Jorge belongs to the generation of Guatemalans who were students at the University of San Carlos and had to move to Mexico in the early eighties. Ponciano is currently a Research Affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies and holds degrees in Anthropology from Stanford University (MA, 1997) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 2005). He is also a full-time Research Professor at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research of Chiapas and the South Border, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. 

Much of Ponciano’s published work addresses the relationship of the Liberal state and indigenous populations in Guatemala and Mexico, discourses about the “Civilization of the Indians,” vagrancy and laziness that have been strategic for the labor discipline of plantation economy.  He also investigates the cultural history of anti-communism and the pathologization of political opposition, which legitimized the exercise of dictatorship and the naturalization of genocide.  His research considers how Guatemalan revolutionary nationalism (1944-1954) and US Cold War anthropology (1954-1962) coincided in the failed effort to construct a homogenous nation.  As part of his ethnographic work, he has been working in the human formation of the Mexico-Guatemala border, the construction of the exotic in the Mayan region, and a comparative history of the tourist industry in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas and Antigua Guatemala.