She was born and raised in an immigrant family in the El Paso/Juárez border area, and earned her BA and MA in English and Women’s Studies from New Mexico State University and her PhD in Literature from the University of California at San Diego. Her research interests include the analysis of gender, labor, immigration, and representation in contemporary cultural productions. She has also studied and published essays on how current globalization projects have impacted the lives of women on the U.S./Mexico border area and how those changes are represented.
Her book, Domestic Disturbances: Reimagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration (UT Press, Nov 2014), suggests a new way of looking at Chicana/Latina immigrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the conditions of immigration occurring in our current historical moment
