BIO

Michelle Vasquez Ruiz is a UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, a BA in Political Science in Chicana/o Studies from UC Irvine, and an MA in History from California State University, Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies the movement of Latinx Indigenous peoples across the US and Mexico. Her work aims to understand how laws, policies, and other social structures have historically managed the physical movement of Latinx Indigenous peoples as a method of erasing, exploiting, and dispossessing these populations in both Mexico and the United States.

She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dismantling Settler Crimmigration: Histories of Indigenous Transborder Mobilities, which traces the history of undocumented Zapotec and Mixtec immigrants immigrating from Oaxaca, Mexico into California and how draconic immigration laws suspend and police the movement of Indigenous communities across borders and within the US. Through archival research, oral histories, and an analysis of media, her work unmasks how local policies, anti-immigrant laws, and other discursive practices across Mexico and the US have disproportionately affected Latinx Indigenous populations and infringed upon their rights to move across space.