Nell Haynes

Nell Haynes is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Anthropology at Georgetown University. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at American University in 2013 with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice. She also holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. Her research and teaching focus on gender and indigeneity in Latin America. In particular, she is interested in the ways that notions of who counts as “authentically indigenous” become expressed through and troubled by popular culture and media. After publishing Social Media in Northern Chile in 2016, she is currently working on my second book tentatively titled Chola in a Choke Hold: Remaking Indigeneity through Bolivian Lucha Libre. The book explores how lucha libre wrestling spectacles, featuring women performing as Andean chola characters, reflect and contribute to current debates over the nature of indigeneity in Bolivia. 

Research and Teaching Interests: Indigenous peoples & indigeneity, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, linguistic anthropology, performance, media, popular culture, and migration.

Areas of Concentration:Latin America, primarily Andean Bolivia and Chile

Current Research Project: Bolivian Lucha Libre

This project focuses on the “cholitas luchadoras”— female wrestlers who dress in Indigenous Aymara women’s attire while wrestling in exhibition events. Nell uses the narratives of these women, along with  spectators’ and other Bolivians’ opinions of the events, to understand shifting notions of what it means to “be indigenous” in Bolivia today. She focuses on the luchadoras to understand how intersections of globalizing forces, histories of racial discrimination, the presidency of Evo Morales, and even discourses of decolonization across the Americas are shifting local understandings of indigenous identification. The project is based on twenty months of fieldwork between 2009 and 2015 during which she conducted ethnographic and linguistic research, including training and participating in wrestling events herself.

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