University of Minnesota Press, Forthcoming Nov. 2025.
The cultural reverberations of Central America’s frustrated revolutions on US intellectual thought...
"Insightful and brilliant, States of Defeat uses the defeat of the Central American revolutionaries by US–backed, brutal right-wing militaries to analyze the meaning of revolutionary failure for the United States. Eric A. Vázquez expertly uses these failed revolutions to explore the contiguity between Central American and US politics: the rise of the surveillance state, incarceration, and the radical right."—María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States.
"This riveting and carefully argued book analyzes the complex politics of US solidarity with Central America in the 1980s. Centering people in the Central American diaspora for their work as artists and activists, Eric A. Vázquez asks hard questions about what is at stake, who benefits, and what matters in the making of alliances across borders. Every chapter is rich with a nuanced account of anti-imperialist creativity and commitment."—Melani McAlister, author of Promises, Then the Storm: Notes on Memory, Protest, and the Israel–Gaza War.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latinx Literature in Transition: 1848-1992.
April 2025.
“The Work of War: Latinx Literature, Racial Schismatics, and Possible Solidarities."
Here we survey a range of Latinx representations of the Civil War, World War II, The Korean War, wars of revolution and counterinsurgency in Viet Nam and Central America. Rather than waging war on an irredeemable enemy, we conclude, Latinxs lay siege to the imperial relationship championed by the US in most of these conflicts.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022.
This essay examines bitcoin enthusiast's abstract and material arguments about the viability of bitcoin in El Salvador through historical and political-economic frameworks. It argues that President Nayib Bukele's "technical fix" on El Salvador's economy is a mere pretext for pursuing the class interests of El Salvador's new oligarchy by leveraging the assets of the broader populace.
Public Culture, Winter 2022.
This essay investigates Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities or AMIREDIS’s recorded testimonies, which, I suggest, upend the logic of social amelioration and financial gain intrinsic to economic and policy narratives about the remittance economy. I argue that by introducing the tribulations of lived-risk AMIREDIS involutes the remittance form, disclosing the brutality underlying the circulation of migrant funds.
Theory & Event, Winter 2020
“What forms, motivates, and directs the kind of warfare known as counterinsurgency? in ‘Counterinsurgency's Ambivalent Enterprise,’ Eric Vázquez shows that such state-sponsored modes of military oversight repeatedly attempt to pacify the very civilian populations that they purport to protect...Looking at the field manuals that emerged from the U.S. counterinsurgency against Latin America (and therefore became the templates for the 21st century's "war on terror"), Vázquez traces the affective and intellectual disharmonies and disconnections that emerge from counterinsurgencies' ambivalent logics of appropriation and reversal,” from the “Introduction” to the journal issue, Cristina Beltrán and Kennan Ferguson.
Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 2018.
This essay recenters critical appraisal of The Tattooed Soldier to what I take to be the novel’s central premise: a prolonged exploration of the boundary between revenge and collective justice. I examine how the novel reckons with the barbarity of war and the plight of its refugees by experimenting with distinct emplotments of and figures for justice. I argue that only the interrogative mode of justice escapes the recrimination of vengeance and encompasses the aftermath of imperial violence and the neoliberal exploitation suffered by Central American immigrants.
His first book, States of Defeat: US Imaginaries of Central American Revolution (out 18 November 2025), explores how thwarted ambitions for revolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala give rise to ambivalent, outraged, cynical, and mournful affects for novelists, intellectuals, and immigrants 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 interpretations 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.
Central American studies
Latina/o/x Cultural Studies
Critical Theory
War and Culture
Capital, Financialization, and Crisis
Migration
Film and Media Studies
Contemporary American Literature
2020-present
Assistant Professor, Department of American studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.
2018-2020
Visiting-Assistant Professor, Department of American studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.
2015-2018
Adjunct-Assistant Professor
English Department
College of Staten Island
Staten Island, NY
2014-2015
Dissertation: "Realms of Inconsequence: U.S. Imaginaries of Central America, 1979-2005." Committee: David Shumway (chair), Marian Aguiar, Paul Eiss.
2015
BA: Major: English, Minor: Philosophy (University Honors, cum laude), Kenyon College, Gambier, OH.
2003
2023
Book Ends Workshop, Obermann Center for Advanced Learning, University of Iowa.
2023
Ethnic Studies Research Funding Award, University of Iowa.
2023
Old Gold Summer Fellowship, University of Iowa.
2022
The Ford Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship.
2013-2014
PhD Student Scholarship "Culture as Resource Summer Institute," Central European University, Budapest, HU.
2007
April 2022
“Bitcoin In El Salvador.”
The Latino Media Collective.
July 2021
“Left Out of Bukele’s Bitcoin Decision, Salvadorans Face Deepening Inequality.” The North American Congress on Latin America.
July 2021
“The Central American Death Cult.”
The Brooklyn Rail.
November 2019.
F25, S25, F24, S24, F22, S21, F20
Central America & Its Diaspora
F25
Dissertation Writing Workshop
F25, S25
Money | Capital | Culture
S24, S21
Undocumented America: Citizenship, Race, and Immigration
F23, S21
Grad. Seminar: Cultures of Capitalism
F23, S22
Latina/o/x Popular Culture
F22, F21
War Stories
S22
Last Updated: Sept. 2025