I am professor emeritus, Indiana University, and work at the confluence of language and culture in US and Latin American settings. My research ranges from the verbal play of children, in Children’s Riddling (IU Press, 1979); to Mexico’s ballad tradition, the corrido, in Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

Pertinent to InterPlex is my research on the mythic consciousness of Andean peoples, in Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (1989) and “So Wise Were Our Elders”: Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá (1994), both published by the University Press of Kentucky. Lately, I have been drawing inspiration from my friends and acquaintances in the Andes and collaborating with the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) to develop the concepts of “ecoperformativity” and “ecosovereignty” in documenting the responses by Indigenous communities to the incursions of extractive industry and other invasive projects of nation-state and global capitalism. See, for example, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021, co-edited with Katey Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy).