BIO

I am a father and a husband, a brother and a son, a teacher and a scholar, and a Chicano. I am the second of three children born to two Chicanos from East Los Angeles, and the grandson of Mexican immigrants who arrived to California in the early and mid 20th century. I’m a native Californian who grew up in the town of La Puente, lived a decade in Northern California, and now calls the L.A. Southland home (again).

Teaching is my vocation. I view teaching as a collaborative process of fostering learning with others. I hope to nurture a critical and empathic form of humanism–what I call “Chicanx/Latinx critical humanism”–that is, the ability to understand the world as others have, with humility and compassion, through the study of Latinx experiences. While I am trained as a historian, I view the study of the past as a form of activism in the present. I am less concerned with disciplinary boundaries than with the development of scholarship that speaks to our continuing struggles for equity, for human dignity, for justice.

I am the product of education and a living testament to the kinds of transformative power it can possess. As a child, no one in my immediate household could call themselves a “college graduate.” Today, all five of us hold at least a Bachelor’s degree, four have earned a Master’s, and three of us have a doctorate. This is more than our collective achievement; it has framed our very access to the privileges of this society. My commitment to teaching and learning emanates from this experience, as does my dedication to quality and accessible education for all.

I attended St. Joseph’s Elementary School and Bishop Amat Memorial High School, both in La Puente. I received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Claremont McKenna College in 1994, with a double major in History and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). I then studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where I received both a M.A. degree (1996) and a Ph.D. (2002) in United States History.

img_4979.jpgI have been actively employed in higher education since 1995, beginning first as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, and then as an instructor, both at Cal and at Vista Community College (now Berkeley City College). I accepted my first tenure-track teaching position when I joined the faculty of California State University, Monterey Bay in August 2002. At CSUMB I worked as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities and Communication, or HCOM and served as the coordinator of the Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies Program.

In January 2006, I joined the faculty of Pomona College, the flagship campus of the “Claremont Colleges.” I hold a joint appointment in the History Department and the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o ~ Latina/o Studies, where I teach classes focused on Latinx histories, race in the modern US, oral history, and social movements of the sixties.

Along with my wife and our three children, we strive to live peacefully in Upland, California.