About

I am a professor of Latinx Studies in the Department of African American Studies and the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University where I teach courses that examine the legacies of colonialism and slavery as the shape  the lives of Latinx people, particularly Black Latinx, in the diaspora. I am concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. My work insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives. 

I was born in the Dominican Republic and migrated as a child to Trenton, NJ. I attended Rutgers University for undergraduate, obtaining a degree in journalism in 1998. My path through academia has been shaped by my personal experiences as an immigrant, a woman of color and a first generation—the first person in my family to graduate from college.  I come from a community that has been affected by the challenges of being undocumented and minoritized in the United States.  Therefore, my research, my teaching and my public facing work are concerned with the lives of undocumented people, Black people, and people of color. It is my radical hope that the work I do helps to shatter silences and to center the lives of the communities I come from and care for.