About Melissa Hurtado Nuez

Melissa Hurtado Nuez was born in Havana, Cuba. Her family’s journey to the United States began in 1994, when her father pushed a makeshift raft off Havana’s eastern coast and began a perilous seven-day journey toward Florida. Settlement in the US was fraught: headlines cast “boat people” as threats to national security and drains on public resources. From an early age, Melissa learned how public narratives and policy regimes shape immigrants’ access to safety, resources, and belonging.

After seven years of separation, Melissa joined her father Florida in 2001. Her early years in the US were shaped by economic precarity. With her father working construction and her mother cleaning hotel rooms, they moved frequently to keep up with rising housing costs. Eventually, the family settled in Ocala, Florida, where Melissa’s father managed a horse farm that provided housing and the family quickly settled into the rhythms of rural life. Melissa served as her family’s primary translator, handling administrative tasks and mediating tenant disputes.

Melissa went on to become the first in her family to graduate from university, earning a degree in statistics from Hunter College. She began her career as a data analyst at Bloomberg, but the Covid-19 pandemic redirected her path. As anti-immigrant rhetoric resurged and her parents faced illness without insurance and exclusion from relief, Melissa was motivated to return to graduate school to study the processes that shape immigrant well-being in the US.

Melissa completed a master’s degree in Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Her thesis examined the beliefs and practices of Latino and Caribbean immigrant gun owners in Florida. She found that exercising Second Amendment rights allows some immigrants to assert belonging and seek protection amid hostility. This work earned her an Emergent Scholar Fellowship from Arizona State University’s BRIDGS Center.

Melissa is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at Rice University, where she studies immigration, health, and guns in society. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, her research examines how immigrant communities construct alternative pathways to safety and belonging. At Rice, she is an active member of the quantitative methods working group and collaborates on research projects with faculty and graduate students. One of these projects resulted in a first-author publication in Social Science Research. Her work has been selected for presentation at the American Sociological Association, the Guns in Society Symposium, and the Population Association of America.

After completing her doctoral training, Melissa plans to pursue a career as an academic researcher to produce scholarship that informs more equitable public policy and mentor the next generation of social scientists.