Mario Macias Ayala

Mario Macías Ayala is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Arizona, with a minor in Latin American Studies. He holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico, and an MA in Nationalism Studies from Central European University. His research centers on issues of dispossession and displacement, settler colonialism, solidarity economies, migration, and indigeneity, particularly focusing on return migration to rural communities in Puebla's Mixteca and Sierra Norte regions. Macías's doctoral work explores the subsistence strategies of returnees, forms of solidarity economy, and the revitalization of identity and belonging. Additionally, he has conducted research in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, examining migration and community resilience. Mario works as a Research Assistant at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA).

Research interest

Mario is interested in the processes of dispossession and displacement of communities in Mexico, settler colonialism, solidarity economies, migration, and indigeneity.

Publications

[In process ] Macías-Ayala, Mario, and Alison Elizabeth Lee. “Tendencias migratorias México-Estados Unidos antes, durante y después de la pandemia de COVID-19. Una mirada longitudinal desde Zapotitlán Salinas, Puebla.” In [In process ], edited by Alison Lee and Adriana Sletza Ortega Ramírez, [In process], 2025.

Lee, Alison Elizabeth, and Mario Macías-Ayala. “To Separate Myself from Them, I Think I Will Feel Great Sadness”: Transnational Fatherhood and Border Regimes in Central Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 35, no. 2 (2024): 1-17. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/laq.2024.3.

González Ochoa, Amanda, Arturo Villaseñor García, Mario Macías Ayala, and Dominic Paul Harland Faux. "Desarrollo integral en comunidades de retorno en Puebla. Educación intercultural, ciudadanía, proyectos productivos y sensibilización." In El retorno de los migrantes mexicanos de Estados Unidos a Michoacán, Oaxaca, Zacatecas, Puebla, Guerrero y Chiapas 2000-2012, edited by Rodolfo García Zamora, 15-58. Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas; Ciudad de México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2017.

Macías Ayala, Mario, and Karla Buenrostro. “Familia, reintegración económica y social de migrantes retornados en Zapotitlán Salinas.” In Lo que dejamos atrás..., lo que vinimos a encontrar: Trabajo precario, nuevos patrones de asentamiento en Estados Unidos y retorno a México, edited by María Eugenia D'Aubeterre Buznego and María Leticia Rivermar Pérez, 169-198. Puebla, México: ICSYH, BUAP, 2013.