About me

Welcome to my website

I am a social anthropologist specializing in the critical studies of labor migration, anti-indigenous racism, spatial segregation, agrarian capitalism, and state formation.

I am a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, affiliated with the Division of Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. I am also an associate researcher on the Food-Circuits Project at the Universitat de Barcelona and a co-founding member of the Research Group «Población Jornalera Agrícola» at El Colegio de Sonora

I hold a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.A. in social anthropology from El Colegio de Michoacán, and a B.A. in sociology from the Universidad de Guadalajara. For more than 15 years, I have been an active researcher, writer, and educator in the social sciences, conducting academic projects and policy evaluations, teaching at the higher and secondary education levels, facilitating workshops for public employees, and collaborating with civil society organizations.

My research examines how transnational corporations implement socially responsible practices and how state agencies facilitate this agribusiness management style while migrant workers confront racialized surveillance and labor exploitation in agrarian carceral geographies. I have analyzed this disputed process through historical and «studying-up» ethnographies 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), social policy (Carta Económica Regional), spatial controls (Anthropology News), and housing policy (Agriculture and Human Values). I am currently writing my first book manuscript tentatively titled Farm Fascism: Race, Captivity, and Containment in Mexican Agribusiness. 

My present research project is a long-term collaborative ethnography in California and northwestern Mexico with farmworkers-content creators about how their narratives and visualities on social media challenge plantation propaganda, question anti-migrant ideologies, teach health-care practices, and build transnational communities.