Family Migrations
I was born and raised in Mexico City, a site of centuries-old cross-cultural connections which is home to twenty million people. My parents grew up in a time of new migrations: from rural villages, towns, and small cities to the booming Mexico City (a.k.a. “La Capital”), and from Mexico to the U.S.A. in search of well-paying work. For my father that meant migrating from Michoacán (land of lakes in Purépecha) to Mexico City. For my grandmother, it meant, first, moving with my very young mother and uncle from Guadalajara to Mexico City, and soon after, taking a further leap and migrating to Pittsburgh, P.A. My mother grew up in the Steel City and eventually returned to Mexico City, met my father, and started a family there.
These and other migrations shaped my own experience growing up in a bicultural and transnational family, moving from Spanish to English, from the taste of corundas to the memory of birotes, from the thunderous chubascos (heavy rains) of Mexico City to Pittsburgh’s muggy, buglit summer nights.
Eventually, I made my own move and came to the U.S.A to pursue a PhD in English literature. After seven years in New York City, I found my way to Tacoma, WA, the beautiful, gritty town I call home.
Professional Migrations
My professional journey began at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where I studied English literature and eventually taught my first college-level classes. While majoring in English, I coursed a two-year Translation Studies Diplome at El Colegio de México. Then, I continued my graduate studies at Columbia University, where I was a Whiting Foundation Fellow (2009-2010), and received a PhD in English and Comparative Literature. My scholarship focused on eighteenth-century British literature, Critical Animal Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Science. In my academic writing, I’ve examined how eighteenth-century writing about animals drew boundaries between humans and other-than-human beings, between women and men, and demarcated racial and national identities.
From Columbia I moved to Pacific Lutheran University in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, where I taught for 13 years in the English Department and for seven years in the Environmental Studies Program. Today, I am excited to be part of the Tacoma Tree Foundation as Director of Partnerships and Communications to support access to trees and environmental education in underserved neighborhoods across Greater Tacoma.
The Recipe Box unites many of the interests that shaped my academic writing and teaching: genre and media, women’s history, questions of hospitality, as well as my love of nature. I bookend my days and spend my weekends writing and drawing for this project. It tells a story which, despite its specificities, is the story of many families living here in the U.S.A. and in Mexico, two countries that are bound up with each other, no matter how vehemently anti-immigrant action and policies try to deny it. The project is a tribute to my grandmother ’s and mother’s courage, to the hospitality they extended friends, strangers, and neighbors through their generosity and cooking, and to the two cultures I call home.