Collegiate Affiliation
American Studies
American Indian Studies

M. Bianet Castellanos is an anthropologist and a core faculty member in American Studies.

Her new book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2020), analyzes how Maya families make sense of the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution. Her other works include A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (University of Minnesota Press 2010), Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach, which she co-edited with Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Arturo Aldama (University of Arizona Press 2012), and the anthology Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South (University of Arizona Press 2019). She edited a forum on settler colonialism in Latin America for America Quarterly and published an article in the special issue on Critical Latinx Indigeneities in the journal Latino Studies.

She is a member of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities Working Group, the INRS Dialog, and Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. She teaches courses on Indigenous urbanisms, immigration, tourism, American politics and popular culture, and the US-Mexico border.

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • PhD: Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2003
  • MA: Anthropology, University of Michigan
  • BA: Anthropology, Stanford University
  • Certificate: Women’s Studies, Programa Internacional de Estudios de la Mujer, Colegio de México

Specialties

  • Indigenous communities and cultures
  • Migration
  • Anthropology of work
  • Chicana/o studies
  • Latin America
  • Transnationalism
  • Gender studies