Alma has helped build grassroots networks to monitor and document human rights violations resulting from immigration enforcement in communities along the US-Mexico border. Alma has been engaged as a member of NNIRR since participating in the 2001 delegation to the UN World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia (WCAR) in South Africa. She was also a contributing author and trainer to our BRIDGE popular education program, helping to develop human rights monitoring curriculum in 2005. Alma, based in El Paso, TX, is advancing NNIRR’s strategic human rights advocacy and organizing at the border, in national policy spaces and international migrant rights spaces, and engaging with partners to build intersectional solidarity within the movement. 

Alma comes to the role with twenty years of experience in grassroots organizing and human rights activism at the intersection of migration, gender, peasant territories, and human rights. She has developed grassroots networks to monitor human rights violations in the west Texas-southern New Mexico border corridor, and most recently, she was dedicated to rebuilding the social, ecological, and food territories of first-generation and migrant farmers living under the heavily militarized US-Mexico border zone. Alma is the author and co-author of various articles and publications, including NNIRR’s Documenting Human Rights Abuses to Build Community Power; Agroecological Approaches to Migration, Poverty and Landlessness; as well as various human rights reports and policy briefs. Her most recent publication is forthcoming, Food as Territory: Reclaiming the Food Territories of Migrants and Refugees.