I am a first year PhD student in Anthropology at Rice University. My research interests focus on the domestic and international political and legal drivers of migration and its consequences on migrants’ health. At the heart of my research lies a more general interest in cultural, ethnic, and gender studies. My personal penchant for ethnographic research and participatory observation stems from my background as a second-generation U.S.- Central American.

As an undergraduate, I attended California State University, Los Angeles where I majored in Latin American Studies and minored in History and Labor Studies. Before joining the Anthropology program at Rice, I earned my M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. My master’s thesis entitled Points of Contact: Agents of Aid and Social Reproduction at a Migrant Shelter in Tijuana focuses on the Lona shelter as a site that interweaves volunteer motivations, humanitarian principles, and the rescue industry to highlight how volunteers’ current deployed strategies reproduce a neoliberal working class that is harmful to migrants.