Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

The New School for Social Research '10

Correa-Cabrera trained as an economist in Mexico. Interested in furthering her education, she chose to pursue a master's degree in Politics at The New School for Social Research. After completing the program, she chose to stay at The New School to pursue a PhD under the supervision of professor of politics David Plotke. Her dissertation focused on the relationship between politics and violence.

Having extended her stay in the United States to complete her doctorate, Correa-Cabrera planned to return to Mexico upon graduation in 2010. As she put it, she wanted to continue her research on “the institutional factors leading to violence and instability in my homeland,” which she had begun to explore more directly in her dissertation. These insights were later developed into Correa-Cabrera's first book, Democracy in “Two Mexicos”: Political Institutions in Oaxaca and Nuevo León (Palgrave). At the same time, she felt a desire to continue teaching and writing in her native Spanish. Taking these factors together, a return to Mexico seemed like the most attractive option.

Before she could return, however, Professor Plotke suggested that sheapply to a position at the University of Texas Brownsville (now The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), an institution located next to the border itself and serving a community of American and Mexican students. The post offered her a unique opportunity to expand upon her research while reconnecting with her Mexican roots.

“You could cross the street and you could see the bridge to Mexico,” Correa-Cabrera said. After securing and accepting the position, she moved from New York to the small Texan town.

Correa-Cabrera explained that she “had been studying the northern part of Mexico, particularly the border states, especially Nuevo Leon.” But she added that the border is “a very tough place.” Around the time of her arrival, Mexican border states were going through a particularly difficult period, with high rates of violence concentrated in the very states Correa-Cabrera had been researching. “Border violence was a big deal exactly when I arrived,” she said. “A very violent war between two organized crime groups started just on the other side of the border.” It was precisely this climate, which had shaped her teaching and gave concreteness to her doctoral research, that would define her unfolding research program.

As it turns out, Matamoros—Brownsville's twin city across the border—is home to one of the most prominent violent drug organizations in the region. Popularly known as the Gulf Cartel, the organization is notorious for both its violence and the way its “business innovations” have transformed criminal enterprises’ operations in Mexico and throughout the Western hemisphere. Correa-Cabrera found herself as a political scientist precisely at the right place and time to delve into the way these organizations operated.

As a result, she said, it was inevitable that her research focus would expand to encompass the issues of crime and violence in this region. She recalled that many of her students lived across the border in Mexico and would often cite criminal violence as their reason for being absent from class. “They came to me and told me that their parents were very frightened,” Cabrera-Correa said. “A couple of them had had their parents kidnapped.” Undeterred, she explained that she and her students “continued to work, often while listening to the gunfire coming across from the other side of the border.”

Applying her social research skills to what was occurring around her, Correa-Cabrera obtained a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. The grant allowed her to conduct interviews on both sides of the border and to examine the way people discussed violence on social media. “At the time,” she added, “I didn't have the consciousness of what was really happening, and it really shocked me. It changed my life, basically, and it gave some meaning to what I wanted to do. It gave me a project to pursue that was at the same time important, meaningful, and relevant.”

Correa-Cabrera's book Los Zetas, Inc. incorporates the research she has conducted since that time. She explained, “It's the product of personal experience in my own family and of students who were suffering the same thing.” Despite the difficulty of teaching and conducting research in such a dangerous environment, she said, “It was the perfect laboratory for me.” Through this combination of research and life experience, Correa-Cabrera became an expert on border security, border relations, organized crime, and the connections between a range of organized illicit activities. These include not just the transport of illegal drugs and weapons but also human smuggling and trafficking. Unlike smuggling, which results from an agreement between two parties, human trafficking involves one party being exploited and forced to work and another party gaining from that exploitation.

Correa-Cabrera explains that, under the influence of the Gulf Cartel and other criminal enterprises “drug trafficking organizations have consolidated and diversified to the point that they now involve all these illegal activities that were, at some point, controlled by different groups.”

Correa-Cabrera's work won acclaim, and she began to receive support from institutions like Freie Universität Berlin and UNAM in Mexico City. She also won a grant from the U.S. State Department to study the connections between human smuggling, organized crime, and the trafficking of people along migration routes. Correa-Cabrera now began toe focus on what she calls “the connection between the human elements and the criminal elements” associated with these international crime organizations. Her research led her beyond Mexico to countries in Central America's “Northern Triangle”—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—where these networks were also active.

This project reveals a new dimension to Correa-Cabrera's research: her on-the-ground empirical work, involving accompanying migrants on the long journey from Central America to the U.S. border. “It made a lot of sense for me to go to the countries of the Northern Triangle and to take the journey with the migrants from there,” she said. To Correa-Cabrera, this was the only way to see how the migrants were affected by international criminal groups and how, in the end, smuggling could lead to human trafficking.

“Today, because of U.S.immigration policies, it can be much more complicated for migrants to enter the United States, so they often pay a fee to a smuggler,” Correa-Carbrera said. “And these smugglers are connected to the criminal organizations.” She explained that trafficking can involve many forms of forced labor: from sex work to domestic labor and agricultural work to participation in the criminal activities themselves. She emphasized that this project was about “how these are connected and the vulnerability of the migrants. The project was about doing the journey and interviewing individuals in the migrant shelters and in the trucks.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Correa-Cabrera says that the project was an exceedingly complex process that entailed more than 400 interviews. After completing it, she was awarded a residential fellowship at The Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy forum in Washington, DC. There she is turning her research into articles aimed atl informing concrete public policy proposals. This marks a new chapter in her work as a publicly engaged scholar.

“I'm contributing to the design of public policy by presenting the results of my research,” she said. “It's an amazing opportunity.”