Isabella Caltitla

Isabella Caltitla is a first-generation Mexican American student at Yale University studying Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Sociology. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, her academic interests center on Mexican migration, transnationalism, gender, informal labor, and the ways immigration law and state violence shape everyday life across Mexico and the United States. Her research examines the cultural and social dimensions of migration, particularly how working-class Mexican communities negotiate belonging, identity, and family relationships across borders. Her current research explores the corrido as a cultural archive of migration, focusing on how music articulates gendered experiences of displacement, deportability, and transnational life between rural Jalisco and Los Angeles. Beyond the classroom, Isabella works with The American Immigrant Legal Clinic, supporting immigrant communities through legal assistance and advocacy. Drawing from her academic research, community engagement, and lived experience as the daughter of Mexican immigrants, she is particularly interested in how cultural expression, collective memory, and community organizing illuminate the enduring consequences of borders while creating possibilities for solidarity and resistance.