Germán Pallares Avitia was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chih (México). Growing up in the pre-NAFTA, pre-911 Mexican side of the Cd. Juárez/El Paso border, Germán became interested in questions of culture, citizenship, nationalism, and transnationalism, interests reflected in his current scholarship. German’s work is interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as Border, Chicano, and Gender Studies, Environmental History, and Urbanism, and explores Post-colonial and De-colonial concepts that refine understandings of territories, nations, identity, and migration as they relate to urban and architectural conditions.

German’s PhD dissertation Life on the Border: Constructing the México-US Borderlands, 1961-1971, brings into the architecture field a humanized history of the governmental urban and architectural projects that aimed to create more connected borderlands in the 1960s. 

Germán is an architect, researcher, professor, and podcaster. His podcast, From the Margins: Perspectives on the Built Environment, is a space for conversations on architecture and the built environment that puts the work of historically marginalized and oppressed cultural producers at the forefront of the discussion. Germán is currently an Assistant professor at the Department of Architecture at RISD.