[4] She has described her working-class parents as a "machinist/philosopher father", Jose Machlavio Lucero-Sandoval and a "warehouse-fork-lift driver/spiritual-activist mother", Pearl Antonia Doria-Sandoval.
As a result of this course, she became involved in the Santa Cruz Women's Media Collective, a group that made television programming for a local public access channel.
"[6] Her professors in the History of Consciousness program included Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, Vivian Sobchack and Janey Place.
[7] She has cited Hayden White, Donna Haraway, James Clifford and Teresa de Lauretis as her mentors at Santa Cruz.
[10][11] Her most important work, Methodology of the Oppressed, developed fully her idea of a differential oppositional consciousness, a mode of "ideology-praxis" rooted in the experiences of US Third World that resists binary categories of identity in favor of a fluidity that moves between them.
[15] In more recent years, Sandoval has joined her earlier interests in culture with her work on oppositional consciousness to focus on what she terms artivism, a neologism she developed with Guisella LaTorre to describe activist art.