After completing her education, traveling a great deal, and living in Boston, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Spain and South Africa, she resides in Claremont, California, where she is professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College.

For an interview with the Pomona College Magazine, Chávez-Silverman said, "Living in Buenos Aires, that gorgeous, turn of the century city in a country on the brink of (economic) collapse—home to many of the authors and artists I had long admired (Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, and before them the foundational Romantics, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Echeverría)—brought out a sense of self, displaced yet oddly at home, in a cultural, linguistic and even tangible way.

I called my email missives "Crónicas," inspired by the somewhat rough-hewn, journalistic, often fantastic first-hand accounts sent "home" by the early conquistadores, and refashioned by modern-day counterparts such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Cristina Pacheco.

Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters "follow[s] Chávez-Silverman’s personal history, from California to South Africa and Australia and back, from unfathomable loss to deeply felt joy.

With a strong, almost novelistic narrative arc, the book is a "love story for the ages," "based on detailed diary entries and confessional letters to family and friends," and deals with themes of belonging, migration, and South Africa under apartheid.