Fourth-year UChicago student Mónica Ruiz House has been named the second annual recipient of the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence, in recognition of her exceptional commitment to social justice and public service throughout her academic career.
“In addition to excelling with her studies, Mónica’s focus on migrants’ rights during her time in the College has been commendable," said Melina Hale, dean of the College. "We are proud to honor her accomplishments and look forward to seeing what more she will do in the years to come."
The Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence is the highest honor bestowed upon a UChicago undergraduate, in recognition of the same qualities of its namesake: unwavering hope, ambition for others and an abiding courage of conviction.
“As I see it, the Sonnenschein is as much an aspiration for myself as it is for the University,” Ruiz House said. “It is a call to live out our moral codes unflinchingly—even when doing so is critiqued as radical. ‘Radical,’ as the activist Angela Davis reminds us, ‘simply means grasping things at the root.’”
Her impressive service has earned her several awards and accolades including the Perry Herst Prize from the University Community Service Center and, most recently, a grant from the nationally competitive Projects for Peace.
Projects for Peace awarded her a $10,000 grant to implement a grassroots project with an Arizona-based migrant advocacy group called No More Deaths.
Together, Ruiz House and her colleagues plan to spearhead a comprehensive data project to map the locations where migrants have lost their lives while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The project will surpass the scope of previous mapping projects by documenting fatalities in seven additional counties along the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts.
The data they collect will be housed on a public-facing website that tracks migrant fatalities from 1986 onward. The digital map will situate these deaths in their respective political context to show that they are not naturaland instead that they are a direct result of a 1994 Border Patrol policy called "prevention through deterrence," Ruiz House said.
“We hope that policy changes will also occur as data on the impacts of prevention through deterrence become more robust,” she said. “By drawing attention to the human cost of policies like this one, we hope to push border policy in a peaceful direction: with accountability, transparency, and compassion for migrant life as guiding principles."
Ruiz House, who will graduate from the College with a quadruple degree in Law, Letters & Society, Sociology, Spanish, and Latin American & Caribbean studies, grew up in the small town of Holly, Mich. about an hour’s drive northwest of Detroit and 1,700 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Despite the distance to the border, Ruiz House said Holly sometimes felt like a border town. Her father spoke Spanish while she and her siblings spoke English at home. They cooked Mexican food with American ingredients, while most of their family was an entire country away.
“Living at this intersection [of cultures] motivated me to interrogate the impacts of borders on migrant populations and their descendants—impacts that often extend far beyond the physical border itself,” she said.
Ruiz House has channeled this motivation into extensive work with non-profit organizations and grassroots campaigns focused on migrants’ rights. She has worked with the International Rescue Committee, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, and Chicago’s Treatment not Trauma Coalition. This work has taken her to unique places, from military-bases-turned-refugee-camps to remote regions of the Sonoran Desert for her Project for Peace.
Ruiz House attributes her success to the support of her mentors, colleagues, and friends. She credits her fellow organizers at No More Deaths, the staff members at the College Center for Research and Fellowships for reviewing her various national fellowship application drafts, and Dr. John Chamblee at Humane Borders for inspiring the next generation of digital humanitarians.
More information about the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence can be found online here. The nomination process for the 2025 honoree will begin in autumn quarter, 2024.