Amrah Salomón J.

Amrah Salomón is currently leading several archival research projects on Indigenous borderlands history. These projects focus on organizing, coding, and cataloging primary source digital files to build comprehensive research databases. Research assistants contribute through transcription, data coding, and organizing archival materials, including early Spanish cursive handwritten records and oral history recordings.

Ideal students have an interest in archival research, Indigenous studies, or borderlands history. It is helpful for participants to be bilingual, comfortable reading cursive handwriting, and skilled in programs such as Excel, Notion, and cloud-based organization tools. Students may also assist with scanning books and archival records from the UCSB Library using the lab’s scanning equipment and computers.

These projects provide hands-on experience in archival research and contribute to ongoing efforts to preserve and make visible Indigenous histories and knowledge systems across the U.S. Mexico borderlands.

Bio: 

Dr. Amrah Salomón J. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She directs the Regeneración Lab and is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice. A multilingual writer and artist, her work has been published and exhibited across the U.S., Mexico, and the U.K.

Her scholarship and teaching focus on transnational and hemispheric Indigenous Studies, the U.S. Mexico border, Women of Color and Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Theory, Critical Geography, Environmental Humanities, Archives, and Social Movements. Dr. Salomón (O’odham, Mexican, and European) is a descendant of the historical O’odham and Yoeme community of the lower Colorado River region, and her research is deeply engaged in documenting and preserving her ancestral community’s history.

She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in Political Science and English (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University.

Her current book project, Confluences: Indigenous Border Fugitivity, maps histories of Indigenous flight and refusal in Yuma, Arizona, against colonial and carceral pressures. The project weaves together literary analysis, archival research, and oral histories—connecting Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels and Wild West tourism sites like the Yuma Prison Museum with the overlooked stories of non-federally recognized O’odham and Yaqui peoples to reveal the resilience and border resistance of Indigenous communities and the ways traditional desert and water relations inform fugitivity and border theory.