“I got published! It’s all thanks to being in Dr. Muñoz’s class this semester! I was able to find my voice and I’m happy with my current writing style! I will use this motivation and continue writing more pieces!”

“Dr. Muñoz is one of the best teachers I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in all my years of learning.”

“Especially as a math major, I never find myself talking about my classwork outside of the classroom, but this semester, I was regularly bringing up our class topics to tons of my friends and family. Most importantly, I think this class reminded me about how passionate I am about my family heritage. I definitely never want to lose sight of that.”

At 16, Toni moved to New York City after winning the National Hispanic Modeling Contest, and from there, life turned into a whirlwind of success as she walked runways for top designers like Oscar de la Renta®, Chanel®, and Roberto Cavalli®; graced the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Elle Magazine, and Marie Claire; and appeared in national advertisements for Suave®, Cartier®, Nike®, Levi’s®, and Guess®. Over the course of her fashion career, Muñoz was able to pay her way through school and has very much evolved into a strong woman who has taken her talents and passion for her homeland, using them for the greater good of the community.

In May of 2021, Muñoz completed her Ph.D. in literature with three areas of concentration: pedagogy of the oppressed, US-Latinx literature, and US-Mexico Border studies. Wanting to combine scholarly and creative approaches, her dissertation became a hybrid work wherein the first four chapters study the history and circumstances that have shaped a distinct population within the Latinx community and overall American identity, a process she termed “double hybridization.” Taking this concept of double hybridization as the foundation for the fifth and final chapter while using the autoethnography research methodology and applying it to a compilation and layering process of creative visual work resulted in a children’s book, El Bowie Bakery.  

Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, offering courses in Border Literature, Creative Writing, Autoethnography, and Latinx Identity, Politics, and Culture. The contexts literature course incorporates representative selections of literary works from a defined area of literature. In addition, Muñoz teaches a creative writing fiction workshop. This course is an investigation in a workshop format, where students examine the complicated relationship between writers, their fictional characters, and the audience through a combination of lecture, discussion, presentation, and studio production. She has also created an Autoethnography Literature course, which comprehensively approaches the process in the context of qualitative research and inquiry, in relation to the onto-epistemological, political, and theoretical debates that surround this methodology. Lastly, the Interdisciplinary Humanities course, Latinx: Identity Politics, & Culture provides an interdisciplinary approach to theoretical scholarship as it pertains to the cultural concept of Latinx identity from various perspectives.

Throughout this process and over the last ten years, Toni has grown personally and academically. She dedicated much of her time to deconstructing her role as a ninth-generation Bordercanx and her passion for this geopolitical, geocultural, and geographical location where she was born and grew up. She has actively searched for new and innovative ways to share the history and stories of this region and its people. She has published various scholarly works and creative nonfiction pieces and fictional works dealing with the Borderlands in such publications as the Borders in Globalization Review and Columbia Journal. In 2020, she won the Blue Mesa Review Nonfiction Prize for her creative nonfiction piece, “Border Sisters.” Concerned with local and international Border issues, she has also presented articles and research at academic conferences ranging from The University of Barcelona in Spain to The University of Bialystok in Poland.

Currently, her children’s book, El Bowie Bakery is under contract with TCU Press and slated to launch in 2024.

To preserve the lives and stories of the Border community, Muñoz established the Center for US-Latin America Initiatives (CUSLAI) Community Digital Archive project in 2021. She secured a $30,000 grant from Texas Women’s Foundation for high-resolution equipment needed to digitize historical documents through initial fundraising and grant writing. She recently finished her—Human Subjects Protection Training—IRB—and will begin applying for more grants to travel, conduct video interviews, and produce original photography of multigenerational, double-hybridized Border families living along the US-Mexico Border. Muñoz believes that digital history will play an integral role specifically for understanding cultures and identities in diasporic flux throughout several academic disciplines. Her hope is to assert herself as a leader in this field, focusing on the US-Mexico Border, and capturing and curating a diverse array of voices from the area and across our borders. 

Through all her research and experience, she has come to realize that true dedication to the community must go beyond academia. Besides the scholarly passion she has demonstrated, Muñoz felt compelled to serve the community through a more hands-on approach. In 2012, she brought together some of her closest friends with a shared commitment to the community and founded Model Behaviors, a nonprofit organization, which provides a more tangible and inclusive way to raise funding, aid, and services to women and children. To date, Model Behaviors has produced and directed six free to the pubic mega-community events and welcomed more than 36,000 visitors. In addition, they have donated 100 mammograms to underserved women and raised more than half a million dollars for charity, improving the lives of these women and children in transition throughout the Texas community.

Toni believes that the intersectionality between her academic training, teaching experience, fundraising skills, and nonprofit work has prepared her to be an effective researcher, instructor, and collaborator.  It is with great pleasure that she shares the diversity of her experiences with students in a dialogical way, cultivating innovative and effective learning, exploring various research methodologies, and ultimately helping them adapt their personal stories, whatever they may be, into scholarly and creative works while expanding the full potential of her department. 

When Muñoz is not sharing her love for the Border, her greatest joy is spending time and daring greatly with her two daughters, eight-year-old Darlington and five-year-old Tennyson.