My research and teaching focuses on transnational migration and borderlands history. I regularly teach classes on colonial and modern Latin American history, as well as country-specific classes on Mexico and Cuba. I also teach Immigration & Asylum Law and Public History Lab, two classes that focus on the causes of migration from Latin America, including Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Cuba, and address topics such as politics, gangs and cartels, gender-based and domestic violence, and harms to the LGBT community.
My most recent book, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System (Oxford, 2021), explores the long-history of immigrant incarceration in the United States, showing the various means by which migrants have been locked up and the ways in which racism has undergirded immigration policies since their origin. My second book, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (UNC, 2014) focused on the cross-border movement of Chinese in the Americas, revealing the similar ways in which Chinese were stigmatized across the continent and how Chinese migrants evaded restrictions. My first book, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Duke 2004), centered on the story of a South-Texas-Mexican journalist and revolutionary who fought against Mexico’s president Porfirio Díaz in the late nineteenth century. I also co-edited with Sam Truett, Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History (Duke, 2004), a volume on new directions in borderlands history.
I am the co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, a seminar that has brought together scholars from Latin and North America for more than twenty years. I also founded and direct the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC), a national network of migration scholars and am co-director of the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University, with an affiliate at Lewis & Clark College. I have provided expert witness testimony for over 700 asylum cases. In addition to my scholarship, my opinion essays have appeared in a variety of different outlets, including the Washington Post, Time, the Houston Chronicle, and the Oregonian.
