The Spanish Civil War of 1936 forced her family to go into exile for political reasons as her father, Vicente Navarro, was an education inspector and a militant of the Republican Left.
In 1968, she became a professor of Ancient and Contemporary History of Latin America at Dartmouth College,[1] located in Hanover, New Hampshire, at a time when women were not admitted either in classes or in the faculty, being the first woman to hold that position.
She continues her research through the grant received in 2009, the Amelia Lacroze de Fortabat scholarship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
In 2017, she was named Doctor honoris causa by the Public University of Navarre (UPNA),[6][7] the first woman to achieve this honorary title by this academic institution.
Together with Virginia Sánchez Korrol, she examined the role of women in the history of Latin America through articles collected and published in book form.
As a researcher, she has studied Latin American feminist encounters, analyzing both their most conflictive aspects (confrontations, theoretical differences, etc.)
In 1982,[2] Navarro published her biography, Evita, to publicize the dimensions of this woman who became a part of the power and a symbol of Peronism, and whose image presented two opposite faces according to the ideological lens with which one looked at her.