Gabrielle Cabrera

I am a cultural anthropologist specializing in temporality, affect, and gender, racialization, & ethnicity among undocumented migrants in the United States. My first book project, tentatively titled, "Culled Futures: Temporality, Fieldwork, and Migrants in the San Joaquin Valley," examines the experience of waiting for citizenship across several generations for undocumented migrants. My work highlights the complex experience of migrant personhood as one fraught with familial and gender-based tensions, centers forms of moral deservingness migrants invest in, and interrogates how such discourses and imagery operate in undocumented people’s lives. This research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund.

My second project is with migrants who have self-deported from the United States, and U-Visa applicants. My work on U-Visas and self-deportees may be seen as a diptych: a comparison of futures and social worlds based on generational difference, as youth who leave see lesser futures in the US, while U-Visa applicants attest their experiences for state recognition.

Prior to joining CU Boulder, I was the César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. I received my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies, and completed my B.A. in Anthropology at University of California, Merced. 

Featured Publications:

• Cabrera, Gabrielle. “Barrio Fiesta: Food, Labor, and Subjectivity of Undocumented Youth.” In Food Talk: Sociocultural Entanglements of Language and Foodways, edited by Kathleen Riley and Amy Paugh, under contract with Routledge. [Under Review.]
• Cabrera, Gabrielle. "Disrupting Diversity: Undocumented Students in the Neoliberal University." In We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States, edited by Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, 66-86. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctv15kxg4f.7.
• Hundle, Anneeth Kaur, Ma Vang, Neama Alamri, Amrit Deol, Danielle Bermúdez, Violet Barton, Gabrielle Cabrera, Brenda Gutierrez, and Clara Medina Maya. "Thinking the “Twenty-First Century Neoliberal Research University”: Preliminary Reflections on Opportunity, Risk, and Solidarity at the New University of California." Critical Ethnic Studies 5, no. 1-2 (2019): 174-204. doi:10.5749/jcritethnstud.5.1-2.0174.
• Diaz, Gloria, Gabrielle Cabrera, Carla Moore, and Laura Yakas. “Woke to Weary.” Public Culture. 2019.