Miguel Girón is an urban and borderlands historian of the twentieth century United Sates. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Public History with the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. As a Fellow, he will work with Native Bound Unbound to tell a rich history of Indigenous slavery in the Americas. Before the postdoc, Girón was was the Mellon Fellow in Latinx Studies at the School for Advance Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. He received a PhD in History from Northwestern University (2026) 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’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 project 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.
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.
