DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Alfonso Fierro is Assistant Professor of Mexican and Latin American literature at Northwestern University. His work explores the place of utopian and speculative fabulation practices in Latin American urban landscapes, focusing particularly on their connection to urban struggles and the political histories of socialism and anarchism in the region. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Utopian Habitations that dwells on Mexico’s postrevolutionary period (1920-1968). This book project zooms in to materials such as ephemeral futurist magazines, socialist realism novels, unbuilt architecture projects, and political pamphlets to dwell on how radical writers and architects of the postrevolutionary period articulated utopian practices that actively intervened in the urban struggles of the period over housing, tenant rights, and living conditions. Their work provided critiques of capitalist urbanization while pointing to potential alternatives that materialized in different, contradictory, and unpredictable ways in Mexico’s urban terrain. Broadly speaking, this book claims that, although sometimes overlooked, post-revolutionary utopianism has an important place in the collective memory of resistance to exploitation and colonization in Mexico’s urban spaces. 

Besides holding an active research agenda in peer-reviewed publications such as Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos, Hispanic Review, and Chasqui, Alfonso Fierro also participates frequently in public platforms such as the podcasts Sur Urbano and Agitar, cultural projects such Jardín Lac, and the architecture magazine Arquine, where Alfonso regularly publishes short essays on urban Latin America. In 2021 and 2022, he co-curated (with Pedro Ceñal) the exhibition Cartografías Ocultas: Circuitos del Arte Correo en México (Casa del Lago UNAM/Museo de la Filatelia de Oaxaca). Based on archival research and contemporary installations, this exhibition explored how Mexican artists of the 1970s and 80s joined the transnational Mail Art networks to explore collaborative logics for producing, exchanging, and exhibiting art.    

At Northwestern, Alfonso offers courses that survey modern Latin American literature and culture, courses that dwell on specific topics related to modern Mexican culture such as the question of infrastructural development and futurity, and courses that explore Latin American/Latinx urban cultures through literature, film, and critical theory.