
Luis F. Avilés González
Ph.D. Candidate

Luis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese in the Linguistics track. His main area of research is variationist sociophonetics, Heritage Languages, and Digital Studies. He is a proud First-Gen student from the San Ysidro-Tijuana borderlands. He joined the University of Texas at Austin after completing an M.A. in Spanish Literature & Culture from CSUF. Luis attended UCLA for his undergraduate studies. At UCLA he graduated with a degree in Spanish and History.
As a graduate student at UT Austin, Luis has served across campus in different capacities. In the departmental student organization (GSO) he served as the Linguistics track representative and President. At the state level, he served as the community moderator for the Texas Coalition for Heritage Spanish (TeCHS) through the Center of Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL). At the national level, he served as the chair of the Graduate Student Fellows Program (GSFP) through the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE).
His current line of research focuses on the production variation of the discourse marker pues among Mexican migrant and heritage communities in southern San Diego County, California. Additional works have explored variation in Mexican Spanish, perceptual attitudes of Heritage Speakers in Texas, and research around linguistic attitudes on Social Media (Twitter and TikTok).