Damian Vergara Bracamontes

Damian Vergara Bracamontes is an assistant professor of Latinx migration, critical prison studies, and queer and trans of color critique in Gender and Women’s Studies and as an affiliate of the Latina/o Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His current book project, “The Administration of Illegality and Mexican Migrant Life,” examines modes of administrative violence used to identify, report and exclude undocumented migrants. By foregrounding migrant women and transwomen’s experiences living and moving in San Diego, the book demonstrates illegality is not stable or coherent-but as it argues is constituted through an iterative and spatial process of exclusion and violence. Vergara-Bracamontes is also at work on a second book project on LGBTQ+ immigrant detention. His work has appeared in Ethnic Studies Review, Routed Magazine, and The Abusable Past.