Catherine S. Ramírez coedits the Borderlands section of Public Books. She is a 2025-2026 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a scholar of Latinx literature, history, visual culture, and performance. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020) and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and a coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post.
Catherine S. Ramírez
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Writing on Public Books
Humor and Fear, Kings and Soldiers: Jason De León on the Untold Story of Human Smugglers
What happens if we start with the assumption that smugglers are, in fact, humans?
The Border Is the Crisis: Reflections on the Centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924
One hundred years have passed since the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act and the creation of the Border Patrol. But the undercurrents that mobilized both never went away and are resurging with renewed fervor.
A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security
Guadalupe Maravilla makes multimedia art to grapple with his “traumatic experiences” as a unaccompanied child and undocumented migrant.
From “Crisis” to Futurity
Introducing a new series to push forward our thinking and action about immigration and borders.
What Does Assimilation Mean?
When Samuel P. Huntington first published “The Hispanic Challenge,” in Foreign Policy in 2004, I was an assistant professor of American studies …
