Alicia de los Ríos Merino is a Mexican historian, oral historian, and human rights advocate, born in San José Bachíniva, Chihuahua. She holds a doctorate in history, with a focus on ethnohistory, from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and also trained as a lawyer at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, where she is a full-time professor and researcher in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Her scholarship uses oral history to study youth movements, insurgencies, counterinsurgency, and the communities formed by the families of the forcibly disappeared in Mexico, from the second half of the twentieth century — particularly the period known as the Guerra Sucia, or Dirty War — to the present. She has published widely on this history, including a 2014 article on the psychological scars that state violence leaves on the memory of survivors. She is affiliated with the Red Nacional de Investigación de Historia del Tiempo Presente, the Red Iberoamericana de Resistencias y Memorias, and the Asociación Mexicana de Historia Oral. Beyond her academic work she is a prominent human rights activist. Since 2002 she has served as legal counsel in cases of grave human rights violations before Mexico's Fiscalía General de la República, work driven in part by her own search for her mother — also named Alicia de los Ríos Merino, a militant of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre who was forcibly disappeared by Mexican security forces in 1978 and remains missing.
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