Miguel Girón is a historian specializing in United States and Borderlands history. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Northwestern University and holds an M.A. in Borderlands History from the University of Texas at El Paso (2020) and a B.A. in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2017). Miguel was a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and is currently a Mellon Fellow in Latinx Studies at the School for Advance Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Miguel’s manuscript explores the urban and political history of the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. His project proposes that we must look towards the politics of city planning and urban growth to truly understand our contemporary moment that centers the U.S.-Mexico border as contentious flashpoint in American society and culture. By asking who benefits—politically and financially—from the borderland’s political economy, this dissertation illustrates the messy and haphazard rise of border politics that teeter between an institution of exclusion and enforcement and one that allows for the flow of capital, goods, and sanctioned labor. He locates this most at the San Diego-Tijuana border, the busiest land port of entry in the world. Between the 1960s and 1990s, San Diego had an important role in experimenting, defining, and implementing institutions and mechanisms to make the border economy function while delegating the issue of undocumented migration to the federal government. This process was largely done at the behest of many local stakeholders from business owners, border commuters, Mexican American Vietnam war vets, and real estate interest. Giron strategically emphasizes the work of local and regional actors to show that border policy was largely shaped from the borderlands up as opposed from the top-down and with specific outcomes that would allow the city of San Diego to benefit economically from the world’s busiest land port of entry.
In his spare time, Miguel is a cyclist and an amateur photographer working on photo projects that capture the essence of his historical work and, more broadly, life on the border and in the Southwest.
