Ten Years Later: My Full Circle Journey to Professor at UNM
On returning to UNM, honoring my mom's legacy, joining my mentors as a colleague, and continuing the work of liberation.
I cried when I got the job offer. Ten years after walking across the graduation stage with my BA in Chicana/o Studies, I’ll return to that same department—this time, as an Assistant Professor.
In August 2011, I began my journey at UNM as an undergraduate student. I lived in Hokona Hall, I joined ASUNM’s Emerging Lobo Leaders, and I took my first Chicana/o Studies class. I loved it. It was a class called “El Movimiento Chicano” and I was fascinated to learn more about the history of Mexican-Americans in this country.
I was raised by Mexican immigrant parents and grew up in a predominantly Mexican immigrant neighborhood. Still, I had not learned about the deep history of Mexican migration to this region or the centuries-long ties between these places now separated by a militarized border.
As a kid I always wanted to follow in my mom’s footsteps and become a teacher. I thought I would teach elementary school like she did, but after taking that Chicana/o studies movimiento class I changed my major.
Before I began as a student, I’d visited the campus many times. The earliest memories I have are visiting the duck pond and walking around with my sister while our mom was in class. One especially tender and serendipitous moment for me was sitting in on my mom’s university class where her instructor discussed what the word “thesis” meant. I recognize now what a tremendous seed was planted for me that day: how lucky and special it was for me to join my mom in her college classes, to be introduced to this language, but also to her tenacity and verve to keep pursuing higher education as a Mexican immigrant woman with English as her second language.
At UNM, I became involved in research groups, like the McNair program and El Centro de la Raza’s El Puente Fellowship Program. As a life-long avid student who loved school, when I learned I could get paid as I received a PhD, I was left in awe: “I can make money to read books? I can write my own book one day?!” I shared this excitedly with my mom, who at the time was finishing her Masters thesis for the Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies program. As we waited for my clothes to finish drying at Harold’s Laundry, while we shared a Mexican bottled coke and peanuts, we giddily imagined what it would be like if we were both in a doctoral program at the same time. 3 months after that conversation, she died at fifty years old of stage IV metastatic breast cancer that was diagnosed unexpectedly and that rapidly took her life.
Months later, still enrolled in classes and barely able to focus on anything besides my overwhelming grief and ways to numb and distract myself from it, I learned about a local organization called the SouthWest Organizing Project and their food justice group called Project Feed the Hood. To make connections with a daily nourishing material, food, and to think about gardening and wellness helped me tremendously as I was in the intense aftermath of grieving my mom.
My research projects in the McNair and El Puente programs began to focus on these topics related to food, culture, community gardens, environmental justice. The experiences crystallized what I’d been learning in my Chicana/o studies classes: research can and should be liberatory for all.
I applied to graduate schools to better understand how food inequalities are a form of environmental racism. I moved to Los Angeles to start my doctoral program in the fall of 2016, less than three years after my mom’s sudden death, still in the heavy fog of my grief.
My interest in community-based work led me to the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and later, Three Sisters Kitchen in Albuquerque. Both opportunities shaped my work in profound ways, and allowed me to keep making real world connections with pressing social issues and my academic research.
I always quietly carried the dream of returning to UNM as a professor. It eventually became something I had the courage to voice, and I shared with my closest friends and colleagues my vulnerable dream and desire to accomplish this goal. If I were to stay in academia, which I’m not always the biggest fan of, I knew I wanted it to be here in my hometown where my Mami received her MA posthumously.
I successfully defended my dissertation, “Red or Green? Chicanx Food Imaginaries in New Mexico from Statehood to Climate Crisis” in April 2023. In an miraculous moment of luck, stars aligning, divine timing, and fierce support from longtime mentors, I landed a two-year post-doc to tenure track position in my hometown and undergraduate department where I first fell in love with this work.
As of August 2025, I transition into the Assistant Professor role: my dream job.
To think of this full circle moment, joining mentors as a colleague— those mentors who first encouraged me to consider graduate school, who inspired me to pursue my dreams, who wrote my letters of recommendation— brings me to tears. This full circle moment brings both healing and tremendous gratitude.
I am so grateful and I can’t wait to pay it back. The significance of my journey is not lost on me, and sometimes I tend to downplay or hold back about my accomplishments for fear of being “too much.”
But fuck it, it’s my Substack.
I join a profession and lineage of academics who have consistently struggled to make space for marginalized voices in the academy, and I will honor their courage, diligence, and innovation. I am honored to work in a field of critical ethnic studies that analyzes power in a society that is so entrenched with injustice and power imbalances. As the first person in my family with a PhD, I know I am forging a path less traversed. Latinas are less than 1% of doctoral degree holders in the country.
In today’s academic job market, having a tenure track position in the humanities is incredibly rare and I’m so thankful. And as the current US government attempts to make my work illegal and spreads insidious lies about my profession, I will stand taller than ever—to teach, research, and serve my community.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope my story reminds you why ethnic studies matters, and why it must be protected. I hope it reminds you that full circle moments don’t just happen, they are forged through grief, joy, stubborn belief, and community. I promise to keep sharing more of my academic work and things I do as an Assistant Professor in Chicana/o Studies here on Substack.
You go Divana! So proud of you! 💗