Estefanía Castañeda Pérez
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez was a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative (January 2023 – August 2024.) Currently she is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relation at the University of Southern California as an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of law, sociology and political science. Her research investigates how Latinx communities experience the law through policing and surveillance systems, and the consequences of these experiences on their racialization, well-being and legal consciousness. In particular, she focuses on the perspectives of transborder commuters, who are U.S. citizens and non-citizens that reside in Mexican border cities but regularly cross the border to the U.S. for work, education or commerce.
Estefanía received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.A. in political science and interdisciplinary studies from San Diego State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on border politics, state power and institutions through the lens of race, ethnicity, and inequality. Her projects examine how routine contact with state institutions affect the racialization, citizenship, incorporation, and well-being of transborder commuters in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Estefanía has a published academic article in Politics, Groups, and Identities, and has written public-facing immigration policy analyses in the NYU Latinx Project Intervenxions Blog and the North American Congress on Latin America. Her research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and multiple grants from UCLA and the American Political Science Association. Estefanía has held fellowships in the NYU Faculty-First Look Scholars Program, the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, and a fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative. Originally from the Tijuana-San Ysidro borderlands and a first-generation college student, Estefanía has advocated for transborder youth by serving as the co-president of the UCLA chapter for the Transfronterizx Alliance Student Organization, and has documented human rights violations at the border in collaboration with multiple immigrant rights organizations.
Estefanía is an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of law, sociology and political science. Her research investigates how Latinx communities experience the law through policing and surveillance systems, and the consequences of these experiences on their racialization, well-being and legal consciousness. In particular, she focuses on the perspectives of transborder commuters, who are U.S. citizens and non-citizens that reside in Mexican border cities but regularly cross the border to the U.S. for work, education or commerce.