About

Daina Sanchez is an Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also serves as the Department Vice Chair. Her academic background includes a B.A. in History and Ethnic Studies from the University of San Diego, and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research agenda focuses on race, migration, and Indigenous youth, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous Oaxacan communities and their experiences across borders. Her first book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border, examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their homeland, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles and San Andrés Solaga in Oaxaca. Her work centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being, highlighting how migration transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Sanchez's research also explores themes of Native ethnography, critical Latinx indigeneities, and Indigenous youth, contributing significantly to understanding Indigenous immigrant adaptation, identity preservation, and community formation in transnational contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Humanities
• Political Science
• Law
• Psychology
• Art
• Gender studies
• Social psychology
• Biology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• <i>Compromiso</i> in Diaspora

  Aztlán A Journal of Chicano Studies · 2026-01-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• What Do We Do to Build Collaborative Learning Environments and Practices as Diasporic Indigenous Researchers?

  Routledge eBooks · 2024

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Biology

  This chapter is an intergenerational dialogue between emerging Indigenous Latinx scholars – from undergraduate students to junior faculty – that examines and contends with the ethics of conducting ethnographic research during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors anchor their intergenerational dialogue through testimonio as a method and practice. As members of diasporic Zapotec and Mixtec communities, they discuss how their approach to conducting collaborative research is informed by their participation in and efforts to build diasporic Indigenous communities. Drawing on literature produced by Indigenous and Chicana/Latinx feminist ethnographers who discuss how their own positionality informs their academic work, the authors recognize that, as Indigenous Latinx researchers, they have a responsibility to critically reflect on their own processes for producing knowledge in academia. By sharing their experiences, they center Guelaguetza principles of reciprocity and collectivism to understand the needs of their participants, who are also their community members, and the research team during the COVID-19 pandemic. A shift toward a communal approach to research allowed the research team to disrupt the settler capitalist demands of academia to produce knowledge regardless of our own and our community members’ (in this case also our interlocutors’) well-being.

  PublisherDOI

• First Time Home Co‐Directed by Esmirna Librado, Noemi Librado Sanchez, Esmeralda Ventura, and Heriberto Ventura

  Visual Anthropology Review · 2024

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Art

  First Time Home is one of those rare documentaries where intention, genuineness, and honesty exceed any technical limitations in its production.The story is told and produced by children of indigenous Triqui-speaking farmworkers living in the state of Washington.Having lived their lives separated geographically, but not emotionally, from their parents' families in San Martin, a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico, cousins Esmirna

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Book Review: Migranthood: Youth in the New Era of Deportation

  International Migration Review · 2021-01-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Latino <i>Resentimiento</i>

  Aztlán A Journal of Chicano Studies · 2021 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social psychology

  Resentment in anti-immigrant and anti-Latino political rhetoric often focuses on perceived demographic changes, white population decline, and economic decline. Resentimiento, by contrast, connotes disgust and anger at mistreatment through hostile words or acts such as those conveyed in negative political rhetoric. To explore the nature of resentimiento, Mexican-origin students at a California university were shown samples of negative (N = 95) or positive (N = 93) statements and visual images about immigrants and Latinos. Their written responses to the negative rhetoric included anger and sadness, feelings of being stigmatized, and bodily reactions. Participants argued that the negative rhetoric suffered from overgeneralizations, racism, and misinformation, and that it failed acknowledge why people migrate, the valiant struggles of families to secure a better life, and the contributions of Latinos and immigrants to US society. The students recast the negative rhetoric as a fl awed and inadequate source of representation and knowledge about them, their families, and their communities. They denied the rhetoric’s epistemological efficacy while at the same time recognizing the emotional toll of being its target.

  PublisherDOI

• Words hurt: Political rhetoric, emotions/affect, and psychological well-being among Mexican-origin youth

  Social Science & Medicine · 2019-03-11 · 66 citations

  articleOpen access

  We examined the effect of political rhetoric on the targets of that rhetoric. Drawing from scholarship on anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric found readily in various media and scholarship on emotions, we tested four hypotheses. Hypotheses 1 and 2 predicted that positive and negative political rhetoric would increase and decrease positive and negative emotions, respectively. Hypotheses 3 and 4 then predicted that emotional responses to positive or negative political rhetoric would influence perceived stress, subjective health, and subjective well-being. Data collection occurred between August 2016 and June 2017 at a university in California. A sample of 280 Mexican-origin youth, defined broadly as having at least one ancestor born in Mexico or the participant themselves born in Mexico, participated in an experiment where they were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions: viewing (1) positive or (2) negative political rhetoric about immigrants and Latinos in general, or (3) neutral rhetoric as a control condition before providing qualitative responses to open-ended questions and completing measures of positive and negative affect, perceived stress, subjective health, and subjective well-being. Qualitative responses indicated that negative and positive political rhetoric elicited a range of negative emotions and positive emotions, respectively. Quantitative analysis with independent samples t-tests, ANOVA, and linear regression models found that negative political rhetoric elicited higher negative affect than positive and neutral rhetoric, and positive rhetoric elicited higher positive affect than negative and neutral rhetoric. Negative emotional responses, in turn, were associated with participants' higher perceived stress, lower subjective health and lower subjective well-being. Conversely, positive emotional responses were associated with lower perceived stress, higher subjective health, and higher subjective well-being. Positive political rhetoric, by eliciting positive emotions, can have a salubrious effect. Altogether, these findings suggest that political rhetoric matters for the targets of that rhetoric.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial and Structural Discrimination Toward the Children of Indigenous Mexican Immigrants

  Race and Social Problems · 2018-10-25 · 24 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leo R. Chávez

  University of California, Irvine

  3 shared

• Belinda Campos

  University of California, Irvine

  2 shared

• Karina Corona

  2 shared

• Catherine Belyeu Ruiz

  University of California, Irvine

  1 shared

• Juan Pacheco Marcial

  1 shared

• Abigail Morales

  1 shared

• Nancy Morales

  1 shared