Gerardo Rodriguez Solis

University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Gerardo Rodriguez Solis is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026). His research experiences focus on the ethnographic and historical analysis of labor migration, agrarian capitalism, anti-indigenous racism, and state formation. He specializes in discussing the emergent and interlocking violence of plantation and bordering regimes to control human labor mobility and impose white-mestizo orders in Mexico.

Gerardo’s research projects examine how transnational corporations implement and celebrate socially responsible practices and how state agencies facilitate and cheer this agribusiness management style while migrant workers confront hyper-surveillance, confinement, racial hostility, and labor exploitation in agricultural carceral geographies. He has analyzed this disputed process through ethnographic studies in contemporary plantations in western and northern Mexico. His publications present different aspects of agricultural labor: financial exclusion, memory and resistance, racial narratives, state violence, spatial controls, and social policy. Currently, he is working on his book manuscript, Racial Capitalism in Mexican-US Agricultural Carceral Geographies, based on his dissertation.

Education

Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara, 2024. Dissertation “Racial Capitalism in Mexican Contemporary Plantations. State Formation, Labor Controls, and Agribusiness Violence in Sonora.”

M.A. in Social Anthropology, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013. Thesis: “Regional Racialization in Labor and Spatial Organization: Cane Cutting in Autlán-El Grullo Valley, Jalisco” [Spanish].

B.A. in Sociology, Universidad de Guadalajara, 2010. Thesis: “Finances and Household Economies in a Jalisco’s Town” [Spanish].

Selected Publications

Rodriguez Solis, G. 2024. “Trajectory and contradictions of the Attention to Agricultural Workers Program in Hermosillo, Sonora, 1990-2018” [Spanish]. Carta Económica Regional 134: 215-240.

Campbell, S., A.D. Godboldt, E. Hjalmarson, S. M. Holmes, S. Hodžić, N. Raheja, G. Rodriguez Solis, A. Shankar, and J. E. Shaw. 2024. “Borders, Labor, and Beyond: Collective Reflections on Harsha Walia’s Writing, Activism, and Influence on the Anthropology of Work.” Anthropology of Work Review (45)1: 39–54.

Rodriguez Solis, G. 2023. “Anti-Indigenous Racism and Spatial Control. Barracks System in Jalisco and Sonora’s Plantations” [Spanish]. In Racismos entrelazados. Intersecciones de las opresiones racistas en México, edited by C. Masferrer León. Mexico City: UNAM.

Rodriguez Solis, G. 2021. “Agricultural Labor and Migration in Jalisco Southwest. The ‘Agrifood Giant’ and its Systematic Violation of Human Rights” [Spanish]. In Tomo II. Personas en contexto de movilidad humana, edited by E. Sosa Márquez, 71-83. Colección de estudios en derechos humanos. Guadalajara: CEDHJ.

Rodriguez Solis, G., M. C. Arellano Gálvez, and P. Aranda Gallegos. 2021. “Racialization and Agricultural Labor in Northwestern Mexico. Analysis from Newspaper Articles 2013-2019” [Spanish]. Revista Noroeste de México, Nueva Época 3:135-163.

Rodriguez Solis, G. 2019. “Memories of Racism, Exploitation, and Resistance. Sugarcane Cutting in Autlán-El Grullo Valley, Mexico, 1968-2013” [Spanish]. Revista Latinoamericana de Antropología del Trabajo 3(5).

Bouquet, E., S. Morvant-Roux, and G. Rodriguez Solis. 2015. “Agricultural Workers, Credit Rationing and Family Networks in Rural Mexico.” Journal of Development Studies 51 (5): 523–37.