My Biography
Dr. Alejandro Lugo (Stanford Ph.D., Wisconsin M.A., NMSU B.A.) is a cultural anthropologist who was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and was raised on both sides of the Juárez-El Paso (Texas)-Las Cruces (New Mexico) region. He has taught anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Texas at El Paso, Arizona State University, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 20 years and also served in 60 dissertation committees as well as in several administrative positions, including Associate Dean of the Graduate College and Associate Department Head. Currently, Dr. Lugo holds a Faculty Affiliate position back at his undergraduate alma mater, New Mexico State University, where he was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences “2019 Star of Arts and Sciences”. Dr. Lugo’s anthropological research and writing projects contribute to U.S.- Mexico border studies, Latin American Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Latinx Studies, and to anthropological theory, the anthropology of Mexico, the anthropology of gender, the anthropology of colonialism and postcolonialism, and, most recently, U.S.-Canada border studies (in press, 2025). Dr. Lugo is the author of multiple scholarly articles and book chapters and coeditor (with Bill Maurer) of the feminist anthropology volume, Gender Matters: Rereading Michelle Rosaldo (University of Michigan Press, as well as author of the award-winning book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of Texas Press), which won the Southwest Book Award and the ALLA Book Award. Through his tireless persistence and belief on the importance of engaging society beyond “Ivory Tower”, Dr. Lugo has contributed to national public engagement through his thematically diverse “Letters to the Editor” in such major newspapers as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. His ethnographic and artistic photographs have been published as photo essays in the interdisciplinary journals South Atlantic Quarterly (2006), Religion and Society: Advances in Research (2015), and the Review of International American Studies (2018, and in press 2025), and have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York City, Phoenix, and in the El Paso-Las Cruces region. Dr. Lugo’s ethnographic photographs on immigration and border violence are in the Permanent Collections of the Krannert Art Museum and of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art. Several of his photographs documenting Latinx political struggles are in the Permanent Collection of the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture also in Chicago. In addition to his scholarly work and his national public engagement, Dr. Lugo serves on the Board of Directors of “Ngage New Mexico“, a nonprofit organization that focuses on improving the educational outcomes of marginalized children and youth in Southern New Mexico’s Doña Ana County.