Natasha Fernandez-Preston is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, with an emphasis in Archaeology, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and an Urban Ethnobiology Fellow of the Society of Ethnobiology. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow from 2015 to 2017. Her broad research interests concern food and colonial racial capitalism in the Caribbean, particularly how historical anthropology and historical-contemporary archaeology can contribute to conversations about food sovereignty, social and environmental justice, and decolonizing futures. She has employed archival research, ethnographic research, GIS mapping, archaeological excavation, and phytolith analysis as methodological tools. In her dissertation research, she traces food practices, landscape changes, and cuisine changes in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico for the last century (1919-2018) relating them to the processes of colonial racial capitalism and sovereignty.
