Mamá. Scholar. comunidad.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, I write about transnational community formations, autonomy, mothering, and gendered migration. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Arizona and California Humanities Councils. In 2023, I was named Researcher of the Year by the Women’s Foundation of the State of Arizona. In 2025, I received the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) Tortuga Award and was named Distinguished Scholar at the University of Arizona. 

My work is published in several book anthologies, and in journals such as Gender & Society, Feminist Formations, Aztlán, Migration Studies and Chicana/Latina Studies; and in online outlets such as The Feminist Wire, Truth Out and Latino Rebels. I have two books, one is the co-edited The Chicana M(other)work Anthology (2019) and the second is Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect (2021), winner of the Book of the Year Award from the National Association for Chicana/o Studies, 2023. I’ve been involved in a number of grassroots projects where we used critical pedagogy, principles of sustainability, and community-based arts, performance, and visual media to work towards dignity and justice in our communities. These modalities were introduced to me by the student movement for Chicanx Studies that I participated in the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and philosophy, and by my involvement with Incite! Woman of Color Against Violence, a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities.

I am a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work Collective, the Binational Artist in Residency project, and the Arizona Son Jarocho Collective. In 2022, I was co-awarded two Mellon Funded Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative Grants for new work on Afro-Chicanx communities and Mexicana/Chicana activists in the borderlands. I taught at Arizona State University for nine years, at Northern Arizona University for two years, and have been at the University of Arizona since 2016 where I am currently Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies.