Born in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, she earned her doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1996. She is Professor and Senior Researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She worked as a journalist since she was 18 years old in a Central American Press Agency. Since she was an undergraduate she has combined her academic work with her feminist activism and with media projects in radio, video and journalism. Her academic work has promoted indigenous and women rights in Latin America. She has done field work in indigenous communities in the Mexican states of Sinaloa, Chiapas, Guerrero and Morelos, with Guatemalan refugees, with families of dissapeared immigrants in Honduras and with African immigrants in the South of Spain. She has published twenty two books and her academic work has been translated to English, French, and Japanese. Her more recent books entitled Multiple InJusticies. Indigenous Women Law and Political Struggle in Latin America and Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia were published both by University of Arizona Press, in 2018 and 2019. She is recipient of the Martin Diskin Oxfam Award for her activist research; of the Simon Bolivar Chair (2013-2014) granted by Cambridge University for her academic work and of the Radcliffe Fellowship given by Harvard University (2023-2024)