EDUCATION
I completed my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Ethnic Studies and I am an assistant professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. My intellectual and scholarly concerns center on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in relation to state violence, transnational migration, and incarceration.
I have published extensively, including co-editing a special issue of the journal Social Justice entitled “Policing, Detention, Deportation, and Resistance: Situating Immigrant Justice and Carcerality in the 21st Century” (2009). The issue centers on displacing the exceptionalist framework of migrant criminalization and connects contemporary migrant experiences to a longer history of U.S. captivity.
I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled Criminalization of Latina Migrants and the Construction of Irrecuperability. In the book I maintain that imprisonment serves to construct migrants as socially irrecuperable under hegemonic governing logic where migrants marked as “criminal aliens” are deported and banned from returning to the U.S. I argue that the racialized and gendered criminalization of Latina migrants through the discourse of “public charge” is an essential aspect of neoliberal state governance that enables the expulsion of Latina/o migrants when they are considered national threats or excess within the neoliberal labor market. By examining the gendered and racialized connections between prisons and immigration control, I develop conversations between the prison abolition movement and the immigrant rights movement. I urge these movements to reflect on their connections and develop common ground from which to organize.
In addition to my scholarly endeavors, I am greatly involved in community work. I am a member of the MEChA de UCR Alumni Scholarship Committee, which offers outreach and scholarship opportunities for Chicana/o/Latina/o students. I also participate in Leadership, Education, Action, and Dialogue (LEAD), a project of Critical Resistance-LA (CR-LA) that carries out educational workshops for women recently released from prison. In addition, I am a member of the Compañeras Project, which provides advocacy work for incarcerated Latina migrants and is a component of California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). Both CR-LA and CCWP are grassroots organizations dedicated to working against the U.S. prison regime.