I was born and raised in Quito (Ecuador), and I moved to the United States after I won a scholarship to study at Saint Anselm College in Manchester (New Hampshire). As a political philosophy major, I constantly inquired into the role of culture as field to debate and construct the meaning of citizenship and nation. My undergraduate thesis analyzed the role of Vallenato—a musical genre from northern Colombia— in the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as a political venue were race, class, and ideology were constructed as national project. After I graduated from Saint Anselm I lived in Costa Rica for a few months, leading a National Geographic youth group to work in community projects in Guanacaste. Following that Central American experience, I worked as a political consultant in New Hampshire during the 2011 elections, and later volunteered in Ecuador at a high school in La Cananga, a small town in Esmeraldas—the Ecuadorian province with the largest Afro-descendant population. I have lived in Illinois since 2012, where I completed my MA in Spanish Literature, and where I plan to complete in 2019 my Phd in Latin American Literatures and Cultures.