Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, PhD
Assistant Professor (on leave AY24-25 on a NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship)
History (US, immigration, law, childhood)
Contact
Building & Room:
1007 UH
Address:
601 S Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607
Email:
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About
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the Department of History, specializing in the socio-legal history of child migration to the United States. The daughter of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, her research in and outside of academia is rooted in her longstanding commitments to immigrant communities.
She is currently working on a book project, which is based on her quadruple prize-winning doctoral dissertation, that exposes the long history of child migrants’ cruel reception in the U.S., as well as the resistance and organizing by migrants, their children, and local advocates. Her book manuscript draws on neglected archival records scattered across the U.S. and Mexico and oral histories to show how officials used law, policy, and the concept of “alienage” to distort migrant Mexican and Central American youth’s access to the rights associated with “modern” childhood. In uncovering the origins of undocumented youth labor trafficking, the "school-to-deportation" pipeline, and migrant child detention in the twentieth century, her research shows how law and “alienage” nullified migrant minors’ access not just to the rights of childhood—but to childhood itself. And even as minors and their advocates resisted rights deprivations and benefitted from the discourse of youthful innocence, it was weaponized against them and their parents to criminalize them both. Beyond simply describing the possibilities enabled by childhood innocence, the book will urgently warn of its perils.
Outside of academia, her writing, research, and expertise have appeared in a variety of national media outlets. She has also authored policy briefs on the migration of children and women for the federal government and non-profits in the U.S. and Mexico. Her previous research experiences inform her work as a co-coordinator of the Newberry Library's Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies and a member of the Migration Scholar Collaborative.
Dr. Padilla-Rodríguez earned her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her research has been generously supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and the Society for the History of Children and Youth, among others.
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Daysi Ximena Diaz-Strong, Ivόn Padilla-Rodríguez, Stephanie Torres, “Beyond infantilization and adultification: The binary representations of child migrants in the United States and how they harm young migrants,” Children and Society, October 2024.
“’Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Pobre:’ Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1937-1960,” Journal of American Ethnic History 42, no. 1, Fall 2022.
- Winner of the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s 2022 Fass-Sandin Article Prize (in English)
“’A Violation of the Most Elementary Human Rights of Children:’ The Rise of Migrant Youth Detention and Family Separation in the American West” in Ed. Brenden Rensink, The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, November 2022).
“Child Migrants in Twentieth-Century America” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Oxford University Press), December 2020.
Public Scholarship
“The Weapon of Child Separation,” Public Books, October 2024.
“Migrant Child Labor Exploitation and Trafficking in the United States,” Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, June 2024.
“U.S. Policies Like Title 42 Make Migrants More Vulnerable to Smugglers,” Washington Post, January 2023.
“The Origins of an Early School-to-Deportation Pipeline,” NACLA, November 2020.
“The U.S. Separated Families Decades Ago, Too. With 545 Migrant Children Missing Their Parents, That Moment Holds a Key Lesson,” Time, November 2020.
“The extraordinary scene unfolding in Portland has a disturbing history. How immigration enforcement and policing became entwined,” The Washington Post, July 2020.
“The Supreme Court may have just made violence against immigrant children more likely. By deciding the Border Patrol agent who shot a teen could not be sued, the court is perpetuating a long history of violence against immigrant children,“ The Washington Post, February 2020.
“Beyond Zero-Tolerance: How Rights Violations Follow Migrant Children Past the Border,” L.A. Review of Books, September 2018.
“How I Went from Homelessness to Being an Ivy League Student,” Teen Vogue, January 2017.