University of California, Los Angeles
Post-Doc, Sociology
University of Chicago, Political Science
University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
About
PhD 2011, University of Chicago.
Currently, I am a (2011-2012) University of California President's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
My dissertation, Making Democracy Work from Abroad: Remittances, Hometown Associations and Migrant-State Coproduction of Public Goods in Mexico, examines the ways in which external nonstate migrant actors improve the provision of public goods with state public agencies through a process of coproduction. Using a national survey sample of Mexican HTAs, large-N quantitative analysis, and extended fieldwork in four municipalities in Mexico, I find compelling evidence that migrants are able to help create, energize and scale up social capital to induce government responsiveness through mechanisms of social accountability provided migrant-state coproduction is synergistic. I find that external social groups, like migrant hometown associations, are able to mobilize local civic and political participation and improve state-society relations with collective remittances in migrant sending communities.
During my fellowship year, I will be working on adapting the dissertation to a book manuscript and article-length side projects which explore migrant bi-national civic engagement in the U.S. - Mexico migration corridor, a cross-national comparative study of the dynamics of remittances and redistribution, and a study of the political consequences of migrant nonstate provision of social welfare in the developing world.
