About My Scholarship
I take an ethnographic approach to the study of law and legal institutions: from the perspective of those who enforce law, Border Patrol and police, and those who are targeted by it, Mexican immigrants and queer youth. Common to these projects is 1) an up close look at the racial and organizational norms that drive unequal outcomes for immigrants and queer youth of color in legal institutions and everyday life, 2) how legal institutions buffer and amplify disparities related to race, sexuality, and gender identity, and 3) what these empirical cases mean for our understanding of the boundaries of U.S. citizenship and the hierarchies within it.
In my first project, I worked with a local social movement organization to conduct an ethnography of two Mexican immigrant communities in California to understand how the increasing consequences of undocumented status both undermined and inspired immigrant social movement participation. My first book, Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in the Deportation Nation (NYU 2018), is based on this work and is the co-winner of the 2019 American Sociological Association Latina/o Sociology Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award (with Amada Armenta for Protect, Serve and Deport). Short write ups on the project appear in the Santa Barbara Independent, the Mobilizing Ideas blog, and USD Magazine. Hear more about the project at this book talk.
My second project flows from the first, but addresses a larger question and a broader audience. Myth and Reality in the U.S. Immigration Debate synthesizes the social science on the impact of immigration on U.S. society in a brief and digestible format. The book offers an entrée to the U.S. immigration debate that is grounded in empirical research and a critical examination of treatment of immigrants historically and today.
In a collaboration with Victor Rios, we conducted a series of ride alongs with local police to examine their working relationship with Latino youth in the context of the investigatory stop. A procedural justice application of courtesy to the institutionalized practice of proactive policing deepens a tension between the role of police as street level enforcers of crimes of poverty and liberal reform efforts to blunt police violence. Our work appears in the American Sociological Review and forms the basis of our op-ed “Defund the Police, Refund Poor Communities.” I pursued a similar line of inquiry with the Border Patrol in an early study published in Latino Studies.
My current research investigates LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system: in their interactions with police, in the courtroom, and with the wraparound service providers who supervise youth dispositions (sentences). In an era of decarceration, the proportion of queer youth of color in the system has grown. This project seeks to understand their pathways into the juvenile justice system and the points at which reform oriented institutions do and do not channel them out.