My current research focuses on the transnational politics of consumption and labor linking Chile and the United States during the military regime of Pinochet, 1973-1990. I am interested in the incorporation of rural Chilean women into a highly profitable fruit-export sector which produced grapes and other fruit sold in the US and marketed heavily to US women as part of "healthy eating" and an expanded year-round "choice" of imported fresh produce. I am interested in reversing the traditional gaze of Latin American studies which has long inquired about the impact of the United States on Latin America , and instead ask how Latin America impacts life inside the United States . In particular, I am interested in the active role that Chilean businesses played in forging alliances with California fruit growers and other US agribusiness interests to elaborate notions about what constituted “fresh” commodities and for whose bodies. I examine the intersections between the gendered meanings articulated by transnational business partnerships and the food agendas championed by consumer advocacy groups, feminists, environmentalists, and the counter-culture. My work also considers the ways in which Chilean fruit-workers, themselves, became consumers in new ways as the military’s neo-liberal economic policies made relatively cheap imported manufactured goods (many with American name-brand) widely available in the countryside. Moving beyond ideas about simple victimization, I’m interested in how consumption serves as an arena for renegotiating dynamics of gender and sexuality as well as motivating concrete challenges to military rule.

My research on Chile and the US represents one aspect of a more general interest I have in exploring histories of "the Americas ” and thinking about Latin American history in terms of transnational and world history dynamics. I am interested in reworking older are-studies models and making historical projects more fully interdisciplinary. I have recently finished a co-edited volume on this theme, co-edited with Sandhya Shukla : Imagining Our Americas: Towards a Transnational Framework, (Duke, 2007). I am likewise interested in conversations about how to make gender and sexuality central to historical narratives about the global.

My first book, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 (Duke, 2002) examined the politics of gender and sexuality to peasant labor movements during Chile ’s agrarian reform, carried out by Salvador Allende and his predecessor. Here, I explored the centrality of male-headed households to creating a new society and to marginalizing women within the project. So too, this work explored the ways struggles over sexuality were thoroughly intertwined with the ways that peasant men and women experienced class conflict and social transformation.

My teaching interests at both the undergraduate and graduate levels include modern Latin America , world history, feminist studies, transnational Americas , labor history, and critical theory.