Yachats Lions Hall, Doors open at 130p and starts at 200p
Tobin Hansen – Associate Teaching Professor, Social Science, Clark Honors College, University of Oregon
The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Industrialization, and Human Movement
This talk contextualizes, from an historical and cultural perspective, the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexican migration to the United States. It examines the ways that 19th and 20th century industrialization has driven migratory movements between the United States and Mexico. The talk describes the imposition of a legal and territorial U.S.-Mexico border in the 19th century and the active welcome of Mexican workers in U.S. labor markets. Histories of border-making and of recruiting Mexican workers, which have normalized human movements in the U.S. southwest, Oregon, and beyond, invite rethinking of several questions: How might we understand the motivators of human migration? What is a nation-state border? What border crises may exist today? What might comprise a humane approach to border and migration enforcement? We will begin to consider these questions in the talk.
Dr. Tobin Hansen is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Oregon’s Robert D. Clark Honors College. His research and teaching examine deportation, migration, borderlands and bordering, prisons and policing, gangs, citizenship, gender, legal anthropology, ethnographic methods, testimony, community-scholarly collaborations, sociolinguistics, Spanish in the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. Dr. Hansen’s research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He is a former fellow at UO’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and the University of California, San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. He is a 2025-2026 Teaching Innovation Fellow at UO’s Clark Honors College and a 2025-2026 recipient of the Tom and Carol Williams Instructional Grant at UO. Dr. Hansen is co-editor, with María Engracia Robles, of Voices of the Border: Testimonios of Migration, Deportation, and Asylum (2021, Georgetown University Press). He is from Gates, Oregon.
Voices of the Border: Testimonios of Migration, Deportation, and Asylum
Lions Focus Area – Humanitarian
