Born in the Dominican Republic, García Peña immigrated to the United States at age 12. She lived in New Jersey and earned BA and MA degrees from Rutgers University, then a PhD from the University of Michigan.
García Peña is a professor at the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in Latinx studies with a focus on Black Latinidades and the ways anti-Blackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North, producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. She is the author of Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (2022), Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (2022), and The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (2016).
García Peña has won numerous awards, including the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the Latino/a Studies Book Award, the Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haitian and Dominican Studies, and the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship. Named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar, she cofounded Freedom University, which provides college instruction to undocumented students. García Peña also codirects Archives of Justice, a transnational digital archive focused on people who identify as Black, queer, and migrant.
“My path through academia has been shaped by my personal experiences as an immigrant, a woman of color and a first generation — the first person in my family to graduate from college,” says García Peña. “It is my radical hope that the work I do helps to shatter silences and to center the lives of the communities I come from and care for.”
