Daina Sanchez

Assistant Professor
dainasanchez@ucsb.edu

Office Hours: 

By appointment

Office Location: 

1707 South Hall

Specialization: 

Transnational Migration and Children of Immigrants; Identity and Community Formation; Oaxaca, Los Angeles

Education: 

B.A.: University of San Diego, History, Ethnic Studies
M.A.: University of California, Irvine, Anthropology
Ph.D.: University of California, Irvine, Anthropology

Bio: 

Daina (day-nuh) Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research agenda focuses on race, migration, and Indigenous youth.
 
Her first book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (Stanford University Press), examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identities through practices of el goce comunal ("communal joy") in their new homes.

Research: 

Native Ethnography
Critical Latinx Indigeneities
Indigenous Youth

Publications: 

Book

2024    Sanchez, Daina. The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border. Stanford University Press.

Articles

2021   Chavez, Leo, Belinda Campos, Karina Corona, and Daina Sanchez. Latino Resentimiento: Emotions and Critique of Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Latino Political Rhetoric. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

2019   Chavez, Leo, Belinda Campos, Karina Corona, Daina Sanchez, and Catherine Ruiz. Words Hurt: Political Rhetoric, Emotions/Affect, and Psychological Well-being among Mexican-Origin Youth. Social Science and Medicine.

2018   Sanchez, Daina. Racial and Structural Discrimination toward the Children of Indigenous Mexican Immigrants. Race and Social Problems.

Book Chapters

2024   Morales, Nancy, Daina Sanchez, Juan Pacheco Marical, and Abigail Morales. What Do We Do to Build Collaborative Learning Environments and Practices as Diasporic Indigenous Researchers? In Communities of Practice and Ethnographic Fieldwork. Routledge. 

Reviews

2024   Chavez, Leo and Daina Sanchez. First Time Home. Visual Anthropology Review.

2021   Sanchez, Daina. Migranthood: Youth in the New Era of Deportation. International Migration Review.

Courses: 

Summer 2025 - Session B

CH ST 109: Indigenous People and the Nation State

Fall 2025

CH ST 155: Latinidades