Nikolai Alvarado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science and co-director of the Latin American and Caribbean Cities Collective at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on migrant urbanisms, street politics, migrant-state relations, and racialized body-space constructions from a global South perspective. His ethnographic work involves Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica and takes place in La Carpio, the largest migrant urban informal settlement in Central America.