derby, and Raymundo González (eds). The Dominican
Republic reader: history, culture, politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press: 479-
482.
Huezo, Alexander. 2014. “The Queen of Merengue” (interview with Milly Quezada). In
Roorda, Eric, Lauren Hutchinson Derby, and Raymundo González (eds). The Dominican
Republic reader: history, culture, politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press: 483-
485.