Paula Lezama

Paula Lezama is a doctoral student of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She holds an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of South Florida, and a BA in Economics from Universidad del Valle, Colombia. Growing up poor and an orphan as the younger of six siblings in Cali, Colombia inspired her interest in poverty and inequality; while her intellectual curiosity fueled by her personal experiences led her to understand these issues as outcomes of a racial capitalist system, whose hegemonic episteme organizes both, field expertise and the material reality of millions of Afrodescendants and Indigenous Peoples. Man’s overrepresentation as identified by Sylvia Wynter, determines uneven geographical and economic progress as well as the untimely death and the production of humans as waste, engrossing the peripheries of misery or what Wynter calls the archipelagos of the dyselected. These populations are always already outside the community of Man, understanding Man in its current Homo Economicus version, as the western onto-epistemological archetype of the human against which all others are cast as inferior, irrational, unproductive, and incapable of adapting to modernity. Under homo economicus libidinal reign, instead of the whip, Black fungibility is actualized by Adam Smith’s hidden hand. Thus, her interest in tracing the convergence of Blackness, Poverty, and Homo Economicus in the Longue durée.

Feel free to contact me if you share any of these interests, I would love to hear about your work and exchange ideas. Graduate school can be an up-hill climb but it does not have to be a solo one.

Besides school, Paula is a married mom of two, a 15 and 5 year old kiddos. She is a sister, aunt, friend, and everything in between. She loves salsa, hard-core guaguanco, and everything with a drum-base rhythm to dance. She enjoys reading science fiction and fantasy, riding her bike and going for long walks. She is perfecting her Portuguese speaking skills and welcomes any opportunity to practice it.
Supervisors: Marcelo Paixao