Title
Regents Professor and the College of Arts and Sciences Stan Fulton Endowed Chair; Principal Investigator College Assistance Migrant Program
Areas
Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender-based Violence and Feminicides; Farmworker Advocacy; Militarization/Securitization of the Border and impact on Border people; Migration and Immigration Advocacy.
Contact
cbejaran@nmsu.edu
Breland Hall, Rm. 257A
Education
Dr. Bejarano, a native of Anthony, NM, received her BA and MA from New Mexico State University, and her Ph.D. from Arizona State University, School of Justice Studies (Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the School of Justice Studies) August 2001.
Research and Teaching Areas
Dr. Bejarano's publications and research interests focus on border violence, youth cultures, migration and immigration advocacy, and gender violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Courses
Women and Human Rights
Gender and Migration
Women Crossing Borders
Bio
Cynthia Bejarano (she/her/ella), a Regents Professor and the College of Arts and Sciences Stan Fulton Endowed Chair, her publications, research interests and activism focus on a myriad of borderlands issues through activism and scholarship including migrant and immigrant advocacy, working to end gender-based violence and feminicides, farmworker advocacy, and critiquing the militarization/securitization of the border and its impact on border people. Bejarano has engaged in and written extensively on these issues including working for migrant and immigrant rights.
For her dedication in and outside of the classroom, she has received the Donald C. Roush Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2010 Governors Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women, and the Critical Educators in Social Justice (CESJ) Special Interest Group's Community Advocacy Award among others. As a farmworker advocate since the 1990s, she serves as the NMSU Principal Investigator of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Assistance Migrant Program since 2002. The program has served nearly 650 first-year farmworker students at NMSU.
As an anti-feminicide activist, Bejarano co-founded Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez (2001-2011), and in 2014, Bejarano served as a tribunal judge specializing in international human rights and gender-based violence for the Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua, Mexico. To date, she works with several human rights groups in Chihuahua, Mexico. Her publications include, Qúe Onda? Urban Youth Culture and Border Identity (2005), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (2010), and numerous peer-reviewed scholarly articles, chapters, and creative works. Currently, she is co-creating with Dr. Sylvia Fernandez, “Fuerza Feminista: Intimate Recovery and Archiving Memory (FFIRMA)" a feminist and transborder digital humanities project that documents, contextualizes, and will make digitally accessible the activist and feminist participation of the first local feminist movements in the Paso del Norte Region.
With her co-editor, Dr. Cristina Morales (University of Texas at El Paso), Bejarano published a transborder anthology titled, Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Transborder Violence and Oppression at the U.S.-Mexico Border. This anthology is a collection of thirty mothers, activists, and scholars from across both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border published with the University of Arizona Press in 2024.
Transnational Solidarity Day
Dr. Bejarano, in collaboration with G&SS learners, started Transnational Solidarity Day in Spring 2015.
