research overview
- I am the son of Mexican migrant workers from the Texas/Mexican border. I grew up in an urban, multiracial California city. I have been a bilingual teacher and school principal in Latinx working class communities in the U.S. These experiences have shaped my lens to interrogate dominant structures, narratives and practices around culture, race, and language that serve to keep people from realizing their full humanity. I center my research projects in Latinx communities heavily impacted by global migration in California, El Salvador, and Spain. My research examines how Latinx youth and families negotiate from the bottom up global transnational migration, citizenship, belonging, race and complex identity formation processes in the context of severe inequality and structural constraints within sending and receiving contexts of the migration circuit. My work seeks to develop methodologies/pedagogies that facilitate understanding of the complex, liminal lives of migrant subjects and their acts resistance.