Gerardo Rodriguez Solis
Anthropologist & Sociologist
University of California Berkeley
UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow
About me
Gerardo Rodriguez Solis is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. His research experiences focus on the ethnographic and historical analysis of labor migration, agrarian capitalism, anti-Indigenous racism, and state formation. He specializes in examining the emergent and interlocking violence of plantation and bordering regimes to control human labor mobility and impose white-mestizo orders in Mexico. Gerardo obtained 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, he has 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.
Gerardo’s 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. He has analyzed this disputed process through ethnographic studies in contemporary plantations in western and northern Mexico. His 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 (chapter in a human rights book), spatial controls (chapter in a racism book), and social policy (Carta Económica Regional). Currently, Gerardo is working on his first book manuscript, “Racial Capitalism in Mexican-US Agrarian Carceral Geographies,” based on his dissertation.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Trajectory and contradictions of the Attention to Agricultural Workers Program in Hermosillo, Sonora, 1990-2018 [Spanish]
Borders, labor, and beyond: Collective reflections on Harsha Walia’s writing, activism, and influence on the anthropology of work
Racialization and Agricultural Labor in Northwestern Mexico. Analysis from Newspaper Articles 2013-2019 [Spanish]
Memories of Racism, Exploitation, and Resistance. Sugarcane Cutting in Autlán-El Grullo Valley, Mexico, 1968-2013 [Spanish]
Agricultural Workers, Credit Rationing and Family Networks in Rural Mexico
Book Chapters
Anti-Indigenous Racism and Spatial Control. Barracks System in Jalisco and Sonora’s Plantations [Spanish]
Studying Racial Capitalism in Hermosillo. Tools to Analyze How Precarious Conditions in Agrarian Camps are Legitimized [Spanish]
Agricultural Labor and Migration in Jalisco Southwest. The ‘Agrifood Giant’ and its Systematic Violation of Human Rights [Spanish]
Hierarchy and Governmentality in a Social Program of International Methodology [Spanish]
Juggling and Riding in the Financial Practices of Rural Families in Ayuquila, Jalisco [Spanish]
Media
Curriculum vitae
2017-2024
• Ph.D. in Anthropology, sociocultural specialization
• University of California Santa Barbara
• Dissertation: Racial Capitalism in Mexican Contemporary Plantations. State Formation, Labor Controls, and Agribusiness Violence in Sonora
2011-2013
• M.A. in Social Anthropology
• El Colegio de Michoacán
• Thesis: Regional Racialization in Labor and Spatial Organization: Cane Cutting in Autlán-El Grullo Valley, Jalisco
2005-2010
• B.A. in Sociology
• Universidad de Guadalajara
• Thesis: Finances and Household Economies in a Jalisco’s Town
