Dr. Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez

Adriana Cruz Manjarrez is a research professor at the University of Colima, Mexico. She has a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance Studies from the University of California Los Angeles (2006). Adriana’s interdisciplinary work specializes in the study of indigenous Mexican migration into the United States with a focus on transnationalism, community formation, identity, gender, and change in cultural practices.

Adriana Cruz book (Rutgers University Press) Zapotec on the Move: Social, Cultural, and Political Processes in Transnational Perspective examines the social, cultural, and economic impacts of transnational migration on a community of Zapotecs, an indigenous group from Mexico. During her stay at the Institute, she was editing a documentary that addresses immigrants’ involvement in Zapotec religious patron saint fiestas and the politics of international immigrants’ return and participation in their home village in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Her research projects include the study of migration and indigenous Mexican women in the United States and the paradoxes of integration of indigenous Mexican immigrants in North America. Her main interests are to explore differences of power within transnational social fields in relation to the construction of gender, race, class, and the second generation; and to examine the paradoxical processes found in the integration and construction of the identity of indigenous Mexican immigrants in national and transnational contexts. She has conducted research in two megacities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Washington D.C., in the United States, and in Mexico City and Oaxaca in Mexico.