I am an anthropologist and political ecologist from El Salvador. I am a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
I specialize in urban political ecology and critical development studies, with a focus on land politics and the urban-rural interface. I am interested in how struggles over land shape different dimensions of human experience, from the satisfaction of basic needs like food, water, and housing to more abstract ideas about property, sovereignty, and self-determination.
My first book project, tentatively titled Forests of Speculation: Land, Power, and the Birth of Urban Extractivism in El Salvador, explores the relationship between real estate markets and environmental conflict in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a coffee-producing town undergoing rapid urbanization. Moving beyond reductionist narratives about local corruption, the book examines the territorial policies that transformed the coffee forest into a global urban frontier, triggering processes of environmental dispossession and planting the seeds of what I call real estate populism, a form of populist politics that capitalizes extensively on the commodification of land.
My work has been published in academic journals such as Antipode, City & Society, and The Journal of Peasant Studies. I have also written for Central American newspapers like El Faro, Focos, and MalaYerba.
CONTACT
Email: jgutierrez2084@gmail.com
Photo by Parag Saikia