Olimpia Montserrat Valdivia Ramirez

Montserrat is a Mexican Second-year Ph.D. student at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) program at UT Austin. She holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology and an MA. in Asian and African Studies from the El Colegio de Mexico (COLMEX). Her research interests are the relationship between childhood and violence, migration, and refugee studies. Currently, she is working on a transnational dissertation research project examining the experiences of Central American adolescents who have backgrounds as gang members as they leave their home countries and traverse the increasingly arcane asylum process through Mexico. She is particularly interested in knowing how those adolescents are perceived by the law and institutions in Mexico and their possibilities of being recognized as refugees.