Welcome to my personal website!

As a historian of late global capitalism, especially its impact on human belonging, my work is primarily concerned with how individuals built and sustained their social relations in the face of historical rupture and dislocation, such as the rise of the neoliberal order. I am particularly interested in how neoliberalism, as a set of economic policies and a political ideology, reconfigured the way ordinary people forged social connections when macroeconomic forces threatened to undermine them or, at the very least, remake them.

In my dissertation, “The Liberalization of Belonging: Race, Service, and the Making of the Postindustrial San Fernando Valley,” I bring these inquiries to California's San Fernando Valley.  This suburban region, especially its central flatlands, constitutes an excellent case study to examine how macroeconomic processes altered how residents established belonging to each other and to community. 

Previously the epicenter of Los Angeles’ defense economy—and remodeled in the post-World War II era as the quintessential bedroom suburb—the San Fernando Valley transformed as a result of post-1965 immigration and post-1973 economic restructuring. The Valley’s population grew precipitously—aided by an influx of Latin American and South Asian migrants—at the same time that manufacturing, unionized labor, and state social provisions dried up. Long standing automotive and aerospace plants, including the General Motors Auto Plant in Van Nuys and the Price Pfister Faucet Foundry in Pacoima closed, threatening the livelihoods of thousands of long-standing African American, Mexican, and white workers and the local businesses that once thrived nearby. 

Deindustrialization throughout the 1990s ripped up the floor of economic security, while the nascent service sector channeled thousands of new immigrants into low-wage employment. Middle-class white families traded their 1950s ticky-tacky homes for gated communities, or simply fled to neighboring counties, while recent arrivals moved into the scores of dingbat and stucco apartment complexes proliferating the suburban landscape. 

With nearly two million inhabitants spread across 260 square miles, the San Fernando Valley is today one of the most diverse, fragmented, and rapidly growing regions of the Sunbelt. With certain notable exceptions, the scholarship on the San Fernando Valley has not caught up to present-day realities. In the popular imagination, the San Fernando Valley is still beholden to postwar suburban tropes of racial homogeneity and exclusionary politics. Or, it is typecast as a hotbed of unorganized crime, low-budget pornography, and Valley girls. Even if such stereotypes bear out nominal truths, there have been few studies tracing how parts of the region transformed from the standard bearer of middle-class living to a predominantly working-class urban space, and the engine of the region’s service economy. Few scholars have probed the impact of such rapid changes on the way residents built community, interpersonal connections, and civic membership in an era of economic precarity. 

To this end, my project explores how the epochal shifts of deindustrialization, the privatization of social services, and the retreat of the welfare state altered how residents living in the Valley’s flatlands established belonging and community connections. Five substantive chapters, an Introduction, and a Conclusion, lay bare the lives of swap meet vendors, faucet foundry laborers, UAW autoworkers, nursing home employees, and line cooks, as well as entertainment executives, pornography stars, and real estate developers as they adjusted to, and found their social footholds in a neoliberalizing world. My research is based on over 100 original oral history interviews and ethnography that I conducted in Spanish and English over three years, as well as archival research at institutional, municipal, and community-based archives across the region. 

In my dissertation, I argue that the trifecta of trade liberalization, privatization, and immigration reform also led to the liberalization of belonging. What I mean by this is that belonging (and I define belonging as being three key things, attachment to place, connections to others, and inclusion) detached from territorialized notions of national belonging, and formal citizenship, and instead, became tied to more localized, and also transnational, notions of community.  While peoples’ responses to this de-coupling varied widely, depending on ethno-racial, class, and citizenship status backgrounds, I show how individuals turned to different things—labor, service, racial identity, and especially notions of self-responsibility—to reconstitute their place in a neoliberal world. Ultimately, I suggest that these adaptations demonstrated how individuals both resisted and accommodated to neoliberalism in the latter 20th cent. 

Focusing on the east San Fernando Valley allows my research to address broader historical and sociological patterns within the United States and the Americas. It probes how neoliberalism has reconfigured social relations, racial formation, and individuals’ connections to capital and the state. Additionally, it contributes to literature that addresses how ordinary people, not the monied architects of this political economy, have contested and conceded to neoliberalism at the grassroots level. 

My work expands the narrative and chronological horizons of Borderlands historiography. It deepens our understanding of how the meaning of borderlands has evolved in the free market era, a period when national borders became increasingly porous for the movement of capital but progressively impermeable for the legal movement of people. I investigate how these divergent aims have both facilitated and hindered mobility, remade racial categories, and expanded belonging beyond the boundaries of formal citizenship. My work sheds light on how people in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands adapted to the neoliberal political economy and advances a broader conversation about the definition of belonging in a globalized world 

In 2021, I published an article based on the dissertation, “Under the Canopy: Finding Belonging at the San Fernando Swap Meet, 1976-2019,” in the Journal of American Ethnic History. In this article, I argue that the swap meet industry has served an unparalleled economic, social, and cultural function for immigrant populations in Greater Los Angeles. By centering the experiences of vendors, staff members, and musical performers, I point to the ways an semi-formal commercial space like the outdoor swap meet allows individuals to experience a sense of “withness” – connection, solidarity, and company—in a climate of social alienation and anomie. 

My article, “Bringing ‘The Plant’ to Life: Imagining Community Revitalization in the Neoliberal Era,” which was recently awarded the inaugural Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips Essay Prize from Modern American History through Cambridge University Press, was published in the April 2024 issue.  This article studies the closure of the General Motors auto plant in Van Nuys and aftermath. Carefully mediated through the accounts of former workers, developers, and city officials, I reveal how a private-public partnership born in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising sought to revitalize the area surrounding the former auto plant through the creation of the shopping center “The Plant.” In the article, I spotlight how, by supplying non-unionized, low wage jobs to the area, The Plant symbolized the entwinement of community revitalization and neoliberal ideology in the 1990s. 

Teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design have been the throughlines of my entire professional career. As Fulbright fellow in Chile, I studied how high school students interpreted and remembered the Pinochet dictatorship in order to support teachers design curriculum of Chile’s recent history. Working with students and teachers in Santiago—especially incorporating student voices into the curriculum of a highly contested historical period—inspired me to pursue a Masters of Education. In UCLA’s Teacher Education Program, I found a cohort of aspiring teachers, who, like myself, were committed to teaching Los Angeles’ public school students and grounding our praxis in community- and culturally-relevant pedagogy.I subsequently taught U.S. history for six years at a public charter school in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. 

As an educator I believe that the classroom should be an egalitarian space in which all students can take risks, ask questions, and engage in meaningful dialogue with one another and myself. I see my role as a teacher to model the habits of mind—including critical thinking, self-reflection, and humility—that support students as they realize their own potential as individuals and learners. I aspire to learn about the learning profiles, intellectual interests, and socio-cultural contexts of all my students in order to create an inclusive classroom in which students are the producers, not the receivers, of knowledge. 

In addition to my training at UCLA’s Center X, my teaching philosophy has been shaped by my participation in an expansive network of Los Angeles-based educators who are dedicated to critical pedagogies and ethnic studies. As a classroom teacher, I worked to expand this network of educators and ensure that students from the Northeast San Fernando Valley have teachers who grew up in the community. I served as a Mentor Teacher for the organization’s Alumni Teacher Program, an initiative to support alumni obtain Master’s degrees and classroom positions. During the school years 2014-2015 and 2017-2018, I mentored two alumna/novice teachers (one succeeded me as eighth-grade social studies teacher and continues in the same position six years later; and another who continues in her position eight years later as a sixth-grade world history teacher). I also facilitated a wide range of Professional Development programs, including supporting new hires transition to the classroom, and leading workshops for teachers on community-based inquiry projects. 

I believe mentorship and collaboration is among the most powerful tools to enact positive social change. Throughout my PhD program, I have maintained relationships with former students and colleagues in an effort to establish partnerships between academic researchers, secondary educators, and community members of the Northeast San Fernando Valley. In addition to organizing scholarly presentations on these collaborations, I am most proud of the “Archivist in the Classroom” project, a digital humanities and community-based initiative to collect, organize, and preserve student-produced artifacts. “Archivist in the Classroom” strives to create a publicly accessible database of student poems, autobiographies, and identity maps, that documents in perpetuity the lives of Los Angeles’ public school students and supports teachers to develop curriculum that is based in local community knowledge.