She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, with a specialization in Hispanic Sociolinguistics. She teaches courses in second language acquisition, linguistics, Spanish as a second language, and Spanish as a heritage language. Her research focuses on U.S. Spanish and heritage language education, in which she examines the complex relationships between language, identity, ideology and pedagogy. Her most recent publications focus on service-learning as a critical language pedagogy for Spanish heritage learners.