Ernesto Mercado-Montero is a historian of the African diaspora in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. His current book project, The Afro-Indigenous Caribbean: Slavery, Warfare, and Power in the Making of an Early Modern Archipelago—under advanced contract with The University of Pennsylvania Press—is based on his doctoral dissertation, which won the 2022 Richmond Brown Prize for the Best Dissertation on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean by the Southern Historical Association (SHA). This book manuscript offers a revisionist history of Lesser Antillean geopolitics between the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico in the 1510s and the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s. This project illuminates how the autonomous Afro-Indigenous society known as "Caribs" or "Kalinagos" influenced the development of the early-modern Antilles to the same extent as Spain, England, Holland, and France. These Afro-Indigenous people were formidable seafarers, warriors, and diplomats who integrated the Atlantic World's politics and economy through the slave trade, smuggling, and warfare. By centering the history of the Caribbean on Afro-Indigenous people, Professor Mercado-Montero's book project offers a ground-up portrayal of the Lesser Antilles beyond established narratives of European competition, plantations, and mercantilism.

Professor Mercado-Montero's teaching philosophy underscores how the formation of the New World was a culturally entangled process of contact, symbiosis, and competition wherein Africans and African descendants were crucial. In the classroom, he emphasizes African descendants' resilience and power in forging new geographies, notions of sovereignty and authority, trans-imperial markets, and nascent forms of global capitalism in the Atlantic World. As an Afro-Latino scholar and an immigrant himself, Professor Mercado-Montero is passionate about mentoring first-generation and underrepresented students through their academic development.

Professor Mercado-Montero was born in Bogotá City and was raised in the Colombian Caribbean. As a teenager, his family migrated to Madrid, Spain, where he attended college before moving to the United States. His scholarship has been generously supported by different institutions, such as The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, The Social Science Research Council (DPDF and Mellon IDRF programs), The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, The Library Company of Philadelphia, The History Project at Harvard University, as well as The John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies and The Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.