About the talk:

On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in Tulum, Mexico. In this presentation, Osuna introduces a “proletarian feminist analysis” to the study of Central American displacement and forced migration to argue that Victoria Salazar’s death is a “social murder.” Although Mexican police murdered Victoria Salazar, Osuna contends that the social degradation and working-class precariousness in El Salvador and Mexico, all shaped by neoliberal capitalist relations of exploitation and afflicting cisgender and trans women in distinctive ways, set the conditions for Ms. Salazar’s social murder.

About the speaker:

Steven Osuna is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He received his Ph.D. in sociology with an emphasis in Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a M.A. and B.A. in Chicana/o studies at Cal State, Los Angeles. He is a scholar of racism and political economy; globalization, transnationalism, and immigration; and policing and criminalization. His scholarship appears in journals such as Ethnicities, Race & Class, the Journal of World Systems Research, the American Quarterly, and edited volumes such as U.S. Central Americans and The Futures of Black Radicalisms. Steven was born and raised in Echo Park, Los Angeles and is a son of Mexican and Salvadoran working-class migrants. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Homies Unidos-Los Angeles and a member of the Philippines US Solidarity Organization (PUSO).