Dr. Mayra Puente (ella/she) is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on higher education access and choice among institutionally marginalized students and communities, particularly rural Latinx students from migrant farmworker and other manual labor backgrounds.
Dr. Puente examines issues of higher education access and choice through critical race, spatial, and feminist lenses and tools. In particular, she draws on frameworks and approaches such as Critical Race Theory, Latina/o Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Spatial Analysis, and Chicana/Latina Feminist Epistemology. Through these genealogies of scholarship, Dr. Puente investigates how college (in)opportunities are constructed, primarily for racialized students living in rural geographies that have been systematically underinvested. Her most recent methodological design, Platicando y Mapeando (talking and mapping), bridges these multiple fields to document and visualize higher education inequities by grounding geographic information systems (GIS) maps in the embodied spatial identities and lived realities of rural Latinx students.
Dr. Puente received her PhD in Education from the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, with a concentration in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, from the University of California, Los Angeles. She also completed minors in Education Studies and Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA. Her recent awards and honors include two Early Career Awards from AERA and AAHHE, an Outstanding Publication Award from AERA, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship. She is a member of several educational research organizations (e.g., AERA, ASHE, AAHHE) and critical race and feminist organizations (e.g., CRSEA, MALCS, NWSA).