Joel Olea-Calixto

Shot

PhD Candidate

Education

  • Ph.D. (in progress), History with an emphasis in Native American Studies
  • M.A., History, University of California, Davis
  • B.A., Chicana/o Studies (Highest Honors) & History, University of California, Los Angeles
  • A.A, Political Science, San Bernardino Valley College

About

Joel Daniel Olea-Calixto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies at UC Davis. He was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and has deep roots in Acapulco and Ixcateopan. Joel is a proud grandson of Braceros who came to the U.S. during the 1960s. At a young age, he migrated from southern Mexico to San Bernardino, California, and became an undocumented subject. As a first-generation and nontraditional student, Joel's experiences deeply inform his research and fuel his passion for critical histories of humans and the choices they made.

Joel's research examines how Latinx and Indigenous communities shaped the U.S.-Mexico border by mobilizing against air pollutants emitted by mining companies operating in El Paso and contaminating adjacent Ciudad Juárez during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He adopts a public health framing of the border to study how mining company executives and public health agencies manipulated the border by depending on an inconsistent etiology of diseases like neurodegenerative disease, hypertension, and cognitive dysfunction caused by lead absorption in both countries. Ultimately, Joel argues that the struggles of Latinx and Indigenous communities against companies' violence redefined meanings of public health policy, air pollution technology, and environmental justice. Parts of his work will be published in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Health & Environmental Humanities. 

Joel's research has been generously supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Davis Humanities Institute, and the Huntington Library, among others.

Research Focus

  • Environmental History
  • History of Science and Medicine
  • U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
  • Modern Latin America
  • Chicanx/Latinx History

Publications

  • "Conversation Piece: Bodies" with Lydia Tuan, Yale University, Routledge Handbook of Health and Environmental Humanities, edited by Victoria Bates, Amber Abrams, and Rocío Gomez (London: Taylor and Francis). Under contract; anticipated publication date, 2026.
  • Olea-Calixto, Joel. “Review of Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry around Immigrants by Melissa Villa-Nicholas.” Western Historical Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whae060
  • Eva Amarillas, Katy Maldonado, Joel Olea-Calixto, Julio Reyes, German Aguilar-Tinajero, and Yadira Valencia. "UndocuBruins: Critical Race Theory in the Forming of Resources for Undocumented Students.” Center for Critical Race Studies in Education at UCLA Research Briefs (2019)

Honors & Awards (Selected)

  • 2025 University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Finalist)
  • 2025 Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology, The Huntington Library
  • 2023-2024 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Innovation Fellowship
  • 2024 Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies Summer Institute (NCAIS), Newberry Library
  • 2023 Humanities Program Graduate Summer Fellowship  
  • 2023 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (Honorable Mention)
  • 2022 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (Honorable Mention)
  • 2022 Hemispheric Institute on the Americas Summer Research Fellowship, UC Davis  
  • 2021-2022 Davis Humanities Institute HumArts Research Cluster Grant, UC Davis
  • 2021 Dean's Summer Graduate Fellowship, UC Davis
  • 2021 Mellon Research Initiative on Racial Capitalism Fellowship, UC Davis
  • 2020  Graduate Student Fellowship, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE)
  • 2020 MCT Wakeham Fellowship, UC Davis
  • 2020 Hemispheric Institute on the Americas Language Study Award, UC Davis
  • 2019-2020 Provost Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, UC Davis