Ballí was born on April 21, 1976 in Brownsville, Texas. She is the daughter of Antonia and Cristobal Balli, immigrants from Mexico. She has a fraternal twin, Celia and an older sister, Cristina. In the early 1980s, her family spent summers as migrant workers in California. They took long trips on the way, visiting reservations and natural sites. Cristina Ballí described their father, who died in 1987 when Cecilia was 11 years old, as "a cultural anthropologist, without an education." Cecilia Ballí attended Homer Hanna High School in Brownsville and graduated valedictorian in 1994. She spent several summers as a staff writer at The Brownsville Herald. Ballí did her undergraduate studies at Stanford University, where she received a Mellon minority undergraduate research grant and participated in the Irvine summer program for future doctoral students. Her thesis was on the Tejano dance music scene and Tejano talk radio. In 1998, Ballí was the co-recipient of the 1998 Arturo Islas Jr. Prize for overall academic excellence and the winner of the 1998 Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts. She graduated with honors in 1998, with a degree in American Studies and Spanish. She interned in 1998 at the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Ballí has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She was a 2002 Soros fellow and her 2009 dissertation was: “Murdered Women on the Border: Gender, Territory and Power in Ciudad Juárez.”
Career
Ballí has been a writer-at-large for the Texas Monthly since 2000, where she covers borders, security and immigration. She wrote the introduction to the 2005 book No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention. In 2008, Ballí joined the anthropology department at the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor where she remained until 2014. She continued her work as an independent journalist while teaching and researching. Ballí has written for many publications including: Harper’s, including the 2012 story "Calderón’s War: The gruesome legacy of Mexico" and The New York Times Magazine, including a feature about Arizona border towns. In 2014, Ballí was a fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. She was the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2015 Jesse H. Jones Dobie Paisano Fellow. At the time, she told the Statesman that years of researching and writing about violence left her with post-traumatic stress. "The border, it’s a very lively place. It’s always remaking itself, but something about it feels like it’s changed permanently. The fear, the inability to literally move through space in the same way, the inability to relate to family across the border in the same way — all that has changed," she said. Ballí started the communications strategy firm Culture Concepts LLC in 2018.
