Lucero Estrella

Lucero Estrella is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation is a study of the histories of Japanese migration and community formation in Texas and northeastern Mexico across the 20th century. Her dissertation examines how Japanese mining and farming communities in Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Texas are critical to histories of race, migration, and empire. Using oral histories with Japanese communities on both sides of the border and sources from state and local archives in Mexico, Japan, and the U.S., her work illustrates how Japanese Americans and Japanese Mexicans, and the national and global forces that structured their lives, shaped the histories of Mexico, Japan, Texas, and the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Lucero received her B.A. in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Japanese at the University of Texas at Austin. She was born and raised in Brownsville, TX in the Rio Grande Valley. She works closely with the Asociación México Japonesa del Noreste (AMJN) and speaks at events hosted by the Mexican Nikkei communities of Coahuila alongside local historians. She hopes to continue her public humanities work to share the long histories of Japanese migration and the current presence of communities of Japanese descendants in Mexico with residents of the border region in northern Mexico and South Texas.