Cecilia Ball铆
ASU Media Enterprise Fellow, 2025
Cecilia Ball铆 is a journalist and cultural anthropologist whose writing explores the U.S.-Mexico border region and Mexican American and Latino history, culture, and politics. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper鈥檚 Magazine, and the Columbia Journalism Review. For 20 years, she was a writer-at-large at Texas Monthly and previously served as an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ball铆 is currently writing a book for Flatiron Books that tells the story of three of the country鈥檚 most talented and highly competitive high school mariachis in Starr County, Texas, set against a backdrop of polarizing border policy, the changing demographics of Texas and America, and what it means to come of age straddling cultures and identities. A native of the border, Ball铆 turns the narrative of Latinos as foreigners on its head, situating Mexican American history, culture, and music at the heart of the American experience. She has previously done ethnographic research on the sexual killing of young women in Ciudad Ju谩rez, border enforcement and construction of the border wall, and Latino voters and political identities.
Ball铆 was a finalist for the Livingston Award and has held writing residencies with the Lannan Foundation and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program. She lives in San Antonio.
Selected Work
- : A story in the New York Times Magazine about the national championship of high school mariachis and life and politics on the U.S.-Mexico border.
- : An essay in the New York Times about the beauty of border communities and the waning of cross-border life due to increasing border enforcement.
- : A travel story in the New York Times about the longstanding sisterhood between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora.
Fellowships
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