Isabel is interested in broader understandings of the impacts of restrictive migratory policies in the lives of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. Her work focuses on the experiences of Central American migrants and refugees in Mexico, her home country.

As conditions in Central America deteriorate, more and more people have left their homes, in many cases, fleeing life-threatening situations. This situation has led to the consolidation of a narrative of a migrant and refugee crisis. This, however, has not led governments in the region towards policies aimed at protection, inclusion, and social justice. Instead, discourses of crisis have become the backbone of increasingly restrictive migratory and asylum policies, aimed at managing and controlling migratory movements, along with a systematic violation of human rights and deterrence strategies that deny protection to refugees. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a strategic site in Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, Isabel’s dissertation uncovers unexplored dynamics between mobility, time, and power.

Through a comprehensive empirical analysis of this reality, her research has three main objectives. First, to contribute to current scholarly discussions on mobility/immobility, migration, refugee and human rights, power and inequality. Second, to engage in methodological explorations of and debates over how to study these mobile populations in a way that is ethical, systematic, and broadly sociologically relevant. Third, to engage with debates on who has the right to move and who doesn’t, as well as of who controls these movements and in what ways.