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, his dissertation examines how Indigenous state officials sought to materialize a vision of Indigenous autonomy through a community-managed road building program that promoted a discourse of Indigenous self-determination and directness between the federal government and Indigenous communities. Jorge's dissertation shows how, contrary to state discourses of directness, the institutional practices and economic infrastructures that subtended this model of autonomy relied on Indigenous intermediaries who helped mobilize popular participation and manage bureaucratic interventions in rural localities.

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, creating a strategic reliance on Mexico’s hegemonic party. By demonstrating how administrative and financial autonomy became constitutional guarantees, while rights for political autonomy and territory were left out, this dissertation describes the afterlives of the EZLN Zapatista uprising in arenas of law and development, as well as the hopes, anxieties, and criticisms that Indigenous actors articulated in response to government cooptation of radical demands. 

Jorge's research was selected for the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy Intensive at Sciences Po in 2026. He is a 2025 Law and Humanities Junior Scholar and an Editorial Fellow for the digital edition of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), where he published an emergent conversation series on Indigenous–state relations and populism in Latin America. His essay, "An Oral History of Ayuuk/ Mixe Political Concepts" won the Étienne Balibar Prize in Cultural and Political Thought in 2026. 

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)