Vargas has published in a number of different journals and anthologies including Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies and has conducted oral histories with several Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institution Latino Music Oral History Project. Her monograph Dissonant Divas: Mejicanas, Music, Nation is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2012. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships including the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and most recently a University of California Center for New Racial Studies grant to support her current research addressing Mexicana/Tejana racialized sexuality in the social-musical space of the fandango in the Southwest during the 19th century.