SWJ– El Centro Associate Marisa Mendoza Successfully Defends Dissertation
On Tuesday 8 April 2025, SWJ–El Centro Associate Marisa Mendoza successfully defended her dissertation, “Building the Beast: The Evolution of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) From Street Gang to Transnational Criminal Organization,” at Claremont Graduate University. She has been researching and writing over a multiyear period. As a component of her defense, she utilized a 71-slideshow presentation detailing the research, analysis, implications, and future research questions related to the dissertation to her doctoral committee and to the physical and virtual audience in attendance. In the past, she has published multiple co-authored Mexican Cartel Tactical Notes and, in 2019, co-authored (with Dr. Robert J. Bunker and Dr. John P. Sullivan) the Law Enforcement Restricted version of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) Law Enforcement Primer for the California Gang Investigators Association (CGIA).
The Senior Fellows and Fellows of SWJ–El Centro are extremely proud of Marisa Mendoza’s academic achievements and long-standing association with El Centro. She has a unique subject matter expertise with a macro (strategic) level of MS-13 evolutionary knowledge across space and time, encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere— West Coast-Southwest, Midwest-Texas Border, East Coast, Northern Triangle, and Mexico, which few, if any other, applied gang/TCO researchers presently possess. Her dissertation highlighted the gang’s evolution via environmental, competitive, and evolutionary adaptations in all of the different geographic zones (niches) where it operates. This biological-complex adaptive network approach better accounts for the criminal organization’s growth and transitional proliferation than earlier studies which were far more micro analytical in their depth and breadth of the gang’s activities. Given the new administration’s national security focus on the Mexican cartels and transnational street gangs (including MS-13), her knowledge and expertise will hopefully in the future be utilized for informed policy making and counter-gang/TCO mitigation efforts.
