About

Sergio Lemus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University, where he also serves as the Cultural Program Coordinator and the Distinguished Lecture Series Coordinator. He obtained his doctoral degree in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. His research focuses on the transformative impact of labor on Mexican migrant communities, with particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and materiality within these communities. Dr. Lemus's work explores immigration through three key lenses: the experiences of Mexicans across borders, the cultural dynamics within these communities, and the impact of health and disease on class, gender, and shifting political contexts. His upcoming book, 'Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Transborder Chicago' (2025), examines how Mexican working-class migrants experience hierarchies related to race, class, and gender through their work as gardeners. Additionally, he researches the intersection of health and culture among Mexican immigrants, focusing on how working-class Latinos navigate health choices and how broader socioeconomic and political factors influence perceptions and treatment of Latino/a patients in the U.S. His scholarly contributions include examining the politics and practice of migrant busing, the social and cultural aspects of medical tourism at the US-Mexico border, and the performance of power and discipline among Mexican yard workers in South Chicago. Dr. Lemus's research delves into immigration, cultural dynamics, and health within migrant communities, emphasizing the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and political change.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Public relations
• Library science
• Law
• Anthropology
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Unwanted journeys: The politics and practice of busing migrants from Texas to Chicago

  Anthropology & Humanism · 2025-11-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By the early 2000s, and especially after September 11, 2001, the increasing surveillance on non‐sovereign subjects intensified. One clear example is Texas's recent practice of busing migrants to northern cities, especially to Chicago. This article traces the emergence of this practice and analyzes the political and economic discourse surrounding it. Scholarship on border theorizing has suggested that the border has thickened, been externalized inward as well, and the policies implemented at the border are similar to those at the core of the nation‐state. In this article, I argue that this strategy is part of a broader process of internal rebordering , where migrants are relocated within the country to enforce exclusion while sustaining urban economies. Migrants are often viewed as unwanted or burdensome, yet they quickly find jobs across a range of economic sectors in Chicago. By examining statements and practices from state officials and local communities, I demonstrate how internal rebordering reveals contradictions in immigration policy—exclusionary narratives coexist with a structural dependence on migrant labor—and links the busing of migrants as a novel state practice to certain genealogies in history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Mexican Sacer

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The tragic incidents of September 11, 2001, in the United States generated an increased mobilization of the state apparatus to fight terrorism worldwide and at home. This chapter documents the ways in which the Homeland Security State, that is, the punitive and security structures of the American state operate within the capillaries of society to punish everyday migrants. Thus, in this chapter, it is argued that from the end of the 2000s to the end of the 2010s, sovereign subjects actively transformed their local communities to stop, police, and expel many Mexican residents through discriminatory practices. All this was fueled by an antiimmigrant discourse incubating within a revival of American nationalism by the early 2010s, birthed again through neoliberal punitive measures.

  PublisherDOI

• Los Yarderos

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book is about the lives of Mexican working-class people in the neighborhood of South Chicago. The ethnic, Mexican migrant community sits at a crossroads, where the dividing lines of class, color hierarchies, gender, and belonging define their everyday lives. This book gathers stories about the working-class Mexicans who have come to make the city of Chicago their home. It is forcefully suggested in this book that the United States is a nation of immigrants and will continue to be so despite a resurgence of American nationalist rhetoric that seeks to reposition an idealized and racialized white, sovereign subject at its center. Ethnographically, the study focuses on documenting the lives of first- and second-generation Mexican migrants who came and settled from the states of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán to the US Midwest region, and Chicago in particular. Borders and borderlands are central themes in these stories during, and especially after, 2010, not as a transnational cultural moment but as a fundamentally transborder one. Indeed, the book argues that yarderos now find themselves at the crossings and inspections of multiple borders, sometimes not of their own making.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The introduction situates the Mexican migration to the US Midwest starting in the early 1910s. Then, it engages with the acceleration of Mexican migrants to the city of Chicago in the 1970s and into the contemporary period by highlighting the shift from factory work to the service sector. Then, the chapter discusses South Chicago as an ethnographic site, followed by a section telling the reader the book’s organization. Lastly, the chapter reconsiders the anthropological implications of carrying out research in contemporary yardero populations and other Latinx groups for a better understanding of the migrant experience.

  PublisherDOI

• Los Morenos y Los Mejicanos

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Relations between ethnic Mexicans and African Americans have been tense since the early twentieth century, with little room for solidarity alliances, especially in the context of a segregated city like Chicago. This chapter examines the stories of mugging as told by Mexican yarderos. Through a critical lens, these stories speak about conceptions of laziness, worthiness, and racial value. Moreover, by looking at these stories through a relational framework, the aim is to understand the cocreation of racial discourses that differentiate the two groups despite sharing conflicting relations towards an unseen whiteness operating through their interactions as they encounter each other in the South Chicago neighborhood.

  PublisherDOI

• Color Inspections

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter makes use of border theory to highlight how the problems of color for ethnic Mexicans in Chicago organize and challenge simplistic understandings of the Mexican community. Historically, the chapter traces the linkages of Spanish colonial hierarchies of color and how these have been mobilized within the national period and in the context of Mexican Chicago. Ethnographically, the chapter traces certain preoccupations with colorism and color hierarchies as experienced by yarderos while they labor in South Chicago. This chapter specifically calls for a new term, “color inspections,” to capture the nuances of how Mexicans in Chicago experience their racial subjectivity.

  PublisherDOI

• Dispossessed Masculinity

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2025-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Mexican migrants arrive in South Chicago and do not leave their gender identities behind; instead, they incorporate new layers of meaning into those identities. Specifically, the chapter focuses on how Mexican men engage with the market and, in the process, explore their subjectivities. The stories in this chapter further illustrate how material dispossession is linked to material possession. Theoretically, this chapter situates a new type of “dispossessed masculinity” as the best framework to understand the experiences that these men undergo while working as yarderos.

  PublisherDOI

• In search of health: medical tourism at the US-Mexico border/lands

  Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change · 2023 · 4 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  ABSTRACTThis article provides evidence for viewing medical tourism through the lens of transborder theory in order to analyze the variation in access to health care for populations who share the US-Mexico border/lands. Using digital ethnography methods, we examine medical tourism at the US-Mexico border. Through three case studies, we highlight how the global free movement of seeking health care at the borderlands of nation-states provides an oasis for residents of one side of the border but creates and intensifies unequal access to health care on the other. We present evidence from YouTube testimonies, health blog sites, and Twitter to illustrate this discrepancy. This article, therefore, considers the role that the demographics of health seekers play in medical tourism and free movement across borderlands in their search for 'affordable' care services.KEYWORDS: Medical tourismUS-Mexico borderhealthcare oasistransborder theorysocial mediadigital ethnography AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University for allowing us to use the facilities to meet to work on the article and its development phase. We would also like to thank Eric Berlin who helped the author carry out a close editing and reading of the article. His editing suggestions allowed us to produce the present version. Sergio Lemus would like to further thank TAMU's Department of Anthropology for the financial support to help cover the editing services mentioned above. All errors on interpretation as the sole responsibility of the authors.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsViviane ClementViviane Clement is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Cultural Anthropology program at Texas A&M University's Department of Anthropology. She received her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Carleton College in Minnesota and her MPH in Epidemiology at Texas A&M University. Her research area is in transnational migration and leveraging diaspora resources, and health disparities as exacerbated by environmental and social factors.Sergio LemusSergio Lemus is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. He received his BA in Latin American Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his MA in Anthropology from the University of California at Riverside, and his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. His research focuses on examining the Latinx condition in the United States by focusing on race, class, gender analysis, and border theorizing.Emma NewmanEmma Newman completed her BA in Anthropology and Sociology at Cornell College in 2021. She is interested in borderlands (theory, migration, and policy), specifically along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her additional research interests include gender and women's studies. Emma is the recipient of the RESI-Cantu Graduate Fellowship in Latinx Studies for the 2022-2023 academic year.

  PublisherDOI

• El Color de Las Yardas: The Mexican Working Class and Encounters with Color Hierarchies in Mexican South Chicago

  ScholarWorks@BGSU (Bowling Green State University) · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper ethnographically and theoretically utilizes border theory to examine how the investigation into the dynamics of “color” is central for scholars documenting the everyday lives of Mexican working class communities in the United States. Specifically, I argue that “Color Inspections”—a twenty first century theoretical and practical metaphor to Alejandro Lugo’s “border inspections”—is helpful to understand subjectivities where a notion of being perceived and feel as a colored subject is central in Chicago, Illinois. Color hierarchies have been partly hidden by the material and discursive production of the nation-state, but color has remained a site of cultural production which has not been given the proper ethnographic description. The paper is organized in three parts. The first looks at a material and discursive production of colorismo (Lugo 2008) in Mexican history by emphasizing its distinctive presence in the lives of Mexicans since the time of conquest, and as these people moved north to the City of Chicago. Here, I also theorize how border theory is useful to document the shifting terrains of color hierarchies. The second part theorizes how my participants encountered color hierarchies in South Chicago through those moments that I call “color inspections” as they worked as Mexican lawn care service workers. The third part provides a critical look at how color hierarchies allow for serious thinking about the Mexican immigrant condition within the United States. Overall, the paper in effect grounds “color inspections” as the current framework that better explains how color emerges as a structuring force in the lives of working class people in an apparent post-racial society and culture.

  Publisher

• Performing Power<i>en Las Yardas</i>(at the Yards): The Body, Capitalist Discipline, and the Making of Mexican<i>Yardero</i>Lives in South Chicago

  Anthropology of Work Review · 2017-11-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines the relationship between capitalism, the body, and discipline in a new working‐class population in Chicago, Illinois. Specifically, this analysis documents how Mexican lawn‐service workers—commonly known as yarderos— develop the discipline to control their movements, feelings, and bodily functions to perform lawn‐care services efficiently. The article draws on Michel Foucault's notion of biopower and Karl Marx's capitalist framework to advance an anthropological analysis of the ways in which workers become self‐disciplining. The article concludes with a reflection on the hardships of the lawn‐care industry, the production process, and how laughter becomes a mechanism to humanize an activity that is dehumanizing.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Viviane Clement

  Texas A&M University

  1 shared

• E. Newman

  Texas A&M University

  1 shared