About Bertha

I grew up in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, looking across the Rio Grande at Brownsville, Texas. The images came early: the river, the garita, the long lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to cross, the smell of charcoal from the grill, my grandmother's flour tortillas, the particular pride of being norteña. I could not fully understand what I was seeing as a child, but I never forgot it.

El Bordo was part of my geography before it became part of my fieldwork. I never realized my place as a fronteriza until I looked deep into the mirror of the border, and what I found there became the foundation of my scholarship.

Being fronteriza is not a disclaimer I add to my positionality statement. It is what shapes the questions I ask, the communities I stand with, and the kind of sociologist I am.

 

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New Mexico State University, a Carnegie R1 Hispanic-Serving Institution, where I direct La Querencia Lab, a feminist research and methods laboratory focused on border communities and transborder social life.

I earned my Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, my M.A. from the University of Chile, and my B.A. from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. I serve on the Board of Directors of the Association for Borderland Studies and on the Editorial Board of Contexts magazine.

 

My work sits at the intersection of border enforcement, forced migration, and state violence. I examine the impacts of state power on migrant and border lives, with particular attention to how U.S. asylum policy reshapes the conditions of migrant camps, the work of humanitarian NGOs, and the everyday experience of people navigating the Texas-Tamaulipas corridor. My teaching and research expertise spans international migration, race and ethnic relations, U.S.-Mexico border relations, undocumented migration, and qualitative methods.

I practice feminist activist ethnography, a commitment to research that is not only rigorous but accountable to the communities it studies. My fieldwork integrates participant photography, where research participants document their own social environments, and drone imaging to track how camps grow, shift, and respond to policy changes over time, generating visual evidence that informs not only my analysis but the resource and infrastructure assessments of community partners like Solidarity Engineering. The camera, grounded or airborne, is always in service of the people and communities I work with.

 

Beyond my scholarly work, I honor my cultural heritage through Northern Mexican cuisine, always chasing my grandmother's recipes and the particular alchemy of a border kitchen.

I love photography. I love to have a camera in my hands (or in the air). To me it is an art of observation, of finding, of noticing the small things before they disappear. An instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

  • Resaca, Rancho Viejo Texas

    Drone Photography

  • Northern Mexican Cuisine

    Grandma’s Flour Tortillas recipe

  • Rio Grande Valley

    Landscape photography