Writer and geographer Caroline Tracey will visit The University of New Mexico next month to give a lecture that explores the religious and historical roots of humanitarian work along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The lecture, titled "The Theology of Smuggling: A Genealogy of Humanitarianism in the Borderlands," is scheduled for Monday, Nov. 3 at 5 p.m. in George Pearl Hall's Garcia Honda Auditorium. A reception will follow the event. The event is part of the UNM School of Architecture and Planning's Fall 2025 Lecture Series.

Tracey's talk looks at how Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries helped shape modern-day activism in the desert Southwest. Her research connects early missionary work by the Presbyterian Church in southern Arizona to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, when clergy and legal advocates in Tucson helped Central American refugees fleeing civil wars find safety in the United States.

Tracey is the inaugural winner of the On the Brinck | Places Prize, a collaboration between UNM's School of Architecture and Planning and the journal Places. The prize recognizes ambitious public scholarship about the American Southwest, inspired by the work of landscape writer and critic John Brinckerhoff Jackson.

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, n+1, High Country News, and in Spanish in Mexico City's Nexos. She also contributes literary criticism to The New Republic, The Nation, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and writes about art for SFMOMA's Open Space, Burlington Contemporary, and the National Gallery of Art's East-West Series.

Tracey's first book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. A Fulbright fellowship and grants from the University of Colorado Center for Environmental Journalism and the American Council of Learned Societies have supported her research.

She has also received the Waterston Desert Writing Prize (2022), an Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights (2023), a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress Grant (2023), and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's Grant (2024).

Tracey holds degrees in Russian literature, rangeland ecology, and geography. She lives between Tucson, Ariz., and Mexico City with her wife, Mexican architect Mariana GJP.

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