Peer Mentors

I am a Puerto Rican archaeologist and curator who is interested in the intersection of coloniality, material culture, Indigeneity, mestizaje, and the politics behind museums in the Caribbean. I am passionate about how “things” tell stories about the past and how these narratives shape people’s identity.

Prior to joining Stanford, I worked as a curator at the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum. I completed a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in Archaeological Studies and an Erasmus Mundus masters in ARCHaeological MATerials Sciences (University of Evora, Sapienza University and Aristotle University). 

Research...

Christian Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University, where he is studying the transformation of coffee from a luxury item to a staple commodity in the early nineteenth century. His research centers on Brazilian coffee production and its consumption in the United States. His doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee (1808-1850)”, explores how coffee emerged as one of the world’s most valuable commodity markets despite the pervasive risks and adversities of its early years. Robles-Baez’s interdisciplinary research aims at bridging fields such as Business History, History of Capitalism, Environmental History, Transnational...

I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at Stanford University, studying law, violence, and the state. I am specifically interested in how the partisan control of criminal justice systems in Latin America enables ordinary state violence against criminalized communities.

My dissertation, Guilty as Charged: Criminal Prosecution and State Violence in Mexico, examines how prosecutors legalize state violence to protect police and punish alleged criminals in the ongoing “Drug War.” It moves across prosecutors’ offices, courtrooms, and the urban peripheries of Mexico City to offer an ethnographic account of criminal justice from multiple and contradictory perspectives.

As part of this research...