SX Blog

Carlos Montes Jiménez is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His research focuses on transnational networks of material and affective solidarity in the Caribbean, and how they articulate political imaginaries beyond the nation-state. Prior to moving to New York City, Carlos received a Fulbright Research Award to conduct research in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He is originally from Añasco, Puerto Rico, and holds a B.A. with distinction in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Mellon Mays Fellow. Carlos is passionate about dance, including genres like Brega, Samba de Gafieira, Bachata, and, above all, Salsa.

J Jokhai is a Master’s student at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the relationship between oil and nationalism in Guyana, in the context of the country’s ascendent position in the world-system, its fraught socialist history, and its orientation towards U.S hegemony in the Caribbean. J is interested in political anthropology more broadly, as well as the anthropology of religion, art criticism with an emphasis on Modernist and contemporary art, and Marxism generally. He is honored to serve as a new editorial assistant for Small Axe. When not in class or writing for this journal, he is working to found Extant Magazine: Anthropology, whose first issue hopes to be published the summer of 2026. In his downtime, J is watching MMA, and reading a Manchette thriller on the F train in Queens, where he was born and raised.

Dantaé Garee Elliott, Ph.D., is a visiting lecturer at NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her work focuses on barrels (both as remittances and diasporic practices), the Caribbean diaspora, and contemporary art. Her dissertation, "Barrel Poetics", investigates barrel culture and its creative afterlives across Caribbean visual worlds. She has held diverse roles in academia and the arts, such as Co-Director of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Summer Seminar (Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022), Editorial Assistant at Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and contributor to Forgotten Lands Art, Currents of Africa (Volume 04). She also served as a copy editor for Volume 05, The Haunted Tropics, and translator for Volume 07, Poetics of Architecture. A 2023 Mellon Fellow at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Elliott co-curated "Coral & Ash", the first solo exhibition of Vincentian photographer Nadia Huggins, at NYU’s KJCC. She was a 2024–2025 Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and a Dean’s Dissertation Fellow at NYU, continuing her work at the intersection of Caribbean studies, visual culture, and critical imagination

Laura Berríos is a PhD student in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research focuses on artistic and literary responses to disasters in the Caribbean. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico and is a returning Editorial Assistant who enjoys poetry, dancing, and being near the sea. 

Luis Frías is a New York-based scholar and writer pursuing a PhD in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center. Luis’s interests revolve around Mexican literature and cinema, archives, feminism, masculinities, violence, and neoliberalism. He splits his time between parenting his 5-year-old son, Leo, writing his dissertation, teaching Spanish and Portuguese languages, and wrapping up a book of tales. His current obsession is improving his times to run the NYC Marathon.