In 2014, my colleagues and I launched our doctoral program, the first in the world to link Latinx studies and Latin American studies. I help shape and expand these fields and I work for a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive university via my program-building, advising, mentoring, teaching, and leadership.
In addition to UC Santa Cruz's Excellence in Teaching Award, I've won grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, UC Online, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
I'm a first-generation college graduate and have a PhD in ethnic studies and a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
For my CV and more information about me and my work, please visit my website.
My expertise includes Latinx literature, visual culture, and performance; Mexican American women's history; zoot suits and style politics; immigration and assimilation; historical memory and erasure; and speculative fiction.
With Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I'm coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021). With A. Naomi Paik, I co-edit the Borderlands Section of Public Books. And with Jonathan X. Inda and Rebecca Schreiber, I'm coediting Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance, a volume that grows out of our 2022-24 Crossing Latinidades Andrew W. Mellon grant.
Speculative fiction, Afrofuturism and Latinxfuturism
Immigration and assimilation
Introduction to Latin American and Latinx studies (in process)
Comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences
Research in Practice
Global Internship (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Latin American Spain (Madrid, Spain)
Project Lead, Expanding Latinx Studies at and beyond UC Santa Cruz, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2023-24)
Co-Principal Investigator (with Gabriela Arredondo and Carlos Martinez), UC Online Project Funding, UC Online (2023-24)
Principal Investigator (with Jonathan X. Inda and Rebecca Schreiber), Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance, Crossing Latinidades Collaborative, Cross-Institutional, and Comparative Research Working Group in Latino Humanities Studies Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative (2022-24)
"Precarity and Belonging" (with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Camilla Hawthorne, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer), Research Center for the Americas, University of California, Santa Cruz, November 9, 2021.
"Contesting the Nation" (with Kathleen Belew, Jefferson Cowie, and Margaret Levi), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, February 25, 2020.
"Human Migration," UC Santa Cruz Original Thinkers Friday Forum, Santa Cruz, CA, January 27, 2017.
"Home and Mobility." Event Santa Cruz VI: Bridging the Gap between UCSC and Downtown Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, March, 19, 2014.
"The Economic Migrant and the Specter of Permanence in Why Cybraceros?, The Rag Doll Plagues, and Walk on Water." In The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, 189-200. New York: Routledge, 2024.