Research Interests:
Transnational American studies; Latino/a/x studies; Central American studies; critical theory; war and culture; capital, financialization, and crisis; migration; film and media studies; contemporary American literature.

Eric Vázquez is an assistant professor in American studies and Latino studies at University of Iowa. His scholarship emphasizes the cultural, political, military, and economic bonds that link populations and institutions in the United States to Central America.

His first book, States of Defeat: US Imaginaries of Central American Revolution, explores how thwarted ambitions for revolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala give rise to ambivalent, outraged, cynical, and mournful affects for novelists, intellectuals, immigrants, and military technocrats living in the US. Out of these experiences of defeat and disappointment American intellectuals retreat into questions about the viability and legitimacy of state power. Vázquez argues that defeatedness is a critical vantage that produces speculations, figurations, and more explicit commentary on governments' imposition of both soft- and hard-power in the twenty-first century.

Vázquez's current work examines the bizarre coincidence of US tech capitalists search for measureless wealth and deregulated utopias in Central American nations formerly deemed "murder capital of the world"—namely Honduras and El Salvador. This project seeks to bring together an analysis of El Salvador's acceptance of Bitcoin as legal tender with an account of Salvadoran poetry and performance art; libertarian think-tank's charter cities initiatives in Honduras with naïve podcasters' reconstructions of the same; remittance bonds (built off the hard-earned money of Central American migrants) and US Central American novels about plucky immigrants. Tentatively titled, Murder Capital, this project brings cultural forms to bear on the analysis of new modes of accumulation to highlight the unreconciled legacies of US imperialism.

In his research, Eric Vázquez has enjoyed the support of the Ford Foundation with a 2013-2014 Dissertation Writing Fellowship.
 

Publications

Articles

"Counterinsurgency’s Ambivalent Enterprise" in Theory and Event, January 2020, Volume 23, Number 1 pp. 120-144

"Interrogative Justice in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier" in Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 2018, Volume 64, Number 1 pp. 129-152

"The Technical Fix: Bitcoin in El Salvador" in South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022, Volume 121, Issue 3, pp. 600-611

“Your Life Is One-Hundred-Percent at Risk: The Caravan of the Mutilated and the Internationalism of the Vulnerable" in Public Culture, 2022,  Volume 34, Issue 1, pp. 47-70