Born in Ensenada, Baja California, 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 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 Chiapas, Guerrero and Morelos, with Guatemalan refugees and with African immigrants in the South of Spain. Since 2016, she has been supporting, through activist research, women’s collectives searching for missing persons in various regions of Mexico and Central America.

She has published twenty five books and her academic work has been translated to English, French, and Japanese. Her most recent book, Exhumar la Esperanza. Una Etnografía Feminista en el País de las Fosas (Bajo Tierra 2025), also published in English (University of Arizona Press 2026), synthesizes ten years of accompanying the struggle of the searching families

In 2003, she received the LASA/Oxfam Martin Diskin Memorial Award—shared with Dr. Rodolfo Stavenhagen—for her contributions to socially engaged research; in 2013, she held the Simón Bolívar Chair awarded by the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom; and in 2023, she received a Radcliffe Fellowship as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in the United States.