Author

Whitney Chappell

Dr. Whitney Chappell is a Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has been named 2025-2027 Romo Endowed Professor, UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts’ 2021 Researcher of the Year, 2020-2021 Lutcher Brown Distinguished Professor, and 2019 Fulbright Scholar. Specializing in variationist sociolinguistics, her research sheds light on how linguistic features and social meanings interface across communities in the Spanish-speaking world, and her work has appeared in prestigious venues like the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Research Assistant

María del Carmen Ibarra de la Torre

María del Carmen Ibarra de la Torre is a bilingual language specialist fluent in Spanish and English, currently working in AI development where she helps shape the large language models in both Spanish and English. She also serves as a quality and policy specialist, ensuring high standards and policy alignment in AI model training. She holds a Master’s degree in Spanish, a Certificate in Translation and Interpretation and Spanish Linguistics from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Chapter Collaborators

Kenneth M. Bond

Kenneth M. Bond retired as a Master Sergeant from the United States Air Force and is now a Spanish Language Instructor with the Department of the Air Force (civilian). He holds a Master of Arts in Spanish from the University of Texas San Antonio and teaches Spanish refresher courses to active duty cryptologic language analysts (linguists) in the military.

Devin Lukachik

Devin Lukachik is a licensed speech-language pathologist specializing in voice disorders, swallowing disorders, upper airway anomalies, and cancers of the head and neck. Fluent in English and Spanish, he forms part of the small 8% of bilingual speech-language pathologists who are able to treat communication and swallowing disorders with a crosslinguistic approach. He currently practices in a multidisciplinary ENT clinic in the Woodlands, TX.

Carlos Ruvalcaba Hernández

Carlos Ruvalcaba Hernández is the owner and Managing Attorney of Ruvalcaba Hernández Law Firm, PLLC, an immigration practice in San Antonio, Texas. He represents clients across the full range of immigration matters, including family-based petitions, removal defense, and federal litigation, with a particular focus on humanitarian visas. He began his career representing unaccompanied minors from around the world, many of them Indigenous children who spoke little or no Spanish, crime and trafficking survivors and children who had suffered parental neglect. That work shaped a lasting commitment to humanitarian protection and to serving communities that are too often underserved. Having gone through the immigration process with his own family, he built his practice around the representation he wishes they had encountered.

Ángel Velarde

Ángel Velarde is the research coordinator of the San Antonio Heart and Mind Study with the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases. He is from Lima, Peru and has lived in San Antonio since 2017, where he earned a BA in Psychology and Spanish and is now pursuing a Master of Public Health. His research interests include mental health in informal Alzheimer patient caregivers and cognition disparities in diverse communities, and in his free time he enjoys spending time with his dogs, playing videogames, and reading psychology books.

Allison Yakel

Dr. Allison Yakel leads a team of vendor analysts at a tech consulting firm, where she designs and analyzes chat and voice bot experiences for a global, multi-trillion-dollar technology company. Allison credits one decision for her unconventional career: studying Spanish in college. It first landed her an insurance job that valued language skills over industry experience, then carried her through a Master’s, a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics, a professorship, and a role managing language access–ensuring people who speak languages other than English could access equitable treatment in a large, public psychiatric hospital.