About me

Welcome

I am a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) at UC Berkeley, affiliated with the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. My research experiences focus on the ethnographic and historical analysis of labor migration, agrarian capitalism, anti-Indigenous racism, and state formation. I specialize in examining the emergent and interlocking violence of plantation and bordering regimes to control human labor mobility and impose white-mestizo orders in Mexico.

I hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the UC Santa Barbara (2024), an M.A. in social anthropology at El Colegio de Michoacán (2013), and a B.A. in sociology at the Universidad de Guadalajara (2010). Since 2010, I have been an active and collaborative researcher in anthropological political economy, participating in several academic studies and policy evaluations, including projects at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social and as a visiting scholar at El Colegio de Sonora.

My research projects examine how transnational corporations implement and celebrate socially responsible practices and how state agencies facilitate and cheer this agribusiness management style while migrant workers confront hyper-surveillance, confinement, racial hostility, and labor exploitation in agricultural carceral geographies. I have analyzed this disputed process through ethnographic studies in contemporary plantations in western and northern Mexico.

My publications present different aspects of agricultural labor: financial exclusion (Journal of Development Studies), memory and resistance (Revista Latinoamericana de Antropología del Trabajo), racial narratives (Revista del Noroeste de México), state violence (book chapter on human rights), spatial controls (book chapter on racism), and social policy (Carta Económica Regional). Currently, I am writing my first book manuscript, “Farm Fascism: Race, Captivity, and Containment in Mexican Agribusiness.”