About Enrique Olivares-Pelayo
Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo is a doctoral candidate and University of Arizona Fellow in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona, where he works with Dr. Stefano Bloch. He is a 2026–27 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar and received an honorable mention for the 2024 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
His research examines how racial categories are produced and enforced inside prison. He argues that racialization in prison is spatially contingent: racial rules are set by conditions specific to the site, including housing assignment, yard politics, and the physical layout of the unit, rather than carried in unchanged from outside. Incarcerated people negotiate these categories with a degree of agency that structuralist accounts of race and punishment tend to overlook.
His method is autoethnographic. He served four years in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, and treats that experience as primary data alongside interviews and participant observation. His dissertation, Running Raza: An Ethnography From Inside Arizona's Prisons, examines Hispanic identity construction on Arizona prison yards. He expects to complete the PhD in May 2027.
He has published eight peer-reviewed articles, including in Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, and Geoforum. Two sole-authored articles are under revise and resubmit at Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Geoforum.
He has taught Environment and Society in the Southwest Borderlands as instructor of record at the University of Arizona. He is also Program Manager at Just Communities Arizona and has consulted for the City of South Tucson on restorative justice and economic development.
He holds an MA in English and dual BAs in English and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and an AS from Pima Community College.
C.V.
Enrique's Curriculum Vitae
EDUCATION
PhD, Geography (Expected May 2027) School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona Dissertation: Running Raza: An Ethnography From Inside Arizona’s Prisons Chair: Dr. Stefano Bloch
MA, English (2022) Accelerated Master’s Program, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona
BA, English; BA, Creative Writing (2021) College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona Honors College Summa Cum Laude with Honors
AS, Liberal Arts (2019) Pima Community College, Tucson, Arizona
PUBLICATIONS
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Kass, H., Olivares-Pelayo, E. A., & Seal, R. (2026). Abolition means attack! Towards an insurrectionary theory of abolition. Human Geography, 19427786261471182.
- Bloch, S., Martínez, D. E., Olivares-Pelayo, E., Ovienmhada, U., Fatica, R., & Strong, J. D. (2026). Crimmigration and the carceral fix in Arizona. Punishment & Society, 14624745261455337.
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2025). Spatially contingent racialization: A prison site ontology. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 02637758251393418.
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2025). Banging them out: An affective politics of prison sound. Geoforum, 164, 104351.
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2024). Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches. Geography Compass, 18(3), e12742. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12742
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2024). Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition. Progress in Human Geography, 48(1), 3–17.
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2024). Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona. Theoretical Criminology, 28(2), 212–231.
- Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2023). Politics and prison ink in Arizona: A map for navigation in a world of post-structural violence. Journal of the Southwest, 65(3), 302–313. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsw.2023.a915206
- Bloch, S., & Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2021). Carceral geographies from inside prison gates: The micro-politics of everyday racialisation. Antipode, 53(5), 1319–1338.
Edited Volume Chapters
- Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. (2025). Professionally formerly incarcerated. In Handbook on Lived Experience in the Justice System (pp. 449–451). Routledge.
Under Review
- Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. Where’s the Raza? Racial priming and the material life of codes. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. (Revise and resubmit)
- Olivares-Pelayo, E. A. Responsibility under confinement: carceral relational ontology, self-reliance, and abolitionist knowledge in Arizona. Geoforum. (Revise and resubmit)
Grants, Fellowships and Awards
National and External
- 2026–27 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award ($25,000)
- 2024 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship — Honorable Mention and Waitlist
Institutional Fellowships and Grants
- 2025–26 Dr. Maria Teresa Velez Leadership Scholarship, University of Arizona ($25,000)
- 2023–24 Fronteridades Fellowship, Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry, University of Arizona ($8,000). Faculty Mentor: Dr. Stefano Bloch
- 2023–24 Hispanic Alumni Graduate Scholarship, University of Arizona ($6,000)
- 2022–23 University Fellowship, School of Geography, Development, & Environment, University of Arizona ($32,000). Faculty Mentor: Dr. Stefano Bloch
- 2022–23 University Fellows Professional Development Award, University of Arizona ($500)
Honors and Recognitions
- 2021 Provost Award, Graduating Class, University of Arizona
- 2021 Summa Cum Laude with Honors; Outstanding Transfer Student Award, Honors College, University of Arizona
Selected Conference Presentations
- 2026 Crimmigration and the Carceral Fix in Arizona. American Association of Geographers Annual Conference. San Francisco.
- 2025 Running Raza: Latinx Identity Construction within the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. American Society of Criminology Annual Conference. Washington, D.C.
- 2025 Professionally “Formerly-Incarcerated.” American Society of Criminology Annual Conference. Washington, D.C.
- 2025 Creating a Convoy: Bringing Directly Impacted and Formerly-Incarcerated People into the World of Abolitionist Praxis in Arizona. American Association of Geographers Annual Conference. Detroit.
- 2023 Contingent Carceral Identity and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona. American Association of Geographers Annual Conference. Denver.
Teaching
Teaching
- 2024–25 Instructor of Record, Environment and Society in the Southwest Borderlands, University of Arizona
- 2023–24 Graduate Teaching Assistant, Crime and the City, University of Arizona. Faculty Instructor: Dr. Stefano Bloch
Community Engaged Practice
Community-Engaged Practice
Community Safety Incubator Program Manager, Just Communities Arizona, Tucson, AZ (2020–Present)
- Work with directly impacted people to advocate for punishment reform in Arizona
- Developed and maintained the largest outreach mechanism in Arizona for Prop 207 expungement assistance
- Organize justice reinvestment initiatives funded by the Arizona Department of Health Services, including Community Safety Incubator Projects that support Tucsonans in transforming their own sense of community safety
- Develop the leadership of justice-impacted people through workshops on media interviews, storytelling, and narrative framing
- Support research on transformative justice, community safety, and abolitionist philosophy
Consultant, City of South Tucson, AZ (2026)
Justice infrastructure and community design consulting, including support for restorative justice training, community safety planning, and incubator-based community programs.
Portfolio
Download or preview all of Enrique's published academic work here
- All
- Bodies & Affects
- Prison
- Race
Politics and prison ink in Arizona: A map for navigation in a world of post-structural violence
Drawing on the four years I served in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, this essay reads prison tattoos as a map. In Arizona’s prisons, “politics” is the racial rulebook that governs daily life, and ink becomes an iconographic language a prisoner must learn to read quickly or risk serious harm. Prison ink is at once an act of agency and evidence of a racialized order internalized in order to survive it: a mark that follows people home and keeps them excluded. The map leads in one direction. The task is to draw another.
Abolition means attack! Towards an insurrectionary theory of abolition
Abolition means attack! Towards an insurrectionary theory of abolition
Human Geography (2026) · with Hannah Kass and Ryan Seal
In this article, we propose an insurrectionary theoretical framework for approaching prison abolition. We argue that transformative change arises not merely from top-down legislative reforms and grassroots consciousness-raising but also from sustained, collective resistance generated from within carceral spaces. This analysis is grounded in 20 years of support and political collaboration with prisoners and detainees across the United States, the authors’ own experiences of incarceration, as well as careful observation of prisoner and detainee resistance. We use insurrectionary theory to frame our analysis of a strategy for prison abolition that begins with direct resistance and disruption to prisons from the inside, in the form of strikes (including hunger strikes, work stoppages, protests, and boycotts), uprisings, and escapes. Drawing upon 15 years of empirical data collected via Perilous Chronicle (a research project one of us helped found, which focuses on the United States and Canada), we illustrate that organized prison resistance constitutes an ongoing movement capable of rendering prisons ungovernable. We end with a call to abolition geographers and other scholars and activists to integrate analyses of prisoner and detainee resistance into their theoretical frameworks and reassess strategic priorities. While an insurrectionary strategy may not be the only or at all times most effective route for dismantling prisons, it does represent a potent, ongoing strategy that many prisoners and detainees themselves choose to wield in confronting the carceral state in the United States.
Crimmigration and the carceral fix in Arizona
Crimmigration and the carceral fix in Arizona
Punishment & Society (2026) · with Stefano Bloch, Daniel E. Martínez, Ufuoma Ovienmhada, Ryan Fatica, and Justin D. Strong
This paper centers Arizona as a critical site in the racialized criminalization of immigrants — a practice known as “crimmigration” — and the associated adaptive reuse of prison infrastructure. Focusing on a closed prison facility in the Town of Marana that is slated to reopen as an immigration detention center, we propose the concept of a “carceral fix,” wherein declining incarceration rates are offset by expanded civil immigration detention. Expanding Gilmore’s theory of the “prison fix,” we show how political and legal adaptations enable private and public actors to repurpose existing prison space for immigrant confinement amid unprecedented federal investment and intensified racialized enforcement. “Carcerality” names this expansive system of cordoning, confinement, control of which immigrant detention is part. In doing so, we situate Marana within Southern Arizona’s long history of punitive prison politics and anti-Mexican social and legal sentiment, demonstrating how criminalization, racialization, and gang labeling continue to generate and profit from imprisoned populations in a state that has long served as a model for punishment.
Spatially contingent racialization: A prison site ontology.
Spatially contingent racialization: A prison site ontology
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2025) · with Stefano Bloch
This paper examines the racialization processes within the US prison system through the lens of site ontology. We argue that racial formation in prison cannot be understood through universalizing or structuralist notions of race alone. Rather, the prison as a site of racialization demonstrates that such processes are spatially contingent and actively negotiated. Drawing in part on personal experience, we reveal how prisoners engage in “running” race; that is, opting into specific racial affiliations as social and existential survival strategies that reflect both individual agency and site-specific prison “politics.” In elucidating this process, we contend that hierarchical conceptualizations and structuralist theories do not sufficiently account for spatially contingent racial categorization experienced by prisoners. We instead advance an ontologically flat, theoretically grounded, and relational understanding of racialization that is informed by experiential data and agentic discourse. Beyond this present paper, we argue that this ontological approach can also be applied to understanding processes of racialization and other forms of identity construction in sites far afield from the prison.
Banging them out: An affective politics of prison sound
Banging them out: An affective politics of prison sound
Geoforum, 164, 104351 (2025) · with Stefano Bloch
In this paper, we offer the examples of “banging out” and “quieting the run” to the prison and carceral geographies literature, highlighting the place-making capacities and material effect of sound within state-sanctioned and austere spaces of captivity. We argue that it is sound, as just one component of the affective atmosphere of prison, that allows prisoners to exert agentic control and traverse spatial and social distance through coordinated sonic attacks and forced silence orchestrated from the bottom up.
Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches.
Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches
Geography Compass, 18(3), e12742 (2024) · with Stefano Bloch · DOI
Motivated by a critical concern for state-sanctioned coercion, control, and containment across “free society,” geographers have extended Foucault’s concept of “the carceral” to more and increasingly diffuse spaces and processes. In this paper, however, we aim to re-center the prison in the carceral geographies literature, reasserting it as the sine qua non of the subfield. In doing so, we organize geographers’ analysis of prisons into nine conceptual categories based on this journal’s areas of geographical exploration: cultural, development, economic, environment, geographic information systems & quantitative, historical, political, social, and urban. In addition to providing a review of existing prison research in geography, we illustrate the diversity of disciplinary approaches to that most “complete and austere” of institutions.
Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition.
Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition
Progress in Human Geography, 48(1), 3–17 (2024) · with Stefano Bloch
Putting research and reflection on prison experience into conversation with the subfields of carceral and health geography, we discuss the “somatic carceral condition” as a visceral, bodily effect of prisonization. In doing so, we call for increased reliance on data derived from somatic experience as well as autoethnographic insight on imprisonment. More broadly, we argue, an embrace of somatic data used to tell the story of marginalization and captivity experienced in prison and across the carceral continuum can help advance the discipline of geography theoretically, methodologically, and in terms of contributing to praxis-based interventions.
Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona
Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona
Theoretical Criminology, 28(2), 212–231 (2024) · with Stefano Bloch
Prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) coordinate to circumvent full racial housing integration, revealing how “race” and adherence to the “racial code” is used as an organizing concept in carceral settings that is distinct from conceptualizations of race and politics of identity within free society. In addition to providing a review of the literature on the complexity of prison racialization, we base our discussion of racialization and adherence to the racial code on our combined experience as formerly racialized and gang-affiliated inmates, as well as on insights from informal and semi-structured interviews with prisoners who have navigated attempts at racial integration as part of the ADCRR’s recently adopted Integrated Housing Program.
Carceral geographies from inside prison gates: The micro-politics of everyday racialisation
Carceral geographies from inside prison gates
Antipode, 53(5), 1319–1338 (2021) · with Stefano Bloch
Addressing a need for carceral geographical research conducted from inside prison gates, we discuss the spatial context in which racialisation occurs, including its relationship to the performance of prison “politics.” We argue that the convoluted and contentious racial categorisation of prison inmates that begins with “racial priming” and results in “racial sorting” possesses a spatial logic derived from institutional partitioning and street-level cordoning of individual and group identities. We reveal how racialisation is relied upon through both a self-segregation and institutional classification system at the micro scale. Based on autoethnographic reflection as formerly jailed and incarcerated individuals, and through a reading of sociological, criminological, and geographical literatures, we argue that the logic of everyday micro-scale racial identity formation has more to do with location, gang alliances, antagonisms, and the necessary navigating of prison “politics” and protocol than with conceptualisations of “race” engendered by racial capitalism and enforced by the racial state.