Exploring the intersection of culture, politics, and resistance across borders.
My current research examines how transnational youth movements are adapting to the digital age, using social media, streaming platforms, and online organizing tools to build solidarity across borders while maintaining the grassroots, place-based connections that give movements their power and authenticity.
I'm particularly interested in how the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath reshaped youth political engagement in both Mexico and the United States. The pandemic exposed and deepened existing inequalities while simultaneously creating new forms of mutual aid, digital organizing, and community resilience that challenge traditional models of political participation.
My work is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork — spending extended periods living and working alongside the communities I study. This approach allows me to develop the deep relationships and contextual understanding necessary to represent people's experiences accurately and respectfully. I combine participant observation, life history interviews, archival research, and cultural analysis to build comprehensive accounts of how communities navigate structural violence and create spaces of possibility.
Multi-year ethnographic study of hip-hop communities in Mexico City's peripheral neighborhoods, examining how young people use music production, freestyle battles, and graffiti to assert cultural citizenship and resist spatial marginalization in a deeply unequal megacity.
Research on punk collectives in Guadalajara who create autonomous spaces — squats, community centers, independent media — that operate outside both state control and market logic, developing alternative models for urban life and community governance.
Collaborative project documenting how artists and activists along the US-Mexico border use murals, installations, performance, and digital media to challenge narratives of criminalization, advocate for migrant rights, and imagine alternative futures for border communities.