Cecilia Ballí is a writer and journalist who has been writing for magazines for more than twenty years. In 2000, she became the first Latina or Latino writer at Texas Monthly, where she published longform stories and essays as a writer-at-large. She has written extensively about Tejano history and culture, immigration, the sexual killing of young women in Ciudad Juárez, U.S.-Mexican border drug violence, and Mexican military disappearances and torture, among other subjects. She has also published stories in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. She began her journalism career as a high school senior writing for her hometown newspaper, The Brownsville Herald, and later worked as an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.
Ballí is also a cultural anthropologist who taught for six years as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on Tejano and norteño musical culture and intra-ethnic tension between Mexicans and Mexican Americans; gendered violence on the border and the sexual killing of young women; U.S.-Mexico border enforcement and the border wall; and Latino voting and civic engagement. In 2014, she left academia to focus on reporting and writing. She has since served as a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts; a Visiting Scholar at the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American and Latino/a Studies, and a Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Humanities Institute.
As a writer, Ballí has held artist residencies with the Lannan Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Lanesboro Arts Center, and she was the 2014-2015 Jesse H. Jones Dobie Paisano Fellow with the Texas Institute of Letters. In previous years, she was a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and was named Emerging Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Her stories and essays have appeared in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Crime Writing; Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature; and Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from La Frontera.
In 2018, Ballí launched Culture Concepts, a creative and strategic consultancy focused on ethnographic research, cultural analysis and storytelling. She continues to write for various publications. Her latest story for The New York Times Magazine, “A Championship Season in Mariachi Country,” chronicled a season of competition in Starr County, on the Texas-Mexico border, among the nation’s three top-ranked high school mariachis. Ballí is writing a narrative nonfiction book inspired by the story, titled Mariachi Dreams, for Henry Holt, an imprint of MacMillan Publishers.
Ballí holds a B.A. in American Studies and Spanish from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University. The daughter of former migrant farmworkers, she grew up regularly crossing the Brownsville/Matamoros border and is a proud tejana and fronteriza. She’s roamed throughout Texas much of her life, but currently calls San Antonio home.
