I am interested in how people build community and advocate for rights and resources, especially when faced with state violence. Most of my scholarship has focused on Mexico, Central America, and migrants from those countries to the United States. I began working in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico in 2003 and have worked at the US-Mexico border – mostly Tijuana – since 2014. I am deeply concerned with gender, especially the ways ideas about gender (and what is “natural”) can be used as instruments of control – and of resistance. Across my work, I collaborate closely with advocacy organizations to turn research into action for change.

I grew up in a suburb of Boston, which was predominantly white and far from Latin America, both geographically and socially. But I was concerned about social justice from a young age. Both my parents were active in politics, from anti-Vietman war protests to local town meetings (Fun fact: my mom is now president of the League of Women Voters of San Diego). As a high school and college student, I spent several summers living in rural villages in Latin America, through Amigos de las Americas. The experience inspired me to think critically about the place I grew up. I have since had the privilege to live and work in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Spain, and for over 20 years in Mexico. I speak fluent Spanish as well as some French and Portuguese.

My earliest research in college and graduate school was about the global reach of the Zapatista Movement, a group of indigenous activists in Southern Mexico fighting to defend peasants from the harms of neoliberal capitalism. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Zapatistas became an important face of the global Left. I was inspired by their message, but I was also concerned about the power dynamics between the Zapatistas and their outside supporters. I began to study the relationships between members of this movement and their sympathizers from foreign NGOs. I showed that the Zapatistas were able to demand “downward accountability” from some outside groups by creating circles of supporters whose legitimacy hinged on meeting their demands. Between college and graduate school, I also served as a research assistant in a study of the barriers to building peace in Colombia and directed a service-learning program in more than 30 pueblos in Oaxaca, Mexico.

My first book, Undocumented Politics (California, 2018), began as my doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. The book focuses on how undocumented, Oaxacan migrant communities confront a process of globalization in which they are economically marginalized and politically excluded. I look at these politics both in the United States and on the Mexican side. The book emphasizes how local political contexts shape the process of migration, migrants’ approaches to struggle, as well as relations of gender. It also shows how resistance is built in the more inclusive spaces in both sending and receiving countries. Indigenous self-governance plays an important role in this story, giving communities a leg-up as the process of migration begins.

Now that I live near the US-Mexico border, the “global” inequalities I sought to understand in my youth play out within minutes of my house. My current research is rooted where I live and is designed to support the urgent needs of asylum seekers, deported migrants, immigrant students, and organizations that advocate for them. Together with my students, I am trying to better understand the impacts of forced displacement, particularly deportation and US and Mexican state violence against asylum seekers. In my second book, Banished Men (2023), co-authored with 31 students from UCSD, I examine how the US carceral system channels deportees into marginal urban spaces in Mexico, instilling feelings of alienation. I also look at what conditions on both sides of the border may help deported migrants claim rights and resources.

I am also working to fight the ongoing asylum and humanitarian “crisis” created by border militarization. In collaboration with more than 12 advocacy organizations, my students and I have done several major research projects to help migrants access asylum and services and to inform legal action to protect the rights of migrants. In my next project, I am expanding my research to look at how to build spaces of climate and social regeneration, especially for people whose deep relationships with the earth have been severed by forced displacement. As the global climate exodus increases, this will only become more urgent. I am doing this by bringing together artists, activists, and scholars to break out of the bounds of the current US immigration system and reimagine the possibilities for deeper forms of refuge.

I have two elementary aged children, who were born while I was a tenure-track assistant professor (I’m happy to talk about the challenges of academic motherhood with anyone interested!). I hope that raising my children at the border will teach them firsthand about power and difference, and inspire a commitment to righting the racial and national injustices we feel so viscerally in our region.

In all of my work, my goal is to identify on-the-ground ways to end exclusion and oppression and help people build more dignified lives, as well as more connection to one another. I also hope to show how the privileged reinforce or alleviate inequalities and to highlight ways that people of all stripes can work at the local level to drive social change.