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 connect U.S. border externalization to broader developments in the American imperial state. Drawing on interviews and an original transnational archive, I explain how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tested and refined a system of extraterritorial administration in which all core functions of U.S. immigration and border enforcement—including deportation, deterrence, and digital surveillance—are carried out across Mexican territory. In my Immigration Bureaucracy Lab, we are building a bilingual archive to reconstruct the post-9/11 creation and global expansion of the U.S. homeland security bureaucracy.

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 update accounts of Latinx political power and American democracy.

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

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.