A native of Santo Domingo who grew up in the Bronx, he received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from CUNY’s Graduate Center. His book Tracing Dominican identity: the writings of Pedro Henríquez Ureña was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. A linguist by training, his interdisciplinary work straddles the lines between Linguistic Anthropology, History, and Sociology.