DIGITAL PORTFOLIO
ABOUT ME
Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary qualitative Latinx public scholar specializing in contemporary migration processes. Her current research project examines childhood arrival migrants to the United States.
Her academic approach is grounded in Indigenous and feminist pedagogies and methodologies, emphasizing accessible and reciprocal knowledge-making that responds to community needs.
Her research focuses on digital storytelling, testimonial literature, diaspora studies, and 20th- and 21st-century Mexican, Mexican-American, and Chicano/a literature and culture.
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, Ph.D.
She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and holds a degree in Latin American Literatures and Cultures with a designated emphasis on Human Rights. In the Fall of 2023, she began her career as an Assistant Professor in Chicano/a/x Studies at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch College.
Her current book project draws from the Humanizing Deportation project and engages in textual and audiovisual analysis of digital stories (testimonial audiovisual shorts) elaborated by migrants who entered the US as minors (“childhood arrivals”).
These first-person narratives realized by childhood arrivals demonstrate the contemporary phenomenon of mass deportation of a generation of immigrants who express feelings of belonging in a country that raised them yet does not legally recognize them.
Her coming of age between Compton, California, and the rural ranch of La Alcaparosa, Jalisco, inspired her to approach migrants as knowledge producers. She views their perspectives as having the potential to enhance, refine, or even challenge existing scholarly consensus and academic orthodoxies.
Through her scholarship she examines how migrants who entered the U.S. as minors ("childhood arrivals") theorize illegality, deportability, criminalization, and deportation, with a particular focus on the politics of belonging and emotionality. Her work is highly collaborative, multimodal, reciprocity-focused, and grounded in social justice, resulting in numerous critical digital humanities projects designed to engage diverse audiences both within and beyond academia.
She investigates the limited and legal options available to (deported) U.S. childhood arrivals, employing methods such as digital storytelling, multimedia, visual arts, public scholarship, testimonios (a Latin American oral history tradition), and feminist pedagogy.
Since the fall of 2026, Dr. De La Cruz Santana has been a researcher for the Humanizing Deportation project, a community-based digital storytelling initiative and the world’s most extensive public qualitative archive documenting the human consequences of contemporary migration and border control regimes in the United States and Mexico.
She is the director of Painting the Humanizing Deportation Archive, an initiative that illustrates deportation stories through a series of interactive mural projects at the US-Mexico border.
The murals include:
- Playas de Tijuana Mural Project
- El Paso del Norte Mural Project
- Deported Veterans Diaspora Mural Project
Forthcoming:
The Playas de Tijuana Mural Project is located at the initial point of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border, which documents the stories of 15 (deported) childhood arrivals through portraiture and digital storytelling. The mural was first installed on August of 2019 and finalized on July 2021.
El Paso del Norte Mural Project was installed at the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez US-Mexico border on May 2nd, 2024. The mural illustrates 15 faces and stories of contemporary migration to the US through portraiture and digital storytelling. The first phase of the mural can be viewed under the El Puente Santa Fe/ Paso del Norte International Bridge. The portraits were painted by her students at Baruch College and volunteers in NYC.
The Deported Veterans Diaspora mural project was installed at the Playas de Tijuana and San Diego section of the US-Mexico border on August 18th, 2024. The mural illustrates the faces and stories of 16 deported US veterans through portraiture and digital storytelling. The portraits were painted by storytellers and volunteers in Fresno and San Diego. It's installation was made possible by deported veterans and deported veterans support groups.
Other digital humanities projects include the Leave No One Behind Mural Project and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling project.
She is currently co-creating the Teaching Immigration Through Digital Storytelling initiative as part of an American Political Science Association (APSA) Peer-to-Peer Pedagogical Partnerships Grant.
This contribution consists of creating instructional materials on immigration and deportation policy centering on the diverse range of stories and themes curated by the Leave No One Behind Mural project.
This is a collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Martinez-Medina and Dr. Randy Villegas. Forthcoming publication in the Fall of 2025.
This is a collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Martinez-Medina and Dr. Randy Villegas. Forthcoming publication in the Fall of 2025.
While at UC Davis, she was the recipient of a UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, Mellon Public Scholars Fellowships, the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory fellowship, and has received awards from Imagining America, the National Humanities Center, and the UC Humanities Research Initiative, among others.
EDUCATION
University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Spanish Latin American Literatures and Cultures, GPA: 3.94, June 2023
Designated Emphasis in Human Rights, 2020
Dissertation: The Diaspora of US Childhood Arrival Immigrants
Dissertation Committee: Robert McKee Irwin (chair), Maceo Montoya, Michael Lazzara, Diana Aramburu
California State University, Fresno
M.A. Spanish Latin American Literatures and Cultures, GPA: 3.8, May 2016
Thesis: Narración y memoria en testimonios chilenos después del 11 de septiembre de 1973.
Thesis advisor: Gloria Medina Sancho (chair), Yolanda A Doub, Annabella España-Najera
California State University, Fresno
B.A. Spanish Latin American Literatures and Cultures, GPA: 3.6, May 2013
Honors Thesis: “The Structure of Latin American Testimonio: Latin American Memory and Collective Truth.
The Case of Tejas Verdes, Diario de un campo de concentración en Chile (1974)”
TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
- 20th and 21st Century Mexican, Mexican-American Literature and Culture
- Chicano/a Literary, Visual and Media Culture
- Border, Migration and Citizenship Studies
- Literature, Culture, and Politics of the Southern Cone
- Carceral Studies
- Chicanafuturism
- Film Studies, particularly Documentary Film
- Digital Storytelling
- Diaspora Studies
- Testimonial Literature
- Memory Studies
- Digital Humanities
- Engaged Public Scholarship
- Affect and Emotions
ABOUT MY SCHOLARSHIP
Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana is a migration and carceral studies scholar who investigates contemporary processes of immigration and illegality through the lens of human rights, memory politics, and testimonial literature and culture.
Her research focuses on the effects of legal frameworks and the intersections of immigration and criminal law that illegalize, criminalize, and deport a generation of immigrants who migrated to the United States as minors ("childhood arrivals").
Rooted in her theoretical interests at the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, and policy, her work explores how this generation of immigrants navigates immigration policies and their sense of belonging. She examines the paradox of their lives—raised in a country that does not legally recognize them and holding citizenship in a country they may not identify as their own.
Her practice centers on creating multimedia projects through the method of digital storytelling, where the digitalization of immigrant testimonies facilitates engagement with and recruitment of immigrants from vulnerable communities in both the U.S. (country of destination) and Mexico (country of origin).
While ample research exists on childhood arrivals often identified as "Dreamers" or undocumented youth, those who have faced deportation remain significantly understudied. In response to this gap in academic and public discourse, her scholarship aims to complicate and broaden the understanding of who childhood arrivals are.
She advances this work through scholarly interventions and digital humanities projects designed to disseminate her findings. These efforts are anchored in her primary research site, Tijuana, Mexico, where the population of childhood arrivals has grown significantly over the past two decades.
Her scholarship has had a timely influence on today’s immigration debates regarding the future of childhood arrivals in the US and those who have been forced to return to Mexico. This is specific to the Playas de Tijuana Mural project, a community-based art mural project located on the Mexican side of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border that I directed as a UC Davis Mellon Public Scholar in 2019.
The mural highlights the portraits of fifteen childhood arrivals. The selected stories are hosted on quick response (QR) codes. When scanned, visitors can view a digital narrative elaborated by storytellers, many of who painted the mural. Through migrant knowledge, audiences can become acquainted with the human side of the US childhood arrivals dilemma, especially those facing deportation.
As a whole, the mural presents a spectrum of profiles that add to the current public perception of who childhood arrivals are. It includes dreamers, dacamented immigrants, childhood arrivals who faced deportation due to encounters with authorities even though they had no previous criminal record, deported permanent residents, and deported US military veterans.
The mural culminated in July 2021 with the support of the UC Pre-Professoriate fellowship.
The Playas de Tijuana Mural project was inspired by her participation as a researcher for the Humanizing Deportation project since 2016 and fieldwork in Tijuana, Guadalajara, and California. Through this project, she collaborated with childhood arrivals in the creation process of digital narratives (testimonial audiovisual shorts) that document the human consequences of the contemporary phenomenon of mass deportation.
"Dacamentados: Sueños sin fronteras: Proyecto de narrativa digital" (2017)
Her certification in digital storytelling in 2016 and the political climate regarding undocumented youth in the US inspired her first digital humanities project titled “DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders”. This project provided a platform to document the experiences of dacamented individuals through the method of digital storytelling. Ten digital stories were facilitated, with in-person and virtual fieldwork. The project concluded in September of 2017. Read more in Cultura en América Latina. Prácticas, significados, cartografías y discusiones (2017).
UC Davis Humanities Institute Poster Presentation (2017)
The various projects and research Dr. De La Cruz Santana has engaged in have provided the tools to co-design the “Leave No One Behind Mural Project.” This is a digital storytelling mural project that seeks to engage and impact public and policy through multi-site mural installations that highlight the stories of immigrants who have faced and are vulnerable to deportation.
The project has received funding through the Imagining America Leading and Learning Initiative (LLI) 2021-2022).
The Vision Behind the Leave No One Behind Mural Project (2021)
AFFILIATIONS (current and previous)
Preparing Bilingual Spanish Speaking Students for Careers in Immigration Law (National Endowment for the Humanities) - Researcher