Professor Menjívar's research focuses on the structural roots of inequalities and on how individuals’ social locations shape their responses to such conditions. The theoretical strand connecting her work centers on the state and its actions: how state power manifests–through legal regimes, bureaucracies, and formal institutions–in the microprocesses of everyday life in various contexts. This thread links her two empirical areas of work: contexts that immigrants (mostly Central Americans) encounter (mostly) in the United States and the judicial system failures that sustain gender-based violence in Central America.