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 in the region. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Revolutionary Habitations: Modern Mexico’s Urban Utopianism. Reading closely an archive of futurist magazines, socialist realism novels, and futuristic architecture projects, the book explores how a network of experimental writers and architects got involved in urban struggles over housing, tenant rights, and living conditions in Mexico’s postrevolutionary period (1920s-1970s). These artists produced utopian projections of urban space that proposed radically different logics of social organization. Broadly speaking, this book claims that, although sometimes overlooked, modern Mexico’s urban utopianism developed reflections on urban habitation that are relevant for today’s urban challenges and has had an important influence for many communities in urban Mexico.

Besides holding an active research agenda in peer-reviewed publications such as Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, 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. In 2024, Alfonso coordinated (with Pedro Ceñal) the digitalization of these Mexican Mail Art documents and are now available as the public online archive Archivo Aquí.

At Northwestern, Alfonso offers undergraduate and graduate courses that survey modern Latin American literature and culture. Specific courses explore the Latin American Boom and Popular Culture, Film and the Contemporary Latin American City, and Urban Culture in Modern Mexico.