What drew you towards your field and work? 
I started in the sciences. As an undergraduate student, I majored in Plant Sciences hoping to contribute to grow food for a hungry world. From there I gravitated to Latin American Studies and then to my passion for literary and cultural studies. Later, I began to pay close attention to border issues and decided to focus my work on that emergent field, by leveraging my personal and academic experiences living on two border regions. I grew up in the Arizona-Sonora region and spent time as a faculty member at Michigan State, near our northern border. Globalization processes have amplified the importance of border crossings and forced migrations. It has also become clear that you can’t study, analyze or understand borders only focusing on one side, one language or one discipline. To study borders, it is important to be adopt a inter/multidisciplinary approach with strong connections to the places and communities involved.

What advice do you have for graduate students in your field? 
Academia is like a marathon. You need to always keep this on mind. It is also a space that provides multiple opportunities to re-train and to re-invent oneself. I can say this from personal experience. Patience, “ganas” and resilience are qualities that go a long way for us academics. Making a difference for our communities is part of the long-term rewards. Taking good care of our bodies and our minds is also an important factor, balancing the personal and the professional is key.

What are the issues closer to you? 
In the academic world, increased representation, and promotion of Latinx scholars is critically important to sustain designations such as “Hispanic Serving.” Lowering barriers and expanding funding opportunities for Latinx students is fundamental to advance this mission. We need to continue adding incentives, so our faculty pipeline continues to grow. In addition, I am very interested in creating more equal partnerships between institutions of higher learning and underrepresented and underserved communities. I believe that we need to be less transactional and extractive in order to better serve these communities. Some issues closer to me include, social justice, human and migrant rights, and intentional efforts to reclaim cultural heritage and the historical place of Latinx at many levels of society.

What excites you most in your work? 
The possibility of educating new audiences while creating spaces for change. I believe that a deeper understanding of border dynamics will shed light on many aspects of global societal conditions. I also believe that these audiences can be successful agents of change. Moreover, border work needs to be transnational  and collaborative in order to be effective and meaningful. Writing and analyzing monolingually only one side of the border misses real opportunities to better understand these dynamics. I am also excited to see more and more and more students from border communities become part of higher education. Their cultural heritage and on the ground experiences are amazing resources they bring into academia.

What projects are you working on at this moment? 
I am working on two projects. The first is entitled Fronteridades: Migrancy, Testimonios and Self-Representation in Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border Writing and a modified version in Spanish: Fronteridades: Ensayos sobre identidad, cultura y testimonios trans-fronterizos. It explores the relationship between self-representation, space, and the border as a place of enunciation

The second project is titled “Necropolitical Cartographies: Cultural Representations of Cross-Border Displacements and Violence.” The project aims to identify theoretical, academic and community work that explores ways to rehumanize people who have been commodified and designated as surplus by economic and political systems.

How does your research inform and transform your discipline? In the same way, where do you see your discipline going?
While there have been major research efforts in the social sciences to study borders, migrations, and displacements from quantitative approaches, my work aims to create intersectional spaces of inquiry whereby scholars from the Humanities, the Arts and the humanistic social sciences as well as community-based practitioners and activists will convene to share, examine and disseminate ideas, methods, and new ways to interpellate the varied manifestations and codes of violence and exclusion. This reality has embedded itself in the physical, informational, financial, cultural, and intellectual flows across borders. Understanding border dynamics is critically important to fully comprehend how our world functions in the 21st century.