mvasquez@u.arizona.edu, 520-6267-7623
Haury Bldg Room 316, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030
curriculum vitae

Marcela was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She has an interdisciplinary background, with a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Arizona. Currently, she has a joint appointment at BARA and the Latin American Area Center.

Program: Environmental Studies & Rural Development

Research Interests
Marcela's research interests include environmental anthropology; political ecology; fisheries management and maritime anthropology; rural development and agricultural cooperatives; environmental justice; human dimensions of global environmental change. Her research focuses on the political ecology of natural resource management, particularly on the relationship between community decision-making, folk and scientific knowledge, and environmental change. She has projects in different geographical regions as follows:

• Northern Mexico: Since the early 1990s she has conducted extensive research among small-scale fishing communities in the Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California, Mexico. Her doctoral dissertation examined the shrimp industry focusing on issues of fisheries management and the comparison of industrial and artisanal fishing technologies. She participated in a socioeconomic assessment of the Upper Gulf of California - Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve. In 2001 Marcela was Principal Investigator on a NSF funded project in the Mid-Gulf of California region of the Sonoran coast. She also was Principal Investigator in a project funded by the Inter American Institute for Global Change, which focused on the relationship between ethnicity and class in the development of co-management schemes of coastal resources in southern Brazil and the Gulf of California.
  She has also worked among farming and ranching communities in different regions of the State of Sonora.
  
  
• US Southwest: Since 2000 Marcela has been Project Manager for the social science component of the Climate Assessment for the Southwest Project (CLIMAS), funded by NOAA. CLIMAS is an interdisciplinary, university-wide project housed the the Institue for the Study of Planet Earth. Its principal objective is to assess the impacts of climate variability and change on human and natural systems in the Southwest. The social science component of CLIMAS assesses human and institutional vulnerability to climate variability in diverse rural communities in the Southwest U.S. and among farmers, ranchers, Native Americans, Hispanic farm workers, and water managers.
  
  
• South America: Marcela is Co-principal investigator in a project entitled "Development and Expansion of Economic Assistance Programs That Fully Utilize Cooperatives or Credit Unions." This is a five-year project funded by the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) and done in collaboration with ACDI/VOCA. This project assesses a set of agricultural cooperatives that vary in terms of size, function, and commodity across four countries in Latin America-Colombia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia-in order to develop strategies of change that reflect the effective role of cooperativism and cooperatives and their impacts on society and the economy. The project begun in 2004 and intensive field research has already been conducted during the months of June and July 2005 in Brazil and Paraguay. Field research in Colombia and Bolivia will be conducted in the summer of 2006. The graduate students from the University of Arizona recruited for this project include a variety of nationalities -- Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and the US. An integral part of the project is the training and supervision of graduate students from host institutions.

• Vásquez-León, M. and D. Liverman. 2004. The Political Ecology of Land-Use Change: The Case of Affluent Ranchers and Destitute Farmers in the Mexican Municipio of Alamos. Human Organization.63 (1): 21- 33.
• Vásquez-León, M, C. T. West, T. J. Finan. 2003 A Comparative Assessment of Climate Vulnerability: Agriculture and Ranching on Both Sides of the US-Mexico Border. Global Environmental Change. Vol. 13 (3): 159-173.
• Vásquez-León, M., 2002, Assessing Vulnerability to Climate Risk: The Case of Small-Scale Fishing in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Investigaciones Marinas Vol. 30(1): 204-205.
• Vásquez-León, M., C. West, B. Wolf, J. Moody, and T. Finan, 2002, Vulnerability to Climate Variability in the Farming Sector: A Case Study of Groundwater Dependent Agriculture in Southeastern Arizona. CLIMAS Report CL1-02. Institute for the Study of Planet Earth. University of Arizona, Tucson, Az.
• Vásquez-León, M., 1998, Neoliberalism, Environmentalism, and Scientific Knowledge: re-defining natural resource use rights in Mexico. In. J. M. Heyman, ed. States and Illegal Practices. Berg Publishers, Oxford, UK.