The following scholars participated in the Junior Scholars Symposium's third edition in May of 2026 at the Latinx Research Center:
Adriana P. Ramirez
Adriana P. Ramirez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests span migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity.
Her dissertation examines how child and young adult returnees (re)integrate across the life course as they navigate schools, relationships, and labor markets in Mexico. Drawing on 98 semi-structured life-course interviews with returnees in Jalisco and Oaxaca, she finds that young returnees experience a double displacement — physical and psychological — rooted in childhood in the U.S. and carrying into their adolescence and young adulthood in Mexico. Her research demonstrates that U.S. immigration enforcement does not stop at the border: it continues to shape young people's education, friendships, mental health, and life opportunities long after arrival. Deportation and return are not endpoints but ongoing conditions that follow families for years, affecting how young people see themselves and build their futures across two countries. Where previous research has treated return migration as a moment of arrival, her work shows it is a process that begins before departure, continues through arrival and adjustment, and extends into young adulthood.
Her previous work studied how young return migrants navigate their dual Mexican-U.S. citizenship to negotiate belonging and opportunity in Mexico, recently published in Social Problems. She has also presented her most recent findings to members of the U.S. Congress. Adriana’s work has received generous support from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Institute for International Studies.
Website: https://www.adrianapramirez.com/
Alejandro Zermeño
Alejandro Zermeño is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Cal Poly Pomona. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Merced in 2022. His work centers on race and ethnicity, health disparities, settler colonialism, mestizaje, and Indigenous resurgence among Native American and Latinx communities, with an emphasis on ritual practice and qualitative methods.
His research develops an Indigenous-centered framework to examine how settler colonial structures and racial projects continue to shape health inequities among marginalized ethnoracial communities in the United States, and how these communities create healing, resilience, and collective resistance through ceremony, mobilization, and the reclamation of Indigenous identities and cultures.
Daniela Carreon
Daniela Carreon is a sociology PhD candidate in the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. Her dissertation focuses on how a cancer diagnosis affects Latina mothers, specifically examining its impact on their day-to-day lives, family dynamics, and sense of self. Her research is rooted in a passion for understanding the intersection of identity, health, and motherhood in Latinx communities. Daniela holds a master’s degree in Sociological Practice and a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences and Ethnic Studies from California State University San Marcos. Daniela enjoys visiting different coffee shops, going to the beach, walking, doing pilates, and hiking in her free time.
Estéfani Marín
Esmeralda Sánchez Salazar
Dr. Esmeralda Sánchez Salazar is an assistant professor of sociology at William and Mary. Her research examines how educational, familial, religious institutions, and the state intersect to shape racial and ethnic stratification in higher education, science, and the labor market. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, her research encompasses three primary streams: 1) how institutions intersect to shape racial and ethnic inequalities in immigrant college and labor market outcomes, 2) racial and ethnic stratification in science education, 3) inequities in postsecondary attainment among English Learners. Her research has been supported by entities such as the National Science Foundation and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Ford Foundation Fellowship, among others.
Prior to joining William and Mary, Esmeralda held a postdoctoral fellowship at The Pennsylvania State University, and she is currently an external affiliate of the Population Research Institute at Penn State. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Rice University, where she worked with the Houston Education Research Consortium, a research-practice partnership between Rice and area school districts. Dr. Esmeralda Sánchez Salazar is committed to conducting research that informs policy and expands access to higher education for underrepresented students.
Education
Ph.D., Sociology, Rice University
M.S., University of Texas at Dallas
B.A., Southern Methodist University
Gabriela R. Flores
Gabriela R. Flores is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Educational Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. Shortly after, Gabriela earned her Master’s in Sociology from California State University, Northridge. Her research interests center on the role of race/ethnicity, class, gender, immigration, and family in shaping life experiences in the United States. Gabriela’s work pushes back against that reductive lens, affirming the complexity and nuance of Latinx family relationships. Her dissertation titled, Working-class Latinx Families Pursuing Intergenerational Mobility, explores the perceptions of working-class US-born descendants of Latin America, Mexican, and Salvadoran parents and their first-generation college-going children on the value of attainment, familial obligations vis-a-vis mobility prospects, post-college plans, and the overall transition to adulthood. Through semi-structured interviews with parents and college-going children, Gabriela’s research illuminates how working-class parent-student relationships shape far more than educational aspirations and outcomes, extending their influence into career trajectories, childrearing practices, political perceptions, and family safety. Her work captures the profound ways these intergenerational dynamics ripple across all dimensions of Latinx family life.
Humberto Flores
Humberto Flores is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests broadly focus on Latino sociology, policing, race, ethnicity, and gender. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnography, his dissertation, tentatively titled “Got it Bad Cause I’m Brown:” Hyper-policing Latino Neighborhoods, Legal Estrangement, and the Shift Towards Alternatives to Law Enforcement, examines legal marginalization and non-police-based alternative governance within Latino communities. Humberto's research explores the complexities of the relationship between Latino neighborhoods and law enforcement, focusing on how policing contributes to a broader sense of alienation and distrust, fostering the development of community-based systems of social control and collective accountability. By centering on the unique histories and survival strategies of multiple generations of Latino men and women, his project provides an innovative, multi-layered ethnographic portrait that reflects broader dynamics within Latino communities in California. Humberto earned his BA in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his MA in sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Humberto’s research has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, the University of California, President's Pre‐Professoriate Fellowship, and others.
Miguel Chavez
Miguel Chavez is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. His research broadly focuses on culture, labor, gender, masculinity, and migration.
Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and physical training alongside luchadoras/es in Mexico City, Miguel’s dissertation, The Co-Production of Desirable Bodies: Embodied Labor, Lay Expertise, and Gendered Performance in the Transnational World of Lucha Libre, examines the technologies, practices, and forms of labor through which luchadoras/es transform their bodies into commodified cultural objects while navigating the often conflicting physical and aesthetic demands of local traditions, global tourism, and transnational conflict. Across this work, Miguel also explores how competing understandings of Mexicanidad, whiteness, and gringo-ness emerge both inside and outside the wrestling ring as local and global audiences collide.
His work has been supported through grants and awards from The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), Northwestern University's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, The Graduate School at Northwestern University, the Sociology Department at Northwestern University, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Outside of research, Miguel enjoys discussing Letterboxd top fours, experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, and sitting in busy cafés or bustling parks filling notebooks with drawings of the people and scenes around him.
Natalia González
Natalia González (she/her/ella) is a Ph.D. Candidate and UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellow in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies Latines in the U.S., childhood and youth, and agricultural labor using qualitative methods. Her dissertation, Growing in the Fields: Experiences of Former Farmworker Youth, draws on interviews with adults who worked as farmworkers in childhood to understand their life experiences and trajectories. Natalia’s graduate studies have been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Archie Green Fund for Labor Culture and History, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Tatiana Padilla
Tatiana Padilla, PhD is an incoming Assistant Professor at Rutgers University's School of Criminal Justice, where she will join the faculty in Fall 2026. She is currently a T32 NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Population Center. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Cornell University in 2023. To date her work appears in Social Science & Medicine, Social Forces, and the International Migration Review.
Dr. Padilla's research examines immigration enforcement as a policing apparatus, investigating how it shapes health, educational outcomes, family stability, and contact with the child welfare and criminal legal systems among Latinx communities. Her research spans enforcement's racialized geographic patterns, its consequences for maternal health and healthcare utilization, and the construction of new data infrastructure to address persistent empirical gaps in Latinx research. Drawing on demographic methods, quasi-experimental design, and multilingual archival sources, her work documents how enforcement and legal precarity compound disadvantage across the life course.
She is the Principal Investigator of the RAIDS Project, the first nationally representative, geolocated dataset of ICE enforcement operations in the United States, documenting over 1,500 validated raids across 700 counties and supported by several competitive grants. Through this project, Dr. Padilla has mentored over thirty undergraduates through data-intensive research, with many going on to present at conferences and pursue graduate study.
Kristina Fullerton Rico
Kristina Fullerton Rico, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan. Her ethnographic research examines love across borders and creative uses of technology. Specifically, she focuses on the impacts of U.S. immigration policies that lead families to endure uncertainty and long-term separation. Fullerton Rico argues that effective immigration policy must start with the recognition that every immigrant has (at least) two home countries and that post-migration international immobility is one of the most significant penalties imposed on undocumented immigrants and their families.
She has published an article on how immigrants grieve when immigration policy prevents them from attending the funeral of a loved one in person (Social Problems, 2025). Currently, she is writing a book, which theorizes international immobility as central to the experience of being undocumented.
Her research in Puebla, Mexico, and New York City has been supported through grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and Sociologists for Women in Society.