Gabriel Martin Herrera

Gabriel obtained his Bachelors degree in Social Relations and Policy, with a Minor in History, from Michigan State University. Despite not having yet had aspirations of entering academia, Gabriel spent his undergraduate years as the education chair for DreaMSU, in which he curated, researched, and presented bi-weekly lectures concerning different diaspora groups in the United States, and the manner in which American foreign policy and global capitalism contributed to their displacement. 

This approach was centred on the goal of underlining the reality that immigration does not occur in a vacuum in which the United States is a “shining city on a hill”, and rather, is often the direct blow-back of the structural and kinetic violence perpetrated by the United States in its efforts to maintain global hegemony. Throughout this time, Gabriel also volunteered as a neighborhood liaison with the Institute for Community Empowerment in Chicago, surveying neighbourhood concerns, and organising residents to vote on binding ballot measures that redirected funds to subsidise previously defunded mental-health and social service programs.

After graduation, Gabriel undertook his MSc in Labour and Development here at SOAS, during which his research interests coalesced around Mexican political-economy, specifically the manner in which the country’s primary engine of economic development has also served as it’s primary barrier — its function as an auxiliary labour reserve for its northern neighbour.  After finishing his MSc, Gabriel took a year off, working as a part-time researcher for his now supervisor, Dr. Carlos Oya, while taking the initial steps towards developing his DPhil research project.   

Gabriel’s research project concerns the manner in MORENA’s “Fourth Transformation” of Mexico has inverted the country's historical inclination for economic upgrading to precede social upgrading — and in the case of the post-ISI model — actually be predicated on social downgrading. By comparatively analysing how the national labour regime has mediated macro-regional and local dynamics within the automotive sector across Mexico’s post-revolutrionary, post-ISI, and contemporary eras, in turn, generating disparate outcomes for the relationship between social and economic upgrading, Gabriel seeks to recentre the role that domestic market vitality plays in promoting a complementary relationship between economic growth and social development in export-orientated economies whose GVC participation is primarily charecterised by adverse incorporation. His research additionally seeks to underline the manner in which organised labour constitute labour regimes vis-a-vis their posture towards firms and the state, and identifying the mechanisms through which the state can empower worker’s capacity to contest employers. 

• Labour Regimes
• Global Value Chains
• Mexican Political-Economy
• Post-Revolutionary State-Making