Josué Chávez is a PhD Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies how Central American artistic productions mediate national histories of socio-economic transformation and their global connections. His dissertation, Abject Comportments: Financial Experiments and Artistic Forms in Contemporary Central America, investigates how, after the failure of revolutionary struggles in the late 20th-century, contemporary literature, visual arts and architecture are able to theorize in their formal coordination the relations between national financial experiments and neocolonial class relations as contradictory strategies of self-delusion. Focusing on the transformation of Panama into a tax haven, the dollarization and Bitcoinization of the remittance economy in El Salvador, and the legalization of charter cities in Honduras, the project scrutinizes the potential to produce new knowledge about finance and Central America in a global context that only the arts, their criticism and interpretation can give access to.