Assistant Professor, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Latin American & Latino Studies
Assistant Professor, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Latin American & Latino Studies
Carlos Martinez’s research explores the health consequences and sociocultural implications of the deportation regime, asylum deterrence policies, the global drug war, and emergent forms of migrant captivity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the UC-Hispanic Serving Institutions Doctoral Diversity Initiative as well as by the UC Berkeley Health Initiative of the Americas and the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.
P.h.D., Joint Program in Medical Anthropology, UC San Francisco & UC Berkeley
Master of Public Health, San Francisco State University
B.S., Health Education, San Francisco State University
Medical anthropology, deportation, asylum, captivity, carcerality and abolition, migrant and refugee health, coloniality, peasant and rural studies, health social movements
My dissertation, Captive States: Migration and Expulsion on the Carceral Frontier, ethnographically examines how the amalgamation of how U.S. immigration policies, the global drug war, and violent bureaucracies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for Central American migrants and Mexican deportees. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2018, this project examines the everyday lives and survival strategies of these communities in Tijuana, Mexico. Moving between migrant and homeless encampments, governmental and private shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, and activist clinics, my dissertation analyzes the lives of those subjected to intersecting forms of confinement and dispossession at the U.S.-Mexico border.
2021 Carruth, L., Martinez, C., Smith, L., Donato, K., Piñones-Rivera, C., & Quesada, J. (2021). Structural vulnerability: Migration and health in social context. BMJ Global Health, 6(Suppl 1), e005109.
2021 Whitacre, R., Oni-Orisan, A., Gaber, N., Martinez, C., Buchbinder, L., Herd, D., & Holmes, S. (2021). COVID-19 and the Political Geography of Racialization in America: Ethnographic Cases from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Global Public Health, Politics & Pandemics special issue (March 2021): pp. 1-15.
2021 Martinez, C., Talavera, C., Magaña Lopez, M., & Holmes, S. M. Anthropology of inequality & precarity. SAGE Handbook for Cultural Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publishing.
Martinez, Carlos; Holmes, S. M. Health and social stratification. Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Ed. John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press.
Martinez, C. Silent Massacre: The Politics of Chronic Kidney Disease. Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies. Fall 2017-Winter 2018 Issue.
Martinez, C. and Holmes, S.M. Review of They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields, by Sarah Bronwen Horton. Anthropological Quarterly. (Summer 2018).
Martinez, C. Forging a New Body Politics. Cosmologics Magazine: A Project of the Science, Religion and Culture Program at Harvard Divinity School. Fall 2018 Issue.
Organista, K., Marcia, L., Martinez, C., Alcala, M., and Ramirez, J. “Undocumented Latino Migrant Day Laborers in the San Francisco Bay Area: Psychosocial, Economic, and Political Consequences.” In The Immigrant Other: Lived Experiences in a Transnational World, edited by Rich Furman, Greg Lamphear, and Douglas Epps, 90-106. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Martinez, C. “El Salvador's Dance Between Development and Displacement.” NACLA Report on the Americas. Volume 46, no. 1 (2013): 70-73.
Martinez, C., Fox, M., and Farrell, J.J. Venezuela Speaks: Voices from the Grassroots. Oakland: PM Press, 2010.
2021-2022 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship | The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
2020-2021 UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship | UC-Hispanic Serving Institutions Doctoral Diversity Initiative
2020 Research Programs on Migration and Health (PIMSA) | UC Berkeley, Health Initiative of the Americas
2019-2021 Mentorship Grant Program | William T. Grant Foundation
2019 Tijuana Wound Clinic Grant | Open Society Foundations Public Health Program
2018 Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship | UC San Francisco Graduate Division
2018 Pre-Dissertation Research Grant | UC Berkeley, Institute of International Studies
2017 Gay Becker Award | UC San Francisco, Dept. of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine
2017-2020 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship | The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
2017 Tinker Summer Field Research Grant | UC Berkeley, Center for Latin American Studies
2016-2017 Matilda Edlund Merit Based Fellowship | UC San Francisco Graduate Division
2016-2020 Departmental Graduate Fellowship | UC San Francisco, Dept. of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine
Courses Taught
University of California, San Francisco: Adjunct Lecturer, “Mini-courses on the Research of Racism in Science: Colonial and Carceral Legacies in Science and Medicine,” Basic Science PhD Programs (Spring 2021)
San Francisco State University:
Adjunct Lecturer, “Latina/o Health Care Perspectives,” Department of Latina/o Studies (Fall 2020 & Summer 2019)
Adjunct Lecturer, “Health and Social Justice - Burning Issues, Taking Action,” Department of Health Education (Fall 2013)
Courses Assisted
Winter 2019 Graduate Student Instructor, Institute for Global Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco: “Socio-cultural and Behavioral Determinants of Health,” with Professor Kelly Knight
Spring 2018 Graduate Student Instructor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley: “Introduction to Medical Anthropology,” with Professor Adrienne Pine
Contact details
Carlos Martinez
Carlos Martinez CV June 2022