Born and raised in California, la Güera got her nickname in high school when she was the only gringuita in the Spanish for Spanish Speakers class. When those days were over, she moved to San Francisco for college and settled there for almost a decade, intermittently taking off to feed her travel addiction in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Seine and the Tolantango.

She studied abroad in Querétaro, Mexico, for a year and in Paris, France, for a summer. Then, after too many years in one place (though San Francisco remains one of her great loves), she left everything behind to travel South America, starting in Cartagena, Colombia. The plan was to backpack down the Western coast of the continent and eventually end up in Chile, where she would then find a job teaching ESL. Instead, she got only as far as Cuenca, Ecuador, and there she stayed for two years, teaching English and working as a writer and editor at a travel company, and generally eating as many salchipapas as her waistline could handle.

These days she’s learning what it means to stay put for a while in San Diego, California, where she’s recently completed a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies with an emphasis on Feminist Pornography. She currently works as a baker and plays roller derby in her free time. But yes, she’s still looking for ways to travel as much as possible, to the eternal chagrin of her kitchen manager.

Her goal with this blog is this: to share her experiences as openly and truthfully as possible, both the scary and the transcendent.

La Güera hopes to be traveling for a long, long time, because if life isn’t a journey, then what, exactly, is it?