How does your research inform and transform your discipline?
In my work, I'm hoping to inspire religious studies scholars to pay attention to borderlands and to moments of fugitivity and escape. During graduate school and especially as I read for comprehensive exams, I realized that, when religious studies scholars wrote about migration, they were overwhelmingly preoccupied with arrivals and destinations. I noticed that transit, flight, and migratory journeys were being overlooked in the literature. Given that my fieldwork takes place in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands, I focus on and give priority to these moments of escape, movement, and transformation. I see the sacred in these moments of rupture and transformation, what Gloria Anzaldúa calls nepantla—the cracks in the everyday, the tierra entre medio.  

What drew you towards your field and work? 

My work is situated in religious studies and migration studies. And I would say what drew me to these fields or areas of research was — first and foremost — my experiences growing up as the daughter of an undocumented evangelical minister. My family came to the United States in 1998, when I was a child. Growing up in North Carolina and attending my dad's church, I became attuned to and interested in the ways Latinx migrants turn to ritual, to performance, to music, to language as a way to create the sacred and to imagine futures beyond citizenship. My academic training began as a child, listening to my father deliver intoxicating sermons to an audience of largely undocumented migrants. He diligently studied the etymology of words like alpha and omega, eros and agape. He transformed stories from the Hebrew Bible into allegories for the undocumented migrant experience. Every Sunday, I was riveted. And every Sunday, I took notes. This is what drew me in.

What do you like most about teaching art/humanities/humanistic social sciences? 

I really enjoy spending time with a text and with an author's ideas. I especially love those moments when students encounter a text and they can connect an idea or a phrase to their own lives and experiences. 

What is a challenge that you encountered in your teaching academic career and how have you addressed it? 

It's often difficult to teach to every student's needs and to design a classroom that is attentive to different expectations, backgrounds, and skills. So, I try to use many different techniques to engage my students and to incorporate a variety of readings, sources, and classroom discussion techniques. 

What advice do you have for graduate students in your field? 

In graduate school, I took courses in cultural anthropology, performance studies, and activist research methods. Throughout my doctoral training, my advisor, Todd Ramón Ochoa, encouraged me to study various genres and to embrace multiple voices and points of view in my own writing. That advice was such a gift, and so I'll pass it on. Use this time to experiment and play with language and methods. Often, we are taught to see graduate school as a time to learn the histories and boundaries of our discipline. But, I would encourage students to attend lectures and take courses outside of their field, to read unfamiliar and uncomfortable genres of writing, to pursue conversation partners whose work is different from their own. 

What projects are you working on at this moment? 

I'm completing my first manuscript, Sanctuaries Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert. This project is an ethnographic experiment that traces moments of care and refuge on the migrant trail. I'm also looking ahead to my next project, a collaboration with my father, who (as I mentioned earlier) is a formerly undocumented minister in the US south. We're working on an autoethnographic project about his conversion, our migration, and Latinx evangelicals in the United States.