I was born in Los Angeles to migrants from Mexico and El Salvador. I grew up refining my capacity for attunement by navigating diverse spaces across the city. Every cycle in my life illuminated another facet of self I had to grapple with—learn to accept, eventually, to love. Stormy clouds with silver lining accompanied every divergence in mind, body, and spirit. Once the rain cleared, I gained perspective’s potential. My life is an ongoing lesson in channeling perspective into creation, knowledge production, and freedom dreams.

The Arts (music, plastic, dance, poetry) were the undercurrent of my education and development. Three months before my 9th birthday, I was handed a flyer by a little girl at school for a free introductory art class near my family home; I showed it to my parents. Visual art felt like a choice I could own amidst others’ plans for my concerted cultivation—migrant hopes wrapped in expectations of upward mobility. My parents would later pass around stacks of those same flyers to reduce the cost of classes they couldn’t afford either way.

While genuine curiosity shaped my broad love of learning, it was a longing to understand and belong that disciplined my aptitude and skill-building—an obsessive seeking that motivated my language study, travel, and research. Eventually, I realized how a visual arts education augmented my penchant for perception and influenced my approach to scholarship and writing. That is, how I render a sense of the whole through cycling, layering, moving across scale, and decision-making around selective details. My sensing and relating are entangled phenomena that I loosely translate into art, poetry, and humanistic social science. As I learn to rest in being, I increasingly trust in life’s flow and the soul’s joy to direct my action. 

Honoring others’ investment in me has largely motivated my mentorship, collaboration, goals, and politics. While I am thankful for previous opportunities and the work I did through them, I now endeavor to align my natural inclinations toward justice and liberation with a more holistic and spiritually attuned approach to equitable relationships with ourselves, others, and Earth. My scholarship, teaching, and service are increasingly shaped by beloved community. Popularized by bell hooks, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Martin Luther King Jr., I am drawn to this idea’s potential for rooting planetary relations in wellbeing, belonging, and social justice.

As a researcher, I have queried issues of space, culture, power, and relationality to connect and convey critical sources of resilience, change, and urban development in the U.S. and abroad. I combine extensive social-theoretical and methodological training with queer, trans, and feminist insight—especially Black and Latina feminist thought—to study complex groups. I use case studies and different types of data to attend to matter and meaning-making. I follow the lead of queer and critical race ethnographers in “studying up, down, and sideways,” and open space for serendipity and individual sense-making through oral histories. Rather than assume a universal spatial sense, I take multiple cartographic representations seriously. In short, I integrate sociological and interdisciplinary scholarship to explore placemaking and community as dynamic phenomena.