Dr. 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 CSULB, 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.