Damian Vergara Bracamontes

Damian Vergara Bracamontes is a scholar of Latinx studies, critical prison studies, and queer of color critique who focuses on Latinx migration in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

His current project, “The Administration of Illegality and Mexican Migrant Life,” traces the formation and consolidation of illegality in a new phase of prolonged social exclusion and control. Placing government reports and policy briefs in dialogue with migrant narratives, this study foregrounds migrant experiences to describe illegality as a condition that impacts various arenas of everyday life and historicizes how the exclusion and management of the undocumented came to be a  “common sense” response at the local, state and federal levels over the course of the last 50 years. In particular, this study privileges the voices of Mexican women and transgender migrants in relation to cis-gendered migrant men to illuminate how race, gender and sexuality mutually constitute experiences of illegality.