I was born in Los Angeles to migrants from Mexico and El Salvador. I grew up refining my attunement by navigating diverse spaces across the city. Every cycle in my life has illuminated another facet of self to learn to accept, and eventually, love. The silver lining to every divergence in mind, body, and spirit is perspective’s potential. My life is a continuous lesson in channeling perspective into creativity, knowledge, and freedom dreams.

The Arts (music, plastic, dance, poetry) are the undercurrent of my education and development. Amidst others’ plans for my concerted cultivation, visual art in particular was a choice I could own. Three months before my 9th birthday, I was handed a flyer for a free introductory art class by a little girl at school. My parents would later pass around stacks of those same flyers to reduce the cost of classes they couldn’t afford either way. Expectations of upward mobility wrapped in migrant hope fueled their various sacrifices.

A visual arts education and practice augmented my perception. Eventually, I realized that it 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 and humanistic social science. As I learn to rest in being, I increasingly trust life’s flow and the soul’s joy to direct my action. 

Genuine curiosity drives my love of learning. Yet, 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. Honoring others’ investment in me largely motivated my mentorship, collaboration, goals, and politics. Now, I endeavor to align my liberation with a holistic and spiritually attuned approach to equitable relationships with ourselves, others, and Earth. As such, my work is increasingly shaped by a shared aspiration: 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 integrate sociological and interdisciplinary scholarship to explore placemaking and community as dynamic phenomena. I have queried issues of space, culture, power, and relationality to connect and convey sources of resilience, change, and urban development in the U.S. and abroad. I combine extensive theoretical and methodological training with multiple types of data to study “up, down, and sideways.” Rather than assume a universal spatial sense, I take individual sense-making, multiple cartographies, and serendipity seriously. I have published in Sociology Compass, Socius, Contemporary Sociology, and Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World. My degrees are from Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles.