By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
The new director of the Center for the Study of International Migration seeks to add new dimensions to center programming. She hopes to highlight such issues as the impact of increasingly aggressive immigration detention and deportation policies on local communities, including Los Angeles, as well as UCLA students' visceral experience of and research on these policies.
UCLA International Institute, April 22, 2025 — UCLA sociologist
Cecilia Menjívar is in her first year as director of the
Center for the Study of International Migration, or CSIM, where she leads the center, manages its programming and currently chairs the International Institute’s undergraduate minor in international migration. She has been an active faculty member of the center since joining UCLA in 2018 and previously chaired its faculty advisory committee.
CSIM functions as a forum for interdisciplinary engagement and discussion for a large group of UCLA experts on migration, including senior and junior scholars and their graduate students. These experts work in diverse disciplines and professional schools at UCLA on virtually every aspect of migration.
Menjívar, a distinguished professor as well as the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equity Professor of Sociology at UCLA, is only the second director of the center. Her fellow sociologist,
Roger Waldinger, created the Program on International Migration at the UCLA International Institute in 2012, which became the Center for the Study of International Migration in 2015. Waldinger led CSIM for 10 years before stepping down, having created a highly valued intellectual community among UCLA migration scholars.
Looking ahead
“I want to build on what Roger created,” said Menjívar, “especially the intellectual dynamism that he generated at the center.” A recent past president of the American Sociological Association, she publishes widely in two empirical areas: immigration from Central America to the United States and gender-based violence in Central America, both within the framework of state power.
Her award-winning scholarship includes three books: "
Immigrant Families" (Wiley, 2016; co-written with Leisy Abrego), "
Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala" (UC Press, 2011) and "
Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America" (UC Press, 2000); together with 17 edited volumes and over 150 articles, chapters and essays.
Menjívar wants to bring additional dimensions to CSIM programming in response to changed circumstances, especially in the U.S. Among the new issues she hopes to spotlight are the impact of increasingly aggressive immigration detention and deportation policies on local communities, including Los Angeles, as well as UCLA students’ visceral experience of and research on these policies. Future programming will thus feature not only scholars and graduate students, but also undergraduates and leaders of nonprofit organizations who are doing research on these phenomena in Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles was the first city in the United States where we saw these policies, and it caught a lot of people by surprise that they were so aggressive and intense,” she said in reference to the ICE campaign launched in the city in summer 2025.
“Yet these policies provided an opportunity for local community activists, artists and people who express themselves through art to go out into the streets and photograph, do murals and create music,” she said in reference to an ongoing (through May 26) art exhibit at UCLA, “
ICE Out!” The opening night of the exhibit — organized by undergraduate students and cosponsored by CSIM, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center — was attended by close to 200 people from LA communities hard-hit by ICE tactics.
CSIM is currently collaborating with the editor of the U.K.-based Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) to host two “Emerging Migration Scholars” conferences at UCLA, largely because the center received an overwhelming number of excellent paper submissions. These conferences invite emerging and early-career scholars from across the world to present their latest research.
“Migration Across the Americas I: Comparisons and Cross-Border Connections,” was held at UCLA on April 16, with the second conference scheduled for late September. Final papers from both meetings will be published in a special issue of JEMS.
Menjívar is currently working to integrate graduate students into center activities beyond attending workshops and conferences by soliciting recommendations for speakers and occasionally asking advanced doctoral candidates to be discussants at events. She is also looking for ways to involve more undergraduate students in center activities, as with the “Ice Out!” art exhibit.
The UCLA sociologist regularly teaches an undergraduate course on the media and immigration and has been astounded by the range of video and audio materials that her students uncover to use in their research. “Undergraduate students have very immediate experiences of immigration policies in their families. I have had students who couldn’t complete coursework because a family member was deported,” she explained.
“For them, this is a very immediate — life-altering, really — reality. I’m trying to make sure that they know that the center provides an intellectual community, one that understands their experience and can provide a lens for them to make sense of what is happening around them,” she said. Moreover, she added, “Undergraduates are doing research papers and senior theses on immigration that are very well done — their work is interesting, creative and new.”
Also on Menjívar’s radar is strengthening coordination on migration research and programming across the University of California. This work builds on the cooperation among the four UC centers that currently cosponsor a biweekly webinar book talk series: CISM at UCLA, the
UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the
UC Davis Global Migration Center and the
UC San Diego Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.
“I want to show that the UC system has a vibrant network of migration-related research and that the system is both thinking collaboratively across the board in response to current developments and showcasing cutting-edge research that can help people think through what is going on in the U.S. (and elsewhere) right now,” said Menjívar. This research is not, she emphasized, limited only to the social sciences, but incudes work from all disciplines.
An enduring interest in gender-based violence in Central America
Menjívar’s long research interest in the forms of state power, as well as the structural, symbolic, state-sponsored and everyday violence that affect Central Americans, informed her recent work as co-editor of a special 2024 two-part issue of the journal, American Behavioral Scientist (68: 12 and 13), “
Tools of Autocracy Across the Globe.”
This same intellectual foundation is supporting her work with co-author Pamela Neumann of Texas A&M University on a new book about the structural roots of gender-based violence in four countries of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. While the book does not focus on migration per se, it makes clear that this violence is a key driver of women’s migration from the region.
“When I say this book is about gender-based violence in Central America, people think that we are writing about machismo culture and gang violence,” said Menjívar. “That is absolutely
not what the book is about. We are looking at the structural, historical roots of gender-based violence in the region… deeply unequal policies that have kept most of the region’s population poor and exploited, especially women. We also examine how the expansion of militarization and a militarized mindset leads to the rise, or re-emergence, of autocratic practices, with direct effects for violence in women’s lives.
“The book also considers the infiltration of conservative religious thought into politics, the manipulation of information and use of misinformation, and attacks on women’s organizations that try to do something about the problem. All of that combined creates obstacles to women’s access to justice.”
As part of their research, the co-authors interviewed women experts from across Central America, including regional gender scholars, researchers, lawyers, activists, journalists, social workers and psychologists. “These women live there, they have studied these conditions, they have written about them. When explaining gender-based violence in the region, they all point to the same things: militarization, autocracy and conservative religious thought,” explained Menjívar.
“It’s not just religious ideology, it’s how the interpretation of certain religious scriptures is being utilized as a political tool that creates an alliance between religious leaders and political leaders… [T]his opens the door for religious leaders to create policy that aligns with their conservative thinking.
“When you look at the whole book, it is not surprising that women are going to leave these countries to seek the protection that has been so long denied to them at home. They are seeking not only protection, but also access to resources, access to a dignified life free of violence.”
Keep a lookout for what will surely prove to be a fascinating, deeply researched work.
Published: Wednesday, April 22, 2026
