My two primary areas of scholarship are transnational migration and global health and mental health. My first major ethnographic research project explores the impacts of mother migration for caregiving in migrant sending families in Nicaragua. My first book,  Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families (Stanford University Press, 2017), highlights the importance of intergenerational caregiving as a resource for the children’s and family wellbeing in the face of transnational migration. A second research project, funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, involved colleagues and student mentorship at the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa and the University of South Florida and studied the impacts of transit migration through Mexico (Central American migration and forced return or deportation from the U.S.). Another line of research in Mexico examined the impact of culture on mental illness and mental health care through interviews conducted at a public, psychiatric, outpatient clinic. This work emerges out of my involvement from 2012-18 as a Faculty Mentor with the Latino Mental Health Research Training Program and has resulted in several peer-reviewed articles, co-authored with LMHRT trainees.

My current projects include engaged anthropological research with immigrant rights organizations, which has been supported by a grant from the UO Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and is tied to my involvement with the Anthropologists Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees. I am currently developing a book manuscript based on this work, tentatively titled, State of Welcome: Oregon’s Contested History of Sanctuary. A separate collaborative public humanities project with Prof. Mary Wood (UO English) examines the history of Morningside Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility that operated in Portland, Oregon, from 1903-1963, and the legacies of Morningside for public mental health care and nationstate formation in the U.S. With the support of a UO Mellon Library-Museum collaborative grant, we developed a podcast series and public website to accompany the project. I also have ongoing engagements with local immigrant rights and health equity projects in Oregon. In all of these projects, I aim to foster interdisciplinary engagements that use social science and humanistic approaches to address real-world problems and to open collaborative research opportunities for students.