ABOUT RAFAEL

I was born in Moroleón, Guanajuato, Mexico and raised in the streets of South Central L.A. 

As a first-generation immigrant, I have learned the power of storytelling in forming connections to place and community. As an advocate of community-based history projects, I am engaged in public projects that seek to connect academic work with community development. 

UndocuScholar – individuals who are conducting research, writing, documenting, producing artwork, and developing public projects from the lived experiences of being undocumented or formerly undocumented. 

My forthcoming book with the University of Arizona Press, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States (2024), takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of Undocumented Youth Movements in the U.S. in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two-decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that exposed and critiqued repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal.’

I am an Assistant Professor of Southwest Borderlands in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (CISA) at Arizona State University (ASU).