Gerardo Otero is Professor and Graduate Chair in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He received his B.A. in Business Administration at the Instituto Technológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM, 1975), an M.A. in Latin American Studies, with a major in Economics, at the University of Texas at Austin (1977), and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986. Dr. Otero has held a faculty appointment at SFU since 1990.

Gerardo Otero was the 2021/2022 President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and organized its 40th international congress to be held in virtual format. Its central theme was: Socioenvironmental Polarization and Rivalry Among Great Powers. See LASA's Website for more information. Highly recommended are the video recordings of the LASA2022 Presidential Panels. In 2021, Otero was elected fellow to Academy II (Social Sciences) of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). See 30 seconds video here.

Dr. Otero was born and raised in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico. He taught economics at ITESM and sociology at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in 1977, social anthropology at the Autonomous University of Puebla from 1980 to 1983, and sociology at the University of Guadalajara from 1987 to 1990. He was a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Center for U.S. – Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 1986-1987, and a visiting faculty in Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1989-1990. In 2001, he was an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University. In Fall 2014, Otero was the Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, housed in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology.

Dr. Otero has published more than 100 scholarly articles, chapters and books (see Articles). Dr. Otero’s books (see Books) include: Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico. (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1999, translated to Spanish in 2004 by M.A. Porrúa in Mexico; reissued by Routledge in 2018); Gerardo Otero, ed. Neoliberalism Revisited: Economic Restructuring and Mexico’s Political Future (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview 1996; reissued by Routledge in 2018); Gerardo Otero, ed. 2004. Mexico in Transition: Neoliberal Globalism, the State, and Civil Society. (London: Zed Books. Translated to Spanish in 2006 by M.A. Porrúa in Mexico); Gerardo Otero, ed. 2008. Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and  Biotechnology in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press (reissued in 2010). A revised and updated version of this book was published in Spanish as La dieta neoliberal: globalización y biotecnología agrícola en las Américas in 2014. Otero's latest book is The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People published by the University of Texas Press in 2018.  Otero's latest book, coauthored with Efe Can Gürcan, is: Collective Empowerment Theory: The Political-Cultural Formation of the Dominated in Latin America, currently under review for publication.