Matias Boon

Eileen Truax is a veteran journalist specialized in migration and politics. She’s a Knight-Wallace Fellow 2019-2020 at the University of Michigan. She currently lives in Ann Arbor.

Eileen was born in Mexico City, where she was a political reporter and a Congress correspondent. In 2004 she moved to Los Angeles. For seven years she worked for La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the US. In recent years her work has been published in several media outlets in the US, Latin America and Spain, such as The Washington Post, Vice, El Universal, Americas Quarterly, The New York Times ES, Newsweek ES, Gatopardo magazine and 5W magazine, among others. 

She's the author of three books: Dreamers: an Immigrant Generation's Fight for their American Dream (Beacon Press 2015); We Built the Wall. How the US keeps out asylum seekers from Mexico, Central America and Beyond (Verso 2018), and How does it feel to be unwanted. Stories of resistance and resilience from Mexicans living in the United States (Beacon Press 2018). All of them have been published in Spanish too, and her work has been published in six other books.
 
Eileen has a B.A. in Social Communication and an M.A. in Communication and Politics (Summa Cum Laude). She has been a fellow with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ); the International Women Media Foundation (IWMF), and the Iber-American Foundation for New Journalism (FNPI). She has also been a board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). Currently she’s the Content Director of the International Migration Journalism Symposium, an annual event celebrated in Mérida, Spain.