In an interview with the Maroon, alum Mónica Ruiz House (A.B. ’24) discussed her selection as a Marshall Scholar, one of the most prestigious international fellowships awarded to American college graduates.
Ruiz House is the 30th UChicago affiliate since 1986 to receive the Marshall Scholarship, which provides American students with a one or two-year stipend to study at any British university.
Ruiz House shared her journey from a small town to becoming an advocate for immigrant rights, and her plans to continue this work through upcoming studies at Oxford University.
Growing up in Holly, Michigan—a town that is 90 percent white—Ruiz House explained that she often felt different but couldn’t pinpoint why. As one of the few biracial and immigrant families in her small town, these feelings came into focus during her high school years.
“I remember someone saw me with my dad, who was Mexican—so, brown—and he said, ‘I didn’t know you were one of them,’” Ruiz House recalled.
She said these experiences took on new meaning during the racial justice movements of 2020. “For the longest time in my upbringing, I couldn’t put a finger on why I felt different,” she said. “But when we started having conversations about race during the Black Lives Matter movement, that really made me introspect about my own experiences as a biracial person in Holly.”
It wasn’t until college that Ruiz House began exploring her identity and immigrant rights advocacy. A pivotal moment came when she interviewed her father about his immigration story for a class with Susan Gzesh, a UChicago instructional professor, former senior lecturer, and the executive director of the University of Chicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.
“I think immigrant parents are closed off in some ways, that there are some things they don’t share with you that you have to figure out bits and pieces of their story,” Ruiz House said.
Through this assignment, she sat down with her father to learn why he came to the United States—and why he stayed. “There were a lot of really terrible things going on in [his hometown]. People were disappearing,” she explained.
She learned that he had originally come to the U.S. on an H-3 trainee visa with plans to return to Mexico, but escalating drug violence—including the death of a cousin’s fiancée—made her father realize it wouldn’t be safe to raise a binational family in Mexico under those conditions.
These early experiences with immigration and identity shaped Ruiz House’s path at UChicago, where she began pursuing opportunities in humanitarian work and advocacy. Through the University’s Human Rights Summer Internship Program, she secured an internship with the International Rescue Committee, which led her to work at a military base during the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Despite the position paying under the minimum wage requirement, Ruiz House felt compelled to help. While there, she assisted refugees who had fought alongside U.S. military forces.
“These people literally lost everything,” Ruiz House recalled. She noted one mother’s gratitude for simple Barbie bandages as particularly impactful.
Ruiz House’s humanitarian work extended to the U.S.–Mexico border as well, where she worked with No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization that provides life-saving aid to migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert. The group leaves water and supplies along known migrant routes and conducts search and rescue operations for people in distress.
Alongside groups like the Armadillos Search and Rescue, who are “50-year-old day laborers who drive down from San Diego in the 100-degree heat,” according to Ruiz House, she has walked over 150 miles of migrant routes in the desert, conducting search and recovery missions for the organization—sometimes finding human remains.
She explained that the work has taught her to distinguish human bones from animal bones and how to estimate the age of discarded water bottles by their sound—skills that she said illuminate the human cost of the 1994 “Prevention through Deterrence” policy. This Clinton-era border strategy pushed migration routes away from urban areas into treacherous desert terrain by increasing security and barriers in cities, assuming migrants would be deterred by deadly natural barriers. Instead, according to Ruiz House, it has forced people to attempt increasingly dangerous desert crossings, leading to thousands of deaths in remote areas.
“Being confronted firsthand with death fundamentally changes how you think about things,” Ruiz House said. “It’s really easy to read about migrant deaths in a book, but to be in the desert, to literally see human bones, to leave water and crosses where people have died—it sticks with you in a way that I don’t think it sticks with you when you read a book.”
For Ruiz House, these hands-on experiences have profoundly shaped her academic work, including research with professor Chiara Galli on municipal ID programs and unaccompanied minors in immigration court. She said combining academic research with field work is essential: “I don’t think you can be grounded as an academic if you don’t have some of that field work experience.”
Ruiz House will pursue further studies in criminology and Refugee Studies at Oxford University, home to what she considers “the best border criminology program in the entire world.” However, the transition comes at a challenging time for her—as a community organizer in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, she’s currently helping build response networks for potential ICE raids.
“It’s hard to leave at this moment because we’re doing such important work,” Ruiz House said.
Looking ahead, Ruiz House plans to use her Marshall Scholarship to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. The U.S. has not passed major immigration legislation since President Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted legal status to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. Since then, attempts to overhaul the immigration system have repeatedly failed in Congress, leaving millions in legal limbo and forcing many to attempt dangerous border crossings.
“People don’t want to walk 70 miles through 100-degree heat carrying 40 pounds of water on their back,” Ruiz House said. “If there were legal alternatives, people would be using them.”
For Ruiz House, the scholarship represents more than personal achievement: it’s a tool for legitimizing the humanity of those she serves. “The whole purpose of having an institution behind you is to use it on the people you love and the issues you care about,” she said.
