Project Manager & Researcher
Regina Baeza Martinez (she/her) is the project manager for Transnationally Indigenous (under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hathaway), which documents Indigenous trans-Pacific activism and diplomacy since the 1960s. She is also a research assistant for The Case of Mayan Migrant Farmworkers in Canada (under the supervision of Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez). This project looks at Indigenous migration as an outcome of settler-colonialism, using a framework of disposability.
Her own research project is titled Indígena Worlds in Canada: An Ethnography of Mayan Migrant Farmworkers. Using ethnographic methods in Guatemala and BC, Regina explores how Indigenous migrant farmworkers build livable worlds through daily practices that are rooted in transnational social relations and processes of homing. She argues that although migrant farmworkers come to Canada under temporary work visas, they create vibrant community spaces that transcend the assumed temporality of their work. Her project is part of a larger political effort to achieve dignity for all migrant workers by contesting the structural violence embedded in Canada’s temporary work programs. She joins migrant and labour advocates in calling for permanent residency upon arrival for all migrant workers in Canada.
She is a Graduate Fellow at the SFU Community Engaged Research Initiative. Her research has also received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at SFU, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SFU, and the Graduate Student Society at SFU.