Carla Guerrón Montero is a cultural and applied anthropologist trained in the United States and Latin America, specializing in the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of food, and the African diaspora.
Guerrón Montero holds joint appointments in Latin American and Iberian Studies, Africana Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. She received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and Latin American Studies from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in applied anthropology from Oregon State University, and a Licenciatura degree in socio-cultural Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador)
Guerrón Montero studies the complex and multiple meanings and representations of identity among marginalized populations in modern Latin American and Caribbean nation-states, specifically Brazil, Ecuador, Grenada, and Panama. She is the author of The Color of the Panela: Study of Afro-Ecuadorian Women in the Afro-Ecuadorian Andes (Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano, 2000) and From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama (University of Alabama Press, 2020). She is also the co-editor of Careers in 21st Century Applied Anthropology: Advice from Academics and Practitioners (Wiley, 2008) and co-editor of Why the World Needs Anthropologists (Routledge, 2021).
In addition to authoring several book chapters, Guerrón Montero has published in English and Spanish in academic journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, Bulletin for Latin American Research, Ethnology, Human Organization, the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, and Ecology of Food and Nutrition, among others. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (JLACA).
Her research and studies have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Nippon Foundation (Japan), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Secretary for Higher Education, Science, and Technology (SENESCYT, Ecuador). She has been a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York) and Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Quito, Ecuador). Additionally, Guerrón Montero has been Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation's (CEDLA) in Amsterdam (Netherlands); the Catalan Institute for Research on Cultural Patrimony (ICRPC) in Girona (Spain); the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); the University of Ljubljana and Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana (Slovenia); and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L'Amérique Latine IHEAL, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle 3 (France).
