I am Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and the Mexican Migration Field Research Program, and affiliated faculty in Sociology at the University of California-San Diego. I am a leader in community-action research on migration and immigrants, and I run collective field projects with large teams of students at the US-Mexico border. I am currently PI of a major four-year project to build a network of scholars, artists, and activists across California who are working to reimagine the possibilities for immigrants to and in the US: Reimagining Refuge: California for Just Migrant Futures (website coming soon).

My research focuses on state violence, gender, and grassroots advocacy among migrants from Mexico and Central America. I also look at how to nurture collective care amid state violence and climate crisis. 

At UCSD, I have led dozens of community-action research projects, including:

• A partnership with Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, Comite Cívico del Valle and the United Farm Workers building tools for farm labor organizing and to mitigate extractive climate transition (lithium) in Imperial and San Diego Counties (2023-25)
• A partnership with Al Otro Lado and the UCSD-Alacrán Community Station documenting Mexican state violence, and identifying and bridging information gaps that block asylum seekers from understanding asylum and meeting their basic needs (2021-23)
• A collaboration with Espacio Migrante, Haitian Bridge Alliance, and el Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova, mapping anti-black racism in Mexico’s borderlands (2022-23)
• A project with Innovation Law Lab tracking how ICE facilities block communication between migrants and advocates, which became part of an ACLU lawsuit for access to counsel in detention (2021-22)

I am also an award-winning teacher, integrating undergraduate and graduate students directly into collaborative, applied, and trauma-informed research to make the world more just for migrants and us all.

I co-researched my most recent book with 30 students, Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deportation, which is Free & Open Source with University of California Press. From 2009-2020, the United States deported more than five million people. Over 90% of those people were men, and most spent time in prison and/or immigration detention before the US removed them. We ask: What becomes of men the US locks up and casts off as criminals? How do incarceration and exile shape their families, their struggles for rights and resources, and, more fundamentally, their sense of themselves as men? And how does US incarceration interact with urban spaces in Mexico to produce a new geography of migrant displacement? Students’ voices shape the text and bring deep attention to the emotional lives of men.

My 2018 book, Undocumented Politics: Place, Gender, and the Pathways of Mexican Migrants (UC Press) traced how “voiceless” undocumented Oaxacan communities confront state exclusion, upend patriarchy, and fight to belong.

Throughout my work, I take a feminist, decolonial lens. I am interested in how states use ideas about gender to reinforce power inequalities. I also draw attention to the ways grassroots groups transform gender relationships as they confront unfair conditions. I share this focus with a group of feminist scholars with whom I co-authored a theoretical handbook, The Social Life of Gender (Sage, 2017).

For links to my research, see Publications. For more on me, see My Story and CV.

For a blog post I wrote on how sociology must step up to meet the climate crisis, click here.