Alexis Meza is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC San Diego. She is from the North East San Fernando Valley and received her bachelor’s degree with honors in History and Latin American and Iberian Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Currently, she is a Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year completing her dissertation titled Memory, Meaning Making, and Radical Imaginaries in the Salvadoran Diaspora. In her research she focuses on the historical underlying political radicalism among the Salvadoran left as evidenced by the refusal of silence, persistence of memory, and the intergenerational struggle to acknowledge the lasting legacies of the displacement from war in the Salvadoran diaspora in Los Angeles. She has taught her own courses in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Chicana/o/x Studies. As a scholar activist, she has used her academic training to contribute to grassroots movements to defend asylum and the rights of persons in immigrant detention in the San Diego region. She is co-author of a chapter titled “No Estan Solxs: Mourning Migrant Suffering and Death through Commemorative Art at the US///Mexico Border” in the forthcoming anthology Violence, Migration, and Detention during Trump’s Reign of Terror and Beyond, co-founder of the Medical Advocacy Summer Fellowship, and working with a collective to create an archive of testimonies of asylum seekers and migrants detained during the COVID-19 pandemic.
