As a linguistic anthropologist, she studies language, power, and social identity in Latin America. She will present her ethnographic work on language and identity among Syrio-Lebanese Jews in Mexico City. She analyzes how speakers creatively and pragmatically draw on semiotic resources to forge relations in seemingly disparate social fields and challenge stereotype and stigma. In so doing, they defy assimilatory pressures to perpetuate distinctive, diasporic identities and lifeways into the 21st century, often in transformative ways.