I am an anthropologist and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
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 relationship between real estate markets and environmental conflict in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a coffee-producing town in the periphery of San Salvador undergoing rapid urban expansion. Moving beyond narratives about local corruption, the book examines the state policies that transformed the local coffee forest into a global urban frontier and gave rise to what I call “real estate populism” — a type of populist politics that capitalizes on the economic and ecological dynamics of gentrification.
More recently, I have started a new project focused on techno-libertarian urban enclaves in Central America. I am interested in how the emergence of these spaces in Indigenous territories connects with historical patterns of class, state formation, and dispossession.
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