She received her B.A in Political Science from Stanford University and her PhD in Latin American/Caribbean history from the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2015-2016, she was Visiting Professor in the History Programme at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore; in 2018 she was Visiting Professor at the Consortium for Advanced Study Abroad in Barcelona, Spain.  

She has received two Fulbright fellowships, to Brazil and Peru, and lectures extensively in the United States, Latin America and Caribbean, Asia and Europe. She has written, edited and published 11 books, on three main topics, in 4 languages and 5 continents: indigenous peoples on the U.S.-Mexico border; the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean; diversity, multiculturalism, race, race relations and minority politics in the U.S.  Select publications on the Chinese diaspora include these edited volumes: Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization (1999; e-version 2010); Asians in the Americas: Transculturation and Power (2002); Voluntary Associations in the Chinese Diaspora (2006); Asia and Latin America (2006); Afro-Asia (2008); Towards a Third Literature: Chinese Writings in the Americas (2012). 

She is primary collaborator on two international research, public humanities and digital humanities projects: "Asia Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Towards a Global History" at Brown University and "Chinese Railroad Workers of North America" at Stanford University.

In 2019, she was the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Centennial Fellow in the Dynamics of Place, on leave from Brown University to do research on “The Chinese in the Spanish Empire, From Manila in the 16th Century to Cuba in the 19th Century.” Read Less ^