In today’s episode of Words on a Wire, host, Daniel Chacon interviews Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas on her book A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, where she examines the creative worlds and cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City within the context of a system of racial capitalism that marginalizes Mexican migrants via an exploitative labor market, criminalizing immigration policy, and racialized systems of surveillance.

Dr. Castillo Planas’ work has been published in numerous collections such as Centering Borders: Explorations in South Asia and Latin America , Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas and diverse scholarly and media publications including Border – Lines, Lengua y Literature, Acentos Review, Hispanic Culture Review, El Diario/La Prensa, CNN.com The Bilingual Review, Women's Studies, and Words. Beats