Azucena earned a licenciatura in International Relations from El Colegio de México. Her undergraduate thesis, “Discurso y vida cotidiana de una colonia obrera en Nuevo León”, traced a microhistory of a working-class neighborhood through archival research and the ethnographic method.
She is interested in subjects related to cultural history, particularly the history of science and medicine, intellectuals and the literary canon of twentieth-century Mexico, and the relationship between literature and the sciences.