Hilario Lomelí

Hilario Lomelí  (email)

Dr. Hilario Lomelí is a Mellon Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies (2022-2025) in the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Education and Latinx Studies, his research examines the experiences of racialized children and youth in U.S. schools, highlighting the tensions between statecraft, care, and the neoliberal and carceral logics of disposability. Drawing on cultural anthropology critical ethnic studies, and childhood and youth studies, his scholarship emphasizes the inter-locking systems of immigration, schooling, and criminalization for Latinx children and youth.

Dr. Lomelí is currently working on a book manuscript titled, “(In)Disposable Youth: Latinx Youth Experiences of Structural Abandonment.” The project draws on long-term ethnographic research with Latinx youth in Houston, Texas, and explores the ways neoliberal logics, deficit constructions of racialized youth, and criminality result in the structural abonnement of racialized youth catalogued as less valuable. This work acts as a call to reassert the indisposibility of youth—not just in educational practice, but as a broader ethical framework of care that challenges the often uncaring, inequitable systems that vulnerable youth exist within. A politic and education system that believes in student indisposability is fundamentally one that cares about all youth—and that abolishes the normative metrics of value, as well as the institutions that reinforce them.