My research sits at the intersection of race, nature and migrations. In Guatemala, I have finished research that resulted in the publication of Tierra, Migración y Vida en Petén (2012) and Green Wars (2017). In the US Pacific Northwest, I have examined the role of the Northwest Detention Center in immigrant rights. Thinking relationally across the US, Mexico and Guatemala, I also research transnational Latinidades.


​Green Wars

Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest.  Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples into neoliberal citizens. Even as Q’eqchi’s participate in conservation, Green Wars (University of California Press, 2017) amplifies their call for material decolonization by recognizing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land itself.
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​Northwest Detention Center

The Northwest Detention Center houses up to 1,575 people, against their will, every day while they await the outcome of an administrative immigration hearing. As a place, it articulates environmental racism, xenophobia and state violence.



​Transnational Latinidades

My research working with Q'eqchi' land activists challenged me to rethink my assumptions about a singular "Latinidad," or Latinx identity.