Angie M. Bautista-Chavez

Welcome! I am the Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

In my book project, Exporting Borders, I show how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intruded into Mexican territory, where it tested and refined a system of extraterritorial administration, systematically integrating Mexican federal institutions into active yet subordinate roles under U.S. federal command. By tracing the DHS’s intrusions and situating them within the historical context of U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, I connect U.S. border externalization to developments in the American imperial state. Likewise, I situate developments in the Mexican federal bureaucracy within a transnational hierarchy. I explain the hemispheric and global implications of U.S.-Mexican transnational repression capabilities.

I co-lead the Latinx Organizational Archives (LXOA) Project—a research collective of faculty, students, and community-based leaders. In Spring 2026, the LXOA formalized a collaboration with the Latino Landscapes Project (LLP), co-led by two practitioners. Together, LXOA and LLP researchers are tracing the historical development and mapping the current activation of seven hundred Latino organizations working across exclusive environments throughout the United States to inform accounts of Latinx political power and American democracy.

>> Read: “Hierarchy in the Politics of Migration: Revisiting Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Migration State” in International Migration Review.

>> Read: “Community-Based Leaders and Civically Engaged Research: Lessons from the Remaking of the Latinx Organizational Archives Project” in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

>> Read: “The Power-Enhancing and Power-Diminishing Effects of Digital Technologies: Marginalized People and US Racial Authoritarianism” in the Annual Review of Political Science.

>> Read: “Civically Engaged Research in Political Science: A Methodological Guide” in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

I come from a family of women from San Luis Potosí. With guidance and support from educators and members of the Lockhart, Texas, community, and through fundraising, I was able to attend Rice University as a first-generation college student. I graduated from Lockhart High School in 2009, earned my BA from Rice University in 2013, earned my PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2020, and served as an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2021 to 2024.