Carlotta Wright de la Cal

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous history, labor control, and immigration policy in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her dissertation project examines how railroad corporations reshaped mobility, labor systems, and racialized border control across the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project centers transborder Indigenous communities—particularly Yaqui and Mayo—who incorporated railroad work into community-building and resistance on both sides of the border. Drawing on archival research conducted in Mexico City, Sonora, Washington, D.C., Arizona, and Texas, she traces how Indigenous actors navigated and resisted emerging systems of labor recruitment, surveillance, and territorial governance. Her work has been supported by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the John L. Simpson Research Fellowship for Global, International, and Area Studies, and the Berkeley Institute for International Studies.