Maribel Alvarez

Faculty Fellow 2014-2016

Maribel Alvarez received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2003 and is an associate professor of anthropology and an associate research social scientist with the Southwest Center, both in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Alvarez is an anthropologist, folklorist, curator, and community arts expert who has documented the practice of more than a dozen of the country’s leading emerging and alternative artistic organizations. She has published essays on poetry and food, the visual culture of bordertowns, stereotypes and materiality, folklore and musical innovation, intangible heritage and pedagogy, and is the author of one of the leading monographs in circulation about the “informal arts” as a measure of creative placemaking and vitality.

As a Fulbright Scholar in 2009, Alvarez spent a year researching regional cooking and agriculture in Sonora, Mexico. A trustee of the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, Alvarez is also the director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, an expansion of the largest folklife public event in the Southwest, Tucson Meet Yourself.

Currently, Alvarez is completing two books for the University of Arizona Press, one on the verbal arts and lore of workers in the Mexican Curios cottage industry at the U.S.-Mexico border, and another on the cultural history of wheat and flour mills in the state of Sonora in Northern Mexico.