Dario Valles recently completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Northwestern University and has taught and lead research projects and published at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).  Valles’ dissertation captures a critical but understudied nexus of the welfare and educational infrastructure in the US - early education - through the lens of the Angeleno African and Latin American providers who offer subsidized childcare for low-wage parents from their homes. Anchored in household ethnography, his research explores shifting racial and gendered inequalities, intimate labor practices, state formations and constructions of childhood in the “majority-minority” U.S. His current book project addresses the ways in which Black and Latinx children and care providers are conscripted into national projects to shape the future U.S. labor force. In the context of increasing economic anxieties brought on by global competition, providers, parents, and activists enact grassroots visions of a changing U.S. that reaffirm Afro/Latinx transnational diasporic cultural and community-building in everyday life.  

Rooted in anthropological analysis, he hopes his research will contribute to ethnic studies, feminist/queer studies, and American studies – and to deepening the reach and breadth of university-community engagement. He recently led a community-engaged survey and public report on childcare among migrant garment workers, conducted through UCLA and with the support of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Valles’ interests in transnational and interdisciplinary ethnography has been shaped by his experiences, research and social movement work in the Southwest US, Northern México (where he has roots), Central America and Brazil. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Society for Linguistic Anthropology and UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).