Soledad Álvarez Velasco, PhD
Assistant Professor
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About
Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer whose research analyses the interrelationship between mobility, control and spatial transformations across the Americas. She investigates the intersection between undocumented global south-north and global south-south transit migration, border regimes, the formation of migratory corridors across the Americas and the migrant struggle across these transnational spaces. She combines a multi-scale and historical analysis with multi-sited ethnography and a digital ethnography based on a migrant-centred perspective to reconstruct migrants’ spatial and temporal trajectories. In her research, she foregrounds the Andean Region as a key space for understating the dynamics at stake in the transits of Latin American, Caribbean, African and Asian migrants to reach the U.S., or other southern cone and Caribbean destinations. Her work also analyzes the impact of the externalization of the U.S. border regime across the migratory corridors of the Americas, the movement of unaccompanied and undocumented migrant children, as well as the dynamics of transnational migrant smuggling networks operating across those transnational spaces.
She was an Assistant Professor at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany (2022-2021) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Houston (2020-2021). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London. As of January 2023, she will join the University of Illinois Chicago as an Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology. At UIC she will teach courses on Global Migrations across the Americas; Latin American and Caribbean Border Regimes; Mobility, Control and Space: The (Trans)Formation of Global Migratory Corridors across the Americas.