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Borders reflect the many social, historical, and political forces that shape global movement and identity. While borders often suggest fixed lines of division, the experiences within and around them increasingly influence national and global understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and human rights. This panel brings together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of history, sociology, and ethnic studies for a discussion on borders and their impact, particularly through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The panel will feature Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate in History; Adriana Ramirez, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Irene Franco Rubio, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies. Hidetaka Hirota, Professor of History, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix New Directions event series features research presentations by graduate students from different social science disciplines. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, Department of Ethnic Studies, and Department of History.
Panelists
Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD Candidate in History at UC Berkeley. Her research examines how Indigenous and migrant railroad workers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands navigated and resisted overlapping systems of legal and corporate control from the 1880s to the 1940s. Drawing on archives in Mexico City, Washington D.C., and various state and private collections, the project reveals how state and corporate actors deployed immigration law, federal Indian policy, and labor systems to discipline mobile racialized populations, while workers strategically exploited jurisdictional gray zones to advance autonomy and resistance.
Adriana P. Ramirez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests revolve around migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. The influence of growing up as a migrant student between Mexico and the U.S. is evident in her work, which explores transnational migration dynamics. Her current work examines how young return migrants adapt to different spheres of Mexican society and formulate their identity and sense of belonging across contexts of reception in the states of Oaxaca and Jalisco. Her previous work studied how young return migrants navigate their double Mexican-U.S. citizenship to negotiate a sense of belonging and better opportunities in Mexico, recently published in Social Problems.
Irene Franco Rubio is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing designated emphases in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research examines multiracial coalition-building, grassroots resistance, and social movement histories in the U.S. Southwest, with a focus on how cross-cultural solidarity emerges in response to racialized state violence. Drawing on critical ethnography, oral histories, and community-engaged methods, her work highlights how communities resist criminalization and reimagine abolitionist futures, offering new frameworks for understanding coalition-based resistance. She is a Soros Justice Open Society Foundations Fellow and host of the award-winning #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast, which examines the entanglements of the criminal legal system. Irene also received the Dr. Iris Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship, a Social Science Matrix award given annually to one graduate student dedicated to addressing urgent, real-world issues through their scholarship.
Hidetaka Hirota (moderator) is a social and legal historian of U.S. immigration, specializing in nativism, immigration control, and policy from the antebellum era to the Progressive Era. His first book, Expelling the Poor (Oxford, 2017), examines 19th-century deportation policies and received multiple awards. He is currently working on The American Dilemma, which explores the tension between nativism and labor demand in shaping U.S. immigration policy, as well as projects on Japanese immigrants and the history of anti-immigrant sentiment. His research has appeared in leading history and migration studies journals. At UC Berkeley, he teaches U.S. immigration history and co-directs the Canadian Studies Program. He was also a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.
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