I study contemporary Latinx and Mexican cultural production through the lens of gender, performance, and border studies. I address questions of mobility, corporeality, and solidarity through readings of literature and public art that respond to policing in border spaces throughout the United States and Mexico. I situate my research within an expansive understanding of border studies that identifies the workings of institutional systems beyond geopolitical boundaries that reproduce the border’s militarized logic and racialized, gendered policing of citizenship and movement.
 
My recent publications focus on the political stakes of embodied acts of performance. In “The Walking Woman: Border Representation Beyond Hybridity in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo,” published in Romance Quarterly, I critique the limitations of the dominant conceptual border framework of hybridity and propose a reading of the border through the trope of walking, thus emphasizing the corporeal experience of movement in the borderlands. In “Embodiment Against Borders: Discourses of Crisis and Collaborative Performance Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall,” published with the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies in 2021, I assess the political rhetoric that contributes to the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border as a zone of crisis, and examine the role of affect in enacting protest through collaborative, binational performance art. In “Public Grief and Collective Joy: Feminicide, Solidarity, and Feminist Hip Hop in Ciudad Juárez,” (2022) I analyze how members of an all-female hip-hop collective utilize rap to critique neoliberal flows of labor and to perform a politics of solidarity with assembly workers and victims of feminicide. I chose to publish this work in the edited volume For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice to bring Juárez activism and cultural production into conversation with Black feminist theory and popular culture in the U.S. I am invested in generating dialogue across these fields not only to challenge disciplinary boundaries, but also to explore the ways that feminist strategies and art forms in the Global North and South mutually inform one another. In my article on queer and feminist Latinx performance in Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students (2023), I work to make the elements and impacts of the field of performance studies widely accessible. Because performance is ephemeral, I find it crucial to trace the lineage of key performers’ cultural contributions, and to equip students with the tools to analyze this medium. I chose to publish in this forum to collaborate with leading scholars in Latinx studies and to make my name publicly visible in association with my area of specialization.
 
My most recent project, a co-edited book titled Water on the Llano Estacado, reflects my focus on interdisciplinarity, local environments, and Mexican American histories. In addition to writing the Introduction, I worked closely with all 18 contributors to make this book, which will be published with Texas Tech University Press in Spring 2026, accessible to readers from all fields.
 
“Doing Time: Judy Lucero and Lorri Martinez’s Postnational Pinta Poetics,” is under consideration with MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) after a “Revise and Resubmit” decision and thorough re-writing. In it, I examine poetry by incarcerated Chicana women who question the category of the nation as a primary entity of belonging by challenging the practices of time that defend citizenship’s mechanisms of exclusion. I argue that Lucero and Martinez’s representation of temporalities that disobey the logic of nationalism sets their work apart from the category of Chicano Movement literature.  
 
My projects in development include an article that highlights the ways in which bureaucracy operates as a core component of border machinery in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Cresta de Ilión, and an article that examines the role of border assembly factories in shaping the landscape and cultural production of Ciudad Juárez, focusing on local poetry, short stories, and graffiti that assert women’s right to move and work in the public sphere.
 
The currents that unite my range of research projects include my interest in creating dialogue across national and disciplinary boundaries and my belief in art and literature as concrete interventions that can undermine injustice and generate networks of solidarity.