Dr. Zazil Reyes Garcia

Dr. Reyes García had her first cross-border experience as a teenager when her family moved from southern Mexico to North Carolina. Her world opened as she learned to navigate a new culture and to speak a new language. Her second experience crossing borders in the Americas came with a study abroad program in Chile. Living and traveling in South America provided a strong sense of belonging to a larger Latin American community and culture. These experiences were fundamental to her teaching career, which began in 2002 in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she taught in both English and Spanish for an intercultural program at Tec de Monterrey. She has been back in the U.S. since 2009, where her work as a Spanish instructor at UT Austin and later as a bilingual educator and scholar at the University of the Incarnate Word has expanded her interests in cross-border experiences of the Americas to include U.S. Latinas/os/x communities.