Dario Valles
Darío Valles is Assistant Professor in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies (CHLS) at California State University, Long Beach. As an interdisciplinary anthropologist, his research lies at the intersection of gender/sexuality, race, transnational migration and technology linking Central America, Mexico and the US. Utilizing a lens of community-engaged cultural, linguistic and visual ethnographic methods, Dr. Valles’ work expands queer, feminist and migration studies and speaks to the ways Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran migrants shape new horizons of transnational solidarity, abolition and citizenship. Dr. Valles’ teaching methods offer students experience, opportunities, and tools to tap into their potential as researchers and leaders making an impact on community and global issues.
Dr. Valles’ current work includes developing a feature-length, participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis converging in Mexico. He is developing digital storytelling workshops with Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ migrants from Central America and the Caribbean petitioning for US legal protection from Tijuana. He is especially attuned to the conditions under which queer and transgendered migrant youth build networks of mutual aid, reciprocity and kinship to navigate exclusion and violence within a context of state abandonment. He reports on Tijuana as a regular correspondent for the Latin American feminist online radio program Tejiendo Centróamerica.
He is currently completing a book project, Comadre Citizenship, analyzing the role of Central American and Mexican women who have transformed their Angeleno homes into childcare businesses for working class parents. The book uses a comparative approach to understand different Latina migrant approach to care and unionization in the shadow of public education divestment, privatization and immigration enforcement. Valles’ childcare research has gained recognition from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) and funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Prior to , he was an American Council of Learned Society Teaching (ACLS) Fellow where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in gender/sexuality and anthropology at Columbia University. Valles also taught at Brown University in Race and Ethnicity and International Affairs and at UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies.
“Anonymity and Agency: Collaborative Digital Storytelling with Queer, Trans, and Non-Binary Asylum Seekers from Mexico and Central America.” In Natalie Underberg-Goode and Marty Otañez. Digital Ethnography: From Principles to Practice. Routledge. (2025)
Hunter, Brandon; Fleischer, Friederike; Valles, Dario; Baiocchi, María Lis, “Roundtable Discussion: Domestic Worker Organizing in Latin America and Beyond." In Invited Special Issue in Anthropology of Work Review. (2025)
Valles, Dario. “Los Haitianos, Las Caravanas and Transborder Racial Affect: Emotions and Triangulated Representations of Caribbean, and Central American Migrants in Mexico.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. (2024)
Valles, Dario. “Chill Pills Panic: Legal Construction of Play, Race, and the Policing of Care in a California Administrative Court.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). (June 2021).
Winner, Best Graduate Student Paper Award from Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 2018
“Cuando llegaron los Haitianos. Blackness, respectability and anti-Central American racism in Tijuana, Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Geography. (March 2020)
Policy Briefs and Reports
Valles, Dario, Shadduck-Hernández, Janna, Natalia Garcia. Labor as the Bridge: Bringing Together Low-Wage Workers and Family Child Care Providers to Meet Care Needs. UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, No. 24. Los Angeles: UCLA IRLE, 2015.
Garcia, Natalia, Shadduck-Hernández, Janna, Valles, Dario. Hanging by a Thread! Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Struggle to Access Quality Child Care for their Children. Los Angeles” UCLA Center for Labor Research and Employment, 2015
Books In Preparation:
Cyber Ecologies of Solidarity and Confinement: Queer and Trans Migration in the Digital Age (In progress)
Valles, Dario. Comadre Citizenship: Latina Migrant Caregivers, Generation Z and the State after Welfare. (Under revision).
Multimedia Productions:
Documentary film. (2024 27 min)
Archival & Public Engagement Website:
The Root Experience Festival - Official Selection 2025
KPBS San Diego Local Explores - Semi-Finalist 2024
Activist Without Borders - Honorary Mention 2024
Media Mentions
Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)
- Ph.D., Anthropology - 2018
- Master of Arts, Anthropology - 2012
- Doctoral Committee: Micaela di Leonardo; Ana Aparicio; Shalini Shankar; Jessica Winegar
- Dissertation: Raising California Together: Race, Gender and the Cultural Politics of Childcare in Los Angeles
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
- Bachelor of Arts: Anthropology & Bachelor of Arts: Political Science - 2006
Universidade Federal da Bahia (Salvador da Bahia, Brazil) – 2004 (Study abroad)
- Introduction to Ethnic Studies (CHLS 119).
- Latinas/os, Law and Policy (CHLS 362)
- Wealth & Poverty in Latina/o/x Communities
- Racial & Ethnic Experience in the US (CHLS 319)
- Central American & Caribbean People in the U.S. (CHLS 352)
- 1492 and Beyond (CHLS 450)
- Ethnic Studies in the Americas
- Cultural, Linguistic, Visual Anthropology Subfields
- Central American Studies
- Queer & Trans Studies
- Comparative Migration & Diaspora
- Transnational Latinx Racial Formations
- Kinship, Mutual Aid & Care Work
- State Power, Welfare Systems & Violence
- Identity and Social Movements
- Science Technology Studies (STS)
- Methods: Community Engaged & Digital Ethnography
- Digital & Public Humanities
