Latin American and Latino Studies

A warm welcome to our new Assistant Professor Soledad Alvarez Velasco.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer whose research analyses the interrelationship between mobility, control and spatial transformations across the Americas. She investigates the intersection between undocumented global south-north and global south-south transit migration, border regimes, the formation of migratory corridors across the Americas and the migrant struggle across these transnational spaces. She combines a multi-scale and historical analysis with multi-sited ethnography and a digital ethnography based on a migrant-centred perspective to reconstruct migrants’ spatial and temporal trajectories. In her research, she foregrounds the Andean Region as a key space for understating the dynamics at stake in the transits of Latin American, Caribbean, African and Asian migrants to reach the U.S., or other southern cone and Caribbean destinations. Her work also analyzes the impact of the externalization of the U.S. border regime across the migratory corridors of the Americas, the movement of unaccompanied and undocumented migrant children, as well as the dynamics of transnational migrant smuggling networks operating across those transnational spaces.

The Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative ignites cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research, training of doctoral students, and new scholarship in emerging areas of inquiry about Latinos. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the initiative serves as the anchor of the consortium of R1 Hispanic Serving Institutions at the University of Illinois at Chicago. LALS faculty Maria de los Angeles Torres and Amalia Pallares are co-principal investigators on the grant.