Bio

Dr. Hector M. Callejas has a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His interdisciplinary and community-engaged work covers colonialism, Indigeneity, and the environment, with a focus on social movements in the Americas.

Academic Appointments

  • Lecturer, Anthropology

Contact

  • Academic
    hmcallej@stanford.edu
    University - Academic staff Department: Anthropology Position: Lecturer

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 2145

Links

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Hector is an interdisciplinary scholar of colonialism, Indigeneity, and the environment, with a focus on social movements in the Americas. He uses ethnography, archival research, and theory to examine the production and governance of Indigenous identities and environments, and their intersections with colonial power relations, in modern societies. His community-engaged research covers ethnic studies, anthropology, environmental studies, and area studies. He has two research areas: transnational Indigenous activism in Central America and environmental justice activism in the United States.

Indigenizing Indians:
Race, Class, and Landlessness in El Salvador

Over the past century, state development of agrarian capitalism has dispossessed the “Indians” of their lands and transformed them into the racial underclass of the rural population within the mixed-race Salvadoran nation. Since the 1990s, transnational activism has shaped multicultural state recognition, governance, and development of the Indians as “Indigenous peoples.” Hector's current project explains why the Salvadoran Indigenous movement failed to use Indigenous identity to politicize land inequality and reverse Indian landlessness in El Salvador during the 2010s. It traces the processes, discourses, and practices of Indigenous identity formation between state, Indigenous, and other actors, and their effects on unequal land distribution, during the national FMLN and Bukele administrations.

Hector's project contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on modern Indigenous movements between political and legal anthropology; Latin American studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and environmental studies. The scholarship investigates conflict over land, territory, and natural resources between Indigenous communities, state authorities, and other actors in postcolonial and settler colonial contexts worldwide. A key question is whether movement actors can resist and reverse the dispossession of Indigenous ethnic groups and/or nations. Hector's project foregrounds race and class as an important power relation that shapes Indigenous existence and limits resistance and reversal. It shows how activist articulations of ethnic Indigenous identity in El Salvador built on and reinforced the state formation of landless Indians as a racial and class positioning at the margins of the national agrarian structure.

Environmental Justice Activism in California

Hector's next project follows an important thread in his current project: the relationship between agriculture, food, and Indigeneity. My next project follows the transnational circulation of Indigenous identities and cultures across the U.S.-Mexico border and examines their articulation with environmental governance in the context of U.S. settler colonialism. The project focuses on environmental justice activism in the Central Valley of California. The region has extensive productive farmlands. It is home to federally recognized California Indian tribes and a large migrant population from Latin America, including Central Americans and Indigenous peoples. State institutions, non-profit organizations, tribal governments, community leaders, and other actors are transforming "environmental justice" into an important discourse for policymaking. My next project uses ethnography and archival research to investigate how actors create and use Indigenous agricultural and food knowledges and practices to advocate for environmental justice and remake colonial power relations in the region and beyond.

Hector has begun preliminary ethnographic research on environmental justice activism with the Sacramento Environmental Justice Coalition. This grassroots organization partners with immigrant communities, California Indian tribes, and other actors. Hector's parents are Latinx community leaders with the organization. He is from an "Environmental Justice community" defined by Sacramento County.

2024-25 Courses