Dario Valles

Darío Valles is an Assistant Professor in the Chicano and Latino Studies (CHLS) Department at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), within the College of Liberal Arts. His interdisciplinary anthropological work focuses on gender/sexuality, race, transnational migration, and technology, linking Central America, Mexico, and the US. He employs community-engaged ethnographic methods to explore migrant solidarity, abolition, and citizenship.

His current projects include a participatory documentary No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis in Mexico and digital storytelling workshops with Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ migrants in Tijuana. He examines how queer and transgender migrant youth navigate exclusion and violence through mutual aid networks. He is also completing a book, Comadre Citizenship, analyzing Central American and Mexican women’s childcare businesses in Los Angeles as responses to public education divestment and immigration enforcement. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and recognized by the Society of Linguistic Anthropology.

Valles has taught at Columbia University (as an ACLS Fellow), Brown University, and UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. His work bridges academic research with community advocacy, regularly contributing to the Latin American feminist radio program Tejiendo Centroamérica.

• Fellowships/Awards: ACLS Teaching Fellow, SLA Recognition
• Funding: NSF, Ford Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation
• Key Themes: Queer migration, abolition, transnational solidarity, labor in care economies