Almita Miranda

Position title: Assistant Professor, Geography and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies

Email: aamiranda@wisc.edu

Website: Almita Miranda's website

Almita Miranda is an interdisciplinary cultural anthropologist with research interests in race/ethnicity, gender, political economy, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, Latinx families and grassroots organizing in the U.S. and Mexico.  She received her  Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2017 and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  Her research focuses on the ways Mexican mixed-status families navigate the legal and social contraints they face.  Almita’s new courses in Geography include Geog 475: Transnational Latinx Communities: Roots & Migration and U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. She has taught courses including Critical Latinx Ethnography at Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, and Brown University. Currently, she is the co-principal investigator for the project ¡Presente! (Present!): Documenting Latinx History in Wisconsin, which seeks to create a publicly accessible digital edition of documents and interviews related to the histories of communities of Latin American descent in Wisconsin. She is part of the core team of the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective.

EDUCATION

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

PhD, Anthropology, Northwestern University

INTERESTS

Political and cultural geography, race/ethnicity, gender, neoliberalism, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, borders/boundaries, social movements; Latinx ethnography; U.S., Mexico

RESEARCH AREAS

Political and cultural geography, race/ethnicity, gender, neoliberalism, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, borders/boundaries, immigration law, social movements, mixed-status families, place and identities; Latinx ethnography; U.S., Mexico

CURRENT RESEARCH

I am currently working on a book project, Living in Legal Limbo: Migration, Citizenship, and Mexican Mixed-Status Families, examining the ways in which undocumented immigrants, U.S. citizens, and return migrants navigate the legal and social constraints to which their family’s uncertain status exposes them in the U.S. and in Mexico. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, IL and Zacatecas, Mexico, I explore larger questions of state power and liminal subject-formation; race, legality, and citizenship; intra-household gender relations; and shifting patterns of kin and transnational migrant networks in the neoliberal era. My research has received funding from the National Science Foundation (GRF), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, and Dartmouth’s César Chávez Predoctoral Fellowship, among others.

COURSES TAUGHT

Transnational Latinx Communities: Roots and Migrations (Fall 2019)

U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Spring 2020)

Latinx Feminisms (Spring 2020)

AFFILIATIONS

Department of Anthropology

Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program