Yareli Castro Sevilla

I am a sociocultural scholar of Latin America and the U.S.-México borderlands with interests in the related fields of Asia–Latin America studies/history, Latinx studies, ethnic studies, critical mixed race studies, women’s and gender studies, and new media/digital placemaking. Currently, I am a graduate fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

My dissertation, Genealogías Chino Mexicanas/Chinese Mexican Genealogies: Digital Community, Self-Archives, and Transpacific Memories, ethnographically details the practices and strategies deployed by descendants to configure, negotiate, and visualize their Chinese Mexican roots and lived experiences in Mexico and across the Americas. Using a hemispheric Asia-Latin America studies framework alongside Latinx feminist criticism, I combine transpacific Asian, Latinx, and Latin American cultural and social histories with original research to map genealogies of Chinese Mexican migration, community and family, diasporic identity, and autoethnography that date back to the early twentieth century, before anti-Chinese violence, roughly from 1900 to 1960, disrupted their towering prospects. I argue that founding the digital community “Inmigraciones Chinas a México” in 2012 has renewed and expanded Chinese Mexican networks of solidarity, enabling the community to garner global visibility and contest legacies of anti-Asian racism. I contend that using autohistoria/self-history and internet-based communities among Chinese Mexicans is a necessity and strategy due to their omission from Mexican and Chinese official histories, national archives, and school curricula. Ultimately, I want to provide a sociocultural perspective of a diasporic community presently linked and organized by shared pasts.

As a formerly undocumented immigrant and a descendant of Sinaloense Chinese Mexicans, immigration is an integral part of my story and a guiding factor for how I approach my research and teaching. Having come from a lineage of migrants, I am passionate about storytelling and a truly interdisciplinary approach to studying diaspora and migration.

I hold an A.M. in History from Harvard University, and graduated from the University of California, Irvine with majors in History and Political Science.

México and Latin America; U.S.-Mexico borderlands; Asia-Latin America; diaspora studies; Latinx/Chicanx; ethnic studies; critical mixed-race studies; transnational and transpacific studies; gender and women’s studies; new media/digital placemaking.