Contact Information
Biography
Lupe Alberto Flores is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He specializes in the anthropology of borders and the state, critical ethnic and migration studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, feminist surveillance studies and science and technology studies. Lupe's book project, Surveilling Immobilities Under the Digital Security State, ethnographically investigates the internal and external bordering effects of punitive asylum policies and digital innovation projects in Mexico and the US. It scrutinizes the digitalization of transnational security state practices alongside the implementation of humanitarian and technological interventions in the management of global asylum migration to showcase how emergent state effects and expressive/popular cultural forms are enacted, experienced and contested across the digital Mexico-US borderlands in the twenty-first century.
Lupe earned his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Rice University, where he also completed certificates in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory. His research and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the School for Advanced Research.
Awards and Honors
Research
Selected Research
- Flores, Lupe Alberto. 2025. "'That Machine Does Not Want Us': CBP One™ and Migrant Im/mobility in the Extended Mexico-US Borderlands. Migration and Society 8(1): 121-137.
- Flores, Lupe Alberto. 2024. "How CBP One Pushes the US' Digital Border South." Border Observatory Special Issue: Reimagining the Migration Protection System: Critical Reflections from the Border. Hope Border Institute. El Paso, TX.
- Flores, Lupe Alberto. 2023. “The Displaced Border.” Anthropology and Humanism 48(2): 379–381. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12497