Introducing Cecilia Menjívar, 2022 ASA President
Don’t let Cecilia Menjívar’s kindness and unassuming demeanor fool you. She is a giant. Her empirically rich and theoretically inspired work has—on more than one occasion—transformed the research agenda in multiple subfields. Unafraid to explore the underbelly of migration bureaucracies as they shape migrants’ lives, for decades her studies have challenged established theories and simultaneously informed individual asylum cases and federal policies in the U.S.
Menjívar, who is the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair and professor of sociology at University of California-Los Angeles, is a leading scholar of international migration and Central American studies. She is a paradigm innovator whose work urges us to examine how the state and legal categories promote exclusions, marginalization, violence, and inequalities. Recognized with John S. Guggenheim and Andrew Carnegie fellowships, Menjívar is also the recipient of numerous ASA book, article, and career awards (from the Latina/o and International Migration sections) for her astute scholarship, public sociology, and mentorship.
Career Trajectory
Born and raised in El Salvador, Central America, Menjívar came to the U.S. to study for her BA and her first MA at the University of Southern California, followed by a PhD in sociology at the University of California- Davis. Her dissertation became the path-breaking book, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (University of California Press, 2000), based on ethnographic field work that she conducted with Salvadorans in San Francisco. In the book—recognized as one of the most influential in the sociology of family and also in anthropology—she challenged the dominant romantic and functionalist view of social networks in migration, and instead showed how a hostile context of reception causes social networks to fray and fragment under precarious conditions. Subsequent studies in sociology, history, anthropology, and more now build on her reformulation of immigrant social networks.
After holding prestigious postdoctoral fellowships, Menjívar began working at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1996, where she was recognized as an outstanding doctoral mentor and scholar, and a cherished colleague. Former ASU colleague Vera Lopez recalls that, even as a recently tenured professor, Menjívar “was a prolific scholar who still found time to mentor early career scholars. She was a role model.”
In 2015, Menjívar became a Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, and in 2018 she moved to UCLA’s sociology department. It is no surprise that colleagues there now speak glowingly about her. In only a few years, Menjívar has become “a treasured member” of the department. “She is thoughtful, conscientious, and effective in whatever she undertakes and does so with grace, congeniality, and wisdom,” says Gail Kligman. Roger Waldinger describes her as “a dedicated, inspiring teacher, an outstanding departmental and university citizen, and a caring, concerned friend.”
A Transformative International Scholar
Menjívar is widely recognized as a leader transforming multiple subfields in sociology, including international migration, Latina/o Sociology, and gender and violence. With a commitment to the understudied region of Central America and Central Americans, she has innovated sociological theory from the margins. As Mary Waters, with whom she worked on the National Academies of Science report on immigrant integration, says, “Cecilia Menjívar’s groundbreaking work on the lived realities of legal status has set the agenda for scholars in international migration … Her brilliant and empathetic studies of how the law affects everyday people and reverberates throughout society is sociology at its very best—theoretically rich, empirically rooted, and policy relevant.” Waldinger adds that she is “a scholar of extraordinary range, whose research has not only enriched the literature of my own field—international migration—but has had foundational impacts on the study of violence, gender, and the family.”
After the dissertation research, Menjívar extended field work on immigration through various projects in different U.S. sites, including Arizona; Kansas; Washington, DC; and Los Angeles. The 1990s mark the intensification of the U.S. deportation and detention regime, and Menjívar became the preeminent scholar redirecting the study of international migration away from assimilation frames (how migrants acculturate and integrate) and transnationalism (how migrants maintain social ties with their communities of origin) toward one emphasizing the social forces and processes of state exclusion.
Her 2006 American Journal of Sociology article on “liminal legality” begins a dialogue with the subfield of law and society and develops the important argument that, rather than immigrants appearing in binaries as documented and undocumented, today’s complex nation-state bureaucracies impose a myriad of intermediate, gray zone legal statuses. These produce periods of extended liminality for many immigrants. Her 2012 American Journal of Sociology article co-authored with Leisy Abrego analyzes how U.S. law constructs and imposes “legal violence” on undocumented immigrant lives in work, family, and education. These interventions have been especially useful as scholars grapple with the detrimental fallout of legal categories and policies under the Trump administration.
Menjívar developed the theme of violence in ethnographic research she conducted in Guatemala for her book, Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2011). A scholarly tour de force, Enduring Violence won three book awards and offers a radical and nuanced reconceptualization of violence against women. She critiques the limitations of looking at violence by focusing on physical events, individual motivations, and interpersonal violence, and instead argues for a broader approach that recognizes the mutually constitutive interconnections between state violence, structural violence, and invisible injuries made possible through everyday gendered expectations of behavior.
Rogelio Saenz observes that the power of Menjívar’s work comes from “always looking under what seems obvious.” Various co-authors who have collaborated with Menjívar on an impressive number of path-breaking articles feel inspired by working with her. Leah Schmalzbauer considers herself “a better sociologist and a better person having had the privilege of collaborating with her,” and Nestor Rodriguez adds that “she always brings new insights and perspectives to elevate the analysis in our work.” These qualities make Menjívar’s scholarship required reading for graduate students’ qualifying exams, as noted by Irene Bloemraad.
Although Menjívar’s primary research has focused on Central Americans and Central America, she has also conducted research around the world, including in Armenia, Russia, and Mozambique with her husband, the UCLA social demographer Victor Agadjanian, and always with their son, Alexander Agadjanian, in tow (he’s now a young adult, pursuing a PhD in political science at UC Berkeley). The impact of Menjívar’s research is global. She is internationally renowned, invited often to deliver keynote and distinguished lectures throughout the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and Europe.
A Transformative Mentor
As Irene Bloemraad notes, what makes Menjívar’s work all the more impressive is that she “combines academic innovation and professional leadership with incredibly engaged mentorship and teaching.” Even when they were fellow graduate students, Mridula Udayagiri recalls that Menjívar was “always pragmatic, mentoring me through momentous decisions about advisors, teaching, and my dissertation project.”
As a professor, Menjívar has published with many graduate students, helping pave the way for a new generation of migration scholars in sociology. Professor Sang Hea Kil, the first graduate student Menjívar mentored, recalls, “Cecilia was a loving, kind, wise and brilliant mentor … I recently was promoted to full professor at San Jose State University, and I owe a lot of my success to her loyalty, her unwavering belief in me, and to her amazing persistence that I push forward in academia and never give up.”
Andrea Gomez Cervantes, her recent graduate student from the University of Kansas and now assistant professor at Wake Forest University, states, “Professor Menjívar taught me how to do academia as a first-generation immigrant Latina. She showed me how to create rigorous research that can lead to social change. She read every word of my dissertation, coached me through writing, publishing, wins, and rejections. Today she continues to guide me to navigate the tenure track.” Indeed, everyone we reached out to for this profile underscored Menjívar’s genuine warmth and humility.
Transforming Migrant Lives
As a public sociologist, Menjívar does what so many of us hope to do when we enter the discipline: effectuate change. With research based on close connections with study participants, her scholarship is in high demand by legal practitioners inside courtrooms and in legal documents to push the needle toward justice in migration policies. Doing this kind of legal advocacy work is extremely time-consuming, adding obligations to professorial teaching, research, and service. Yet Menjívar is driven by social urgency and moral obligation to do this important pro bono work.
Menjívar has written dozens of affidavits for women’s individual asylum cases, provided research support for legislative campaigns, and written declarations for class actions, crafting persuasive arguments based on her own research and that of other scholars in the field. These activities, moreover, further inform her own research agenda. For example, when testifying in court one time, a judge asked her why women fled conditions of violence in Central America when their countries had many laws in the books to protect them. She has since researched this question thoroughly and written a series of publications on institutional neglect and justice system failures to protect women in Central America. This peer-reviewed work now serves as exhibits that accompany expert witness affidavits and declarations.
Since the latest Central American exodus began in 2014, Menjívar has worked with many attorneys from nonprofits and law clinics who represent detained women and children, playing key roles in these cases. She has provided pro bono expert testimony and used her sociological knowledge to educate legal practitioners throughout the country, in the process helping inform legal and advocacy strategies to address the crisis. Bringing sociological research to inform this work is paramount for Menjívar who often has legal teams read sociological work as they prepare their cases.
In 2017, as the fight for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants was on the line when the Trump administration moved to end it, Menjívar also lent her research expertise to the organized movement of TPS recipients. Evelyn Hernandez, a TPS-holder and movement leader with the National TPS Alliance and the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles attests to her role: “Dr. Menjívar conducted an important national study on TPS in 2016 in which she raised the profile of our contributions in terms of labor and wages … She is present at every press conference, media interview, and event where we have invited her. She is essential to our fight for permanent residency.”
Menjívar has also contributed her expertise in class action cases seeking to reverse harmful policies for immigrants. She worked closely with the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, providing research-based affidavits for the cases filed in federal court to reverse Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s rule to eliminate gender and gang violence as grounds for asylum. Blaine Bookey, CGRS legal director, explains how meaningful Menjívar’s role has been: “Menjivar’s work as an expert witness in asylum cases has saved lives. But not only has her scholarship made a difference in individual cases, it has helped reshape harmful narratives about asylum seekers. Equipped with a more nuanced understanding of the underlying conditions that force individuals to flee their homes, advocates are better able to tell their stories and push for more durable solutions.”
Morgan Russell, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, also attests to her commitment in action. “Again and again, Professor Menjívar has made time in her busy schedule—often on short notice—to channel her deep knowledge and research into expert declarations to support urgent lawsuits brought by the ACLU and our partners to challenge some of the most egregious Trump-era immigration policies. From the nationwide expansion of summary deportation procedures to the use of COVID-19 as a pretext to bar asylum to children and families … Her insights into the social conditions that drive vulnerable people to uproot and seek safety in the United States have been especially valuable in our efforts to educate courts about the very real dangers facing those impacted by these restrictionist policies.”
2022 Meeting Theme: Bureaucracies of Displacement
The 117th ASA Annual Meeting will be held August 5–9, 2022, in Los Angeles, and Menjívar has selected “Bureaucracies of Displacement” as the theme. She invites us to examine how state bureaucracies produce exclusions, expulsions, and marginalizations in all realms of social life, and also to discuss how state inactions (such as divestment, neglect, and deregulation) undermine democracy and equality. At the end of the day, as Karida Brown offers, “Cecilia Menjívar is more than a scholar, more than a mentor, and more than a colleague. What her sociology brings to the world and to our discipline embodies the ideal of what a 21st-century public intellectual looks like. Cecilia’s research and praxis are urgent, accessible, and uncompromisingly human. And she does it for us all, including the least of us.” In a moment of social challenge, multiple crises and transformation, let’s embrace her vision and follow her example.
Written by Leisy Abrego, University of California, Los Angeles and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California and originally published in Footnotes, Volume 49, Issue 4.
