Diego grew up in the immigrant suburbs of Miami to Brazilian parents and completed his two bachelor's degrees at the University of Central Florida. His undergraduate theses were on riparian water disputes and interstate conflict, which he completed at the University of North Texas with a grant from the NSF, and an analysis of the concept of death in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essais.” Diego also interned for two years with the Department of State at the American Embassy in Switzerland and for the GEC in Washington, D.C., while studying abroad in France, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Diego completed his master's degree with an Erasmus Mundus grant at the University of Leipzig and the University of Ghent, researching Zapatista women’s articulation of territorio cuerpo-tierra and their fight against global capitalism and patriarchy through communitarian feminisms.

 

Before starting his Ph.D., Diego worked as an interpreter for Via Campesina Europe, interpreting between Spanish, French, Italian, English, and Portuguese. Diego now seeks to study the semiotics associated with the consumption of yerba mate and its transnational transformations through a century of immigration between Latin America and the Levant.