Victoria Gutierrez

Victoria Gutierrez is an undergraduate researcher at UCLA in the anthropology department. In addition to being a Keck fellow, she is a Lemelson Scholar, and a 2024 Undergraduate Research Fellow. Victoria’s honors thesis is an ethnography of Slab City and Bombay Beach, two communities located on the coast of California’s Salton Sea. Her work seeks to explore how marginalized people often turn to atypical forms of government and political structures to fulfill basic needs, as well as establishing a sense of community. Her thesis tackles themes of inequity, political organization, community building, and ecological crisis.