She earned her PhD in sociology with an emphasis in feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research includes Chicano and Latino cultural studies, critical race feminisms, queer-of-color critique, popular culture, and borderlands theory. She will discuss her new book Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which draws on Chicana feminism, cultural studies, and queer-of-color analysis to examine the ways in which Chicana singers push the heteronormative limits of what she refers to as “sonic imaginaries of borderlands music.”