Writing

I am currently doing scholarly writing on Digital Rhetoric, New Media, Cyberculture, Human Mobility, Return Migration to Mexico, U.S.-Mexico borders, and Digital Public Humanities for Social justice. I am also experimenting with creative Cyborg and Electronic writing. You will see my creative works here soon.

Edited Books

Media, Migrants and U. S. Border(s)

Rocha de Luna, Rubria & Bañuelos Capistrán, Jacob (Editors).

Palgrave Macmillan. (2026 )

The relationship between migration and media has become an essential topic of study due to its ethical and civil responsibility implications, particularly in today's digitalized global environment. The media's narrative on world and regional politics, local and global economy, religion, war, and civil conflicts affects the experience of migration and diaspora. In response, artistic representations and cultural interventions have become forms of activism, resistance, and confrontation against the narrative of power. Likewise, the digital space began to be used more intensely as a place of activism for migrants and civil society interested in their human rights. For instance, digital archives such as Humanizing Deportation and social media are used to do activism, the first one through digital storytelling, where migrants can express their deportation stories on video, and the second one uses digital circulation to create community and as a call for action. Artistic- Technological interventions such as Playas de Tijuana Mural (2019) use art and technology to protest the politics of migration by portraying family separation. Theater intermedial performances use virtual spaces to represent distance and the resistance to it. Cinema shows the social and political implications of their visual narrative. Finally, new practices, concepts, and models in AI, journalism, and internet freedom have created a rhetoric that could benefit migrants. Migration is usually seen through numbers, statistics, graphics, and quantitative data, which dehumanizes migrants. With this book, we aim to contribute to the knowledge of the phenomena through the lenses of a more humanistic approach to activism in digital media in the Hispanic world. We propose chapters that explore the activism of migrants and civil society committed to them from a critical perspective. This book, intended to be read by students, researchers, and the public interested in migration, presents interdisciplinary approaches to activist narratives, art, and digital. It explores diverse types of migrations and related phenomena, such as deportation, “voluntary” return, caravans, the Cuban diaspora, US childhood arrivals, and the particularities of the Southern U.S. border. These topics are analyzed in essays on race, politics, theater, film, music, painting, journalism, multimedia, digital archives, social media, storytelling, and artificial intelligence. In the abstracts, you will find diverse perspectives on how digital media act as platforms that allow horizontal activism, which is a direct response at the same level as the rhetoric of power. Likewise, the proposed essays enable us to reflect on the role of arts and media in favoring the expression of the migrant community and those who share a common feeling. Still, in the same way, we will see how digital media, if misused, can also harm vulnerable communities. Work by newer and established migration studies, digital culture scholars, and scholars from both sides of the US-Mexico border and other latitudes is incorporated, providing a comprehensive overview of the intersection between migration, media, and arts in Latin America. The book will consist of an Introduction and 13 chapters divided into three sections: 1. Media and Digital Media Artists´Activism; 2. Migrant Activists Online; and 3) Activism through New Constructive Practices.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Digital Media and Migration: Narratives, Activism, and Resistance

Jacob Bañuelos Capistrán, Rubria Rocha de Luna

Media and Digital Media Artists’ Activism

Open Borders but Not for People: Topicality of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008)

Michela Russo

The Sound of Digital Activism: The Empowerment of Mexican Immigrants Through Music

Alfonso Meave

Crossing Boundaries: Intermediality in Cuban-American Performance

Maybel Mesa Morales

Migrant Activists Online

Art Against the Border: Painting US Childhood Arrival Diaspora Narratives

Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana

Digital Storytelling, Women Migrants, and Artivism: Poetry as a Political Device

Maricruz Castro Ricalde

Voices in Resistance: Humanizing Deportation Project

Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez

Otros Dreams en Acción: Art, Identity and Cultural Performance among Mexican Returnee Organizations in Mexico City

Arturo Montoya-Hernández

Political Practices Through Digital Media: The Case of Latin American Immigrants in Mexico

Rubria Rocha de Luna, Indi-Carolina Kryg

Activism Through New Constructive Practices

Constructive Journalism as a Catalyst for Activism in the Information on Migration: A Narrative Centered on Human Rights for Social Change

María del Carmen Fernández Chapou

Media Coverage Analysis of Migrant Caravans in Mexican Digital Newspapers

Felipe Marañón, Elizabeth Tiscareño-García

AI-Generated Visual Imaginaries: Migration, Activism and Social Resistance at the US-Mexico Border

Jacob Bañuelos Capistrán

Activism in Digital Spaces: TikTok as a Platform of Expression in the Context of Internet Freedom

Zaira Yael Fernández-Esquivel, Eloísa Román-Fajardo

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Digital Culture and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Rhetorics on Human Mobility

Rocha de Luna, Rubria & Castro Ricalde, Maricruz (Editors).

Routledge. 2024.

The advent of digital media has led to significant global changes and reshaped geopolitical borders, impacting human mobility in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, rapid communication has brought transnational families closer, and access to more resources online can be beneficial for migrants. However, digital media can also be used to control and reinforce borders. In the U.S.-Mexico border, digital technology is employed by the State to establish a system of political control that perpetuates stereotypes about the migrant population. Digital media provides a more democratic mode of communication that enables the migrant community to present their discourse, experiences, history, and memories in a way that challenges, deconstructs, and creates an authentic narrative.

Digital culture and rhetoric examine these new forms of expression in which identification, memory, representation, persuasion, and meaning-making are created, experienced, and circulated through digital technologies. Through this lens, the book "Digital Culture and U.S.-Mexico Border: Rhetorics on Human Mobility" explores the borders through digital artifacts, creating a digital border dimension. This digital border functions as a frontier mediated by technology in geographical, physical, sensory, visual, discursive, and imaginary realms. The book deconstructs digital artifacts such as digital press, social media, digital archives, web platforms, technological and artistic creations, visual arts, video games, and artificial intelligence, helping us understand the anti-immigrant and dehumanizing discourse of control. It also examines the ways in which migrants create vernacular narratives as digital activism to challenge the stereotypes that affect them.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Rubria Rocha de Luna

Section 1: Memory, Identity, and Representation of Human Mobility through Social Media and Digital Archives

1. Digital Archives and Women’s Identity: Transborder Rhetorical Practices in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Periodicals

Donna Marie Kabalen Vanek

2. The Migrant Woman in the Language of the Mexican Digital Press

Elizabeth Tiscareño-García

Oscar Mario Miranda-Villanueva

3. Embracing the ‘American Dream’ Social Media Imaginary vs. the Daily American Nightmare for Immigrant Women

Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto

Iris Rubi Monroy-Velasco

4. Crossing the Darien with TikTok: Self-representation and Digital Solidarities in Forced Migrants from Venezuela in Transit to the U.S.

Alethia Fernández de la Reguera Ahedo

Alejandro Martin del Campo

Juan Carlos Narváez Gutiérrez

5. Music, Migration, and Mexicanness in the Digital World

Alfonso Meave Avila

Laura F. Morales

Section 2: Art and Imaginaries: Border Experiences Mediated by Technology

6. The Rhetoric of Empathy: Digital Storytelling Co-creators Seeking to Humanize Migration and Deportation

Maricruz Castro Ricalde

Rubria Rocha de Luna

7. Towards a Hyper-Aesthetics of Migration: Transnational Identities, Hyperborders, and Hypermediacy in the Visual Narratives of Evan Apodaca and Alex Rivera

Alejandro Ramírez-Méndez

8. Reimagining the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands through Contemporary Ecocritical Art

Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

9. Rearticulating Ex-votos within Digital Spaces

Lorella Di Gregorio

10. Visual Imaginaries from Artificial Intelligence on the United States-Mexico Border.

Jacob Bañuelos Capistrán

Section 3: Digital Constraints: Representations and Modes of Border Political Control

11. Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008): Reconfiguration of Limits/Borders in a Cyborg/Cybernetic Culture

Richard K. Curry

12. “Mi entrevista en Juárez”: The Digital Rhetorics of YouTube Immigration Videos

Sonia López-López

Spencer W. Martin

13. Higher Education for Dreamers Returning to Mexico: Vagueness of Official Communications from a User Experience Perspective

Juan Antonio Valdivia Vázquez

Daniel A. Arenas Aguiñaga

14. Engaging Action: Procedural Rhetoric and Agentive Arguments in Border Crossing Videogames

Justin Cosner

15. Migration Policy in Mexico and Situated Knowledge: The Denial of Justice as a Form of Discrimination

Salvador Leetoy

Carlos Cerda-Dueñas

Book Chapters

Introduction: Digital Media and Migration: Narratives, Activism, and Resistance

Bañuelos Capistrán, Jacob & Rocha de Luna, Rubria.

In Media, Migrants and U.S. Border(s) (2026).

This introductory chapter examines the intersections between digital media, migration, and activism in the context of increasingly restrictive migration policies in Mexico and the United States. It explores how migrant communities, artists, and allied organizations employ digital tools to resist xenophobic discourses, construct alternative narratives, and foster transnational solidarity. The text contextualizes the political climate from 2017 to 2025, highlighting the ways in which digital platforms have reconfigured activism and representation. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, the chapter outlines the methodological and conceptual frameworks that guide the book’s three sections—digital artivism, migrant agency online, and emerging technologies. It argues that digital media have become essential instruments of resistance and expression, enabling migrants to challenge dehumanizing portrayals and imagine new forms of belonging. The chapter positions digital activism as a transformative field linking technology, art, and social justice across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Political Practices through Digital Media: The Case of Latin American Immigrants in Mexico

Rocha de Luna, Rubria & Kryg, Indi-Carolina

In Media, Migrants and U.S. Border(s) (2026).

This chapter examines how Latin American immigrants use digital media for political purposes. It aims to understand what issues motivate them, their political practices, the digital platforms they use, and how physical and digital spaces intersect to shape their political behavior. The study employs semi-structured interviews with 58 immigrants from Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela and an ecological approach to analyze the interaction between digital and offline spaces. The interviews show that digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and X are crucial for facilitating online interaction and real-life actions. Facebook emerged as the most versatile platform, supporting activities from political voicing and information exchange to public relations, mutual support, and calls for physical actions such as protests and community events. WhatsApp is particularly significant for information exchange, mutual support, and collective organization. The research underscores the complex interplay between digital and physical realms, highlighting the critical role of digital media in the political adaptation and resistance of immigrants in Mexico. This study offers a comprehensive view of their everyday political life, revealing their resilience and the dynamic influence of digital media on their political behavior.

Introduction

Rocha de Luna, Rubria.

In Digital Culture and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Rhetorics on Human Mobility (2024),

In the introduction to the book "Digital Culture and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Rhetorics on Human Mobility," I discuss how digital technology has both positive and negative effects on human mobility across the U.S.-Mexico border. I explain how digital technology has transcended traditional boundaries in communication, commerce, and knowledge exchange while also highlighting its role in enforcing and controlling borders, both physical and conceptual. Additionally, I outline the digital culture and digital rhetoric approach used to analyze the U.S.-Mexico digital border, as well as how digital media shapes the narrative surrounding borders and migrants. I argue that the vernacular narrative, aided by digital media and technology, can combat anti-immigrant sentiment and challenge stereotypical representations of the border. Throughout my discussion, I reference the works of prominent scholars in border and migration studies, digital culture, digital rhetoric, and digital humanities.

Rhetoric of Empathy: Digital Storytelling Co-Creators Seeking to Humanize Migration and Deportation

Castro Ricalde, Maricruz & Rocha de Luna, Rubria

In Digital Culture and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Rhetorics on Human Mobility (2024).

In this chapter, we analyze the role of facilitators in the production and post-production process of the digital narratives of the Humanizing Deportation digital archive. This archive consists, to date, of 368 digital narratives in the form of testimonial short films. For this study, we perform computer-assisted text analysis of the facilitators’ narrative synopses. This manuscript teaches how video synopses and thumbnail images function as digital rhetoric strategies to build empathy toward migration. Likewise, we confirm the power of the participatory audiovisual genre as a pedagogical and informative tool on migration and deportation themes.

Peer-Review Articles

Filiación de período de La Celestina: Un análisis temático cuantitativo

Rocha de Luna, Rubria.

Intersecciones Hispánicas. (2026, In press).

The purpose of this article is to use a quantitative methodology from the Digital Humanities as a different approach to the study of La Celestina's period affiliation. Authors such as Claudia Raposo, P.E. Russell, Rosa Navarro and Yolanda Iglesias have compared La Celestina with texts from the Middle Ages and have found parallels between them. On the other hand, theorists such as D.W. McPheeters, Michael Gerli, Ranka Minic-Vidovic, Laura Puerto and Emma Gatland, to name a few, find genre and thematic characteristics of the work that could place it closer to the Renaissance period. Other authors like Ivy Corfis and R.O. Jones, consider La Celestina as an unclassifiable text. The word frequency and term association analysis performed with Voyant Tools reveals that themes from medieval literature appear in La Celestina and persist in the Golden Age, although this work treats them differently. The article concludes by proposing possible future research to deepen some of the findings.

Digital Rhetoric and Identity Politics in Associations of Returning Migrants to Mexico

Rocha de Luna, Rubria.

Bulletin of Latin American Research. (2026).

In 2019, the project United Fronteras began to counter the official or hegemonic representation of the Mexico-United States border in the digital cultural record and to inspire the questioning and critical development of materials or projects that utilize digital technologies to represent the border from various perspectives. This article touches on the process of how UF creates a transborder model of work between academics from different humanities disciplines and members of the community outside of academia to make use of postcolonial digital humanities and minimal computing practices and methodologies to generate a third digital space that demonstrates the diversity of (hi)stories from the border and to document the public memory of the materials and projects in this region. Additionally, the article suggests the use of minimal computing as a fundamental part of independent and autonomous projects that dedicate themselves to resisting the structures of power and physical and digital vigilance in border regions because of its ability to provide autonomy, independence, accessibility, functionality, security, neutrality, and material stability across borders.

El caso de United Fronteras: Computación mínima para desafiar fronteras en las humanidades digitales poscoloniales

Fernández, Sylvia, Rocha de Luna, Rubria, and Zapata, Annette.

Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol.16, no. 2, 2022.

Humanidades públicas digitales: Construyendo una comunidad digital solidaria en Redes, migrantes sin fronteras

Rocha de Luna, Rubria and Zavala García, Alicia

Hispania, vol. 104 no. 4, 2021, p. 691-703.

In recent decades, US immigration policy has become more intolerant. Due to this situation, hundreds of migrants have been deported, separated, and imprisoned. However, along with the increase in migrant violence, pro-migrant humanitarian groups have also increased. This article analyzes the case of Redes, migrants without borders. Redes is an initiative that seeksIn recent years, the US immigration policy has become increasingly intolerant. This has led to the deportation, separation, and imprisonment of hundreds of migrants. However, amidst the rise in migrant violence, there has also been a surge in pro-migrant humanitarian groups. This article analyzes the case of Redes, migrants without borders. Redes is an initiative to create a digital community of solidarity between migrants and the organizations that support them. To examine the Redes platform, researchers have used digital public humanities and postcolonial digital humanities as these allow the study of the structures of government domination and control from different critical perspectives. The Redes platform is a third meeting space where pro-migrant associations and initiatives use vernacular rhetoric to counter the dominant rhetoric of power in social networks and other public spaces to build a digital community of solidarity between migrants and the associations that help them. To examine the Redes site, digital public humanities, and postcolonial digital humanities have been used as they allow the study of the structures of government domination and control from different critical perspectives. The Networks platform is a third meeting space in which pro-migrant associations and initiatives use vernacular rhetoric to oppose the rhetoric of power that dominates social networks and other public spaces.

La iniciación en el conocimiento de la sexualidad como elemento de conflicto en las experiencias de Ana en Cría Cuervos

Rocha de Luna, Rubria

Language and Literature Journal. 7. 1 (2012)

Sigmund Freud addressed the psychological conflict that arises in childhood upon learning about sexuality in his work "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1906). Carlos Saura's film "Cría cuervos" (1976) analyzes this conflict through the experiences of Ana, the protagonist. The movie is based on the idea that children develop fantastical theories about their parents' sexuality, conception, and pregnancy. Ana's ideas are formed from what she observes and hears around her as a child, which she tries to make sense of as an adult.