Vasquez's dissertation and first book, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge University Press 1998), focused on the impact of neo-liberal capitalism on grassroots progressive Catholicism in Brazil.
More recently, Vasquez has co-directed (with Philip J. Williams) a series of studies, supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Ford Foundation, on the role of religion in the process of migration, settlement, and integration among Latinos in new destinations in the U.S. South.
In particular, he has explored how religious congregations grapple with the challenges posed by increasing racial and ethnic diversity and transnational immigration, both authorized and unauthorized.
He argues that religions are hybrid and dynamic artifacts produced by complex relations among discursive matrices, and social, neural, and ecological networks.
[1] He subsequently resigned from his post as chair of the department of religion at the University of Florida.