Dr. Victoria Stone-Cadena is the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) at Yale. Prior to Yale, she was the Associate Director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also received her doctorate in Anthropology. Dr. Stone-Cadena was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Saint Peter's University.
A broadly trained socio-cultural anthropologist, her research interests include indigeneity and ethnicity, transnationalism, diaspora, and mobility studies, and the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity across the Americas, with a focus on Andean Ecuador. Part of an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars on human smuggling and migrant facilitation, she presented her work at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, at the Watson Institute at Brown University, at the VU in Amsterdam, at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her publications include, “Historicizing Mobility: Coyoterismo in the Indigenous Ecuadorian Migration Industry” published in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and “Indigenous Ecuadorian Mobility Strategies in the Clandestine Migration Journey,” published in Geopolitics.
At CUNY, Dr. Stone-Cadena was an active member of committees on diversity, equity, and inclusion and oversaw the CUNY Mellon Faculty Diversity Career Enhancement Initiative, a cross campus mentorship and professionalization program, in collaboration with the principal investigator. Most recently, she served on the steering committee the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Initiative, a Mellon funded cross institutional research collaboration, and led the workshop on indigenous migration at the inaugural Summer Institute for graduate fellows. She conducted a multi-lingual environmental justice study in Rockland County and held cultural awareness workshops with community level health practitioners for newly arriving immigrants. Prior to the pandemic, she convened monthly indigenous migration workshops for scholars, activists, and immigration lawyers, and helped organize a language justice conference with NYC community-based organizations in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance, the New York Public Library and New York City Commissioners Office on Human Rights. She actively works as an expert witness on asylum cases and served as the co-chair for the Latin American Studies Association Expert Witness Section for three years.