Born and raised in Bogotá, ancestral land of the Musicas, Carolina Alonso Bejarano (aka Rataprincess) is a scholar-activist, cartoonist and DJ living in London and Brooklyn, ancestral land of the Lenape. She is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, and she teaches Law at the University of Warwick. As a DJ, Carolina produces beats, remixes classics and has performed across the world —from Medellín to Berlin to Goa. As a researcher and organizer, her interests lie at the intersection of art and the law, particularly in relation to the immigrants’ rights movement in the US and reproductive justice in the Americas.
Carolina has produced numerous multimedia events on activism and community organizing the UK and the US, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Feminist Formations, The Believer, WritersMosaic, Revista BLAST and Jadaliyya, among others. Notably, along with her fellow New Jersey immigrants’ rights activists, in 2015 Carolina wrote, produced and performed the play Undocumented/Unafraid about the rights of undocumented immigrants in the US. Her debut book, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (2019, Duke University Press), was written with her field collaborators, women community organizers in New Jersey, about the liberatory possibilities of ethnographic research.
Carolina’s forthcoming projects include Undocu-Artivism, a book portraying the artworks of various undocumented activists in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvannia (edited with comrades Teresa Vivar and Mirian Mijangos García), and If We Survive the Future, a graphic novel about an intercultural couple living in NYC (with creative partner Peter Quach).