I’ve asked questions of the U.S.-Mexico border for as long as I can remember. During my family’s many travels to Mexicali, Baja California to visit relatives, we’d spend hours in the scorching summer heat waiting to reenter the United States. The downtime had a way of getting one to think about why it was so hard to enter the United States, and whether things had always been this way.
I explored these questions as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, where I earned bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Urban and Regional Development. After graduation, I supported research at the intersection of domestic and international politics as a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. At Berkeley, I examine the relationship between real property and nation-state territoriality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with the support of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship, Arizona Historical Society Research Fellowship, Bancroft Library Fellowship, Mentored Research Award, Mike Synar Graduate Fellowship, and Society of Woman Geographers Pruitt Fellowship. I find teaching and mentorship as meaningful as research; My work in the classroom has earned me recognition as an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor as well as a Teaching Effectiveness Award.
In my free time, I love taking road trips, spending time outdoors, and taking photographs of my loved ones.
If you want to connect about my research, teaching, or pursing graduate study at Cal, feel free to drop me a line at alaragarcia@berkeley.edu.
