I am a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2025, I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I specialize in political ecology and critical development studies, with a focus on urbanization, land politics, and environmental conflict. I am broadly interested in how struggles over land shape different dimensions of human experience, from material aspects like housing and water access to abstract notions of 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 complexities of environmental governance in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a semi-rural town on the outskirts of San Salvador whose forested lands have been targeted for residential development. The book analyzes the efforts of real estate investors to transform a series of former coffee haciendas into high-end gated communities, and their conflicts with longtime residents over deforestation, disasters, and water scarcity. Moving beyond narratives that reduce the problem to a culture of corruption, I focus my analysis on property relations and the historical connection between land and power in a region shaped by agrarian capitalism.
More recently, I have started a new project that explores the political ecology of tech-led extractivism in Central America. I focus on the ways in which tech capital is redefining the use, access, and control over land in rural environments through various economic and political experiments.
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: juliogutierrez@berkeley.edu
Photo by Parag Saikia