Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorzano

Jorge Rodríguez Solórzano is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Through ethnographic research in Oaxaca and Mexico City, Jorge's dissertation examines how Indigenous state officials implemented a vision of Indigenous autonomy through a community-managed road building program that promoted a discourse of directness between the State and Indigenous communities. It argues that this model of populist redistribution deepened the role of the State as a provider of monetary resources while making Indigenous citizens responsible for the administration of federal monies and rural development. Contrary to state discourses of directness, the institutional practices and economic infrastructures that subtended this model of autonomy relied on intermediaries to mobilize popular participation, generate bureaucratic interventions, and create a strategic reliance on Mexico’s hegemonic party. Jorge's dissertation then examines how a coalition of Indigenous state officials and council members endeavored to incorporate this model of state-funded autonomy into a constitutional reform on Indigenous rights, as well as the hopes, anxieties, and criticisms that Indigenous actors articulated in response to it. By demonstrating how administrative-financial autonomy became enshrined into law, this dissertation argues that self-determination became tethered to a populist politics of redistribution. As a result, this model displaced the demands of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, which sought land redistribution and political self-determination in opposition to the State.

Jorge is a 2025 Law and Humanities Junior Scholar and an Editorial Fellow for the digital edition of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).

Columbia University, MPhil in Anthropology, 2023

School of Oriental and African Studies, MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies (2019)

Reed College, BA in French (2016)