Carlos A. Batista

Carlos Batista is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University. His current research focuses on the lived experience of infrastructural displacement in the second largest tropical rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon. Examining the construction of the controversial Mayan Train, his work asks how the contamination of underwater caves, deforestation, and impacts on charismatic species like jaguars and spider monkeys constitute a togetherness that expresses itself in the fight against left-wing developmentalism. This research has been supported by the Tinker Foundation; the Institute of Latin American Studies; the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, and the Department of Anthropology’s Fieldwork Research Grant.

Claudio Lomnitz (co-chair), Catherine Fennell (co-chair), Rosalind C. Morris, Nitzan Shoshan

• M.Phil. Sociocultural Anthropology, Columbia University, 2025
• M.Sc. Nature and Society, University of Oxford, 2020
• B.A. International Relations, The College of Mexico, 2018
• Erasmus, Sociocultural Anthropology, Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016

• "Taking over Indigeneity: Sovereignty as Negotiation in Mexico." Theory & Event 28 (2025): 294-314.
• "Sovereignty, Anti-Extraction, and the Prose of Insurgency in Mexico." In: The Routledge Handbook of Subalterns across History. Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee, eds. Routledge, 2025: 163-170.
• Review of Mareike Winchell, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia, University of California Press, 2022. In Political and Legal Anthropology Review 13 (2023): 22-24.