Hola

My familial roots are located on the southside of Chicago, but I was born outside Milwaukee and raised in Atlanta, Toledo, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Atlanta some more. As a teenager, I played competitive tennis and helped found my high school's first speech and debate team. I also (unsuccessfully) campaigned to lower the Georgia state flag from Fulton County Schools because, at the time, it contained the Confederate Battle Flag, which was incorporated into it in 1956 in defiance of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools. I attended a pair of small liberal arts colleges in North Carolina and the United Kingdom before graduating from the University of Georgia with a BA in English debt-free thanks in large part to Georgia's Hope Scholarship, which paid my tuition, and holding down various campus jobs throughout my undergraduate education. After three years of living, working and traveling in East and Southern Africa, Western Ireland and the former East Germany, picking up different languages, cultural practices and malaria along the way, I settled in the center of Spain.

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Madrid quickly became mi lugar en el mundo, an adopted home where I learned Spanish and taught English for the two and a half years between 9/11 and the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings, the latter of which I barely escaped. I also learned the meaning of solidarity and how to dodge rubber bullets while protesting the U.S. war in Iraq that Spain's neoconservative government supported, despite massive popular dissent. After spending a summer working at a pizzeria in Grand Teton National Park, I began my PhD in the Literature Department at UC San Diego, where I began in American Studies working under a pair of fantastic advisors, Lisa Lowe and Shelley Streeby, and ended up specializing in Spanish cultural studies under another fantastic pair of advisors, Luis Martín-Cabrera and Susan Kirkpatrick. In San Diego, I also wrote political satire for a pair of San Diego theater companies, learned how to (sort of) surf, volunteered to help stop militarism in local high schools, did some recovery work in post-Katrina New Orleans, and became a certified yoga instructor.

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From 2004 to 2010 I lived between San Diego and Madrid, where I continued teaching English in the summers. For several years, I also lived and worked in Madrid full-time on the Spanish Civil War Memory Project, a digital archive of survivor testimonies of political repression carried out by fascists during the war and under the long dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, for which I conducted over fifty interviews. As a Student Fellow of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center I collaborated with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory on mass grave exhumations throughout Spain and assisted with archival research that contributed to Judge Baltasar Garzón's historic criminal investigation of the Francoist dictatorship in 2008. During that period, I was also a cultural staff writer and film reviewer for InMadrid, the city's monthly English newspaper and I studied screenwriting at La Factoría del Guión, which led me to translate a film script for its director, the Argentine filmmaker Pedro Loeb. I continued that work later for the Spanish director Helena Taberna, serving as a translator and script consultant on her film Acantilado (The Cliff), which won the Dark Matter jury prize at the 2016 Austin Film Festival.

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In 2010, I returned to San Diego to complete my dissertation on Spanish horror film and cultural trauma related to mass extermination, after having spent two and a half years interviewing survivors and family members of the 114,000 desaparecidos in Spain and working on multiple mass grave exhumations. Two years later, I earned my PhD, got married, and started learning Brazilian Portuguese, my wife's native language. I taught as a Lecturer at both UC San Diego and Cal State San Marcos for a year before moving to Houston, Texas. While there, I worked as the Translation Supervisor for the 20th Century Latin American & Latino Art Digital Archive of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and I gave a pair of public lectures on the Spanish Civil War at Rice University. In 2014, I was hired by Michigan State University as Assistant Professor of 20th/21st Century Spanish Culture in a Global Context to engage with the digital humanities in the Department of Romance & Classical Studies.

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Over the course of 2015, I made a series of trips to Madrid to film the political changes taking place in Spain's capital city and across the country after Podemos, a new left populist political formation shocked the Spanish neoliberal establishment by winning five seats in the 2014 European Parliament elections, sparking a new political cycle inspired, in part, by the 15M indignados movement. When that political cycle came to an abrupt end in 2023, I converted over thirty-six hours of film footage into MADRID 2015, a digital film archive that offers a unique cinematic gaze on a crucial moment of Spanish political, social and cultural history. In 2017, after the birth of my first daughter in Houston and three years of commuting between Texas and Michigan, my family and I moved to Lansing. A year later, I made my first film, a short documentary about two MSU graduate students born in Mexico who were DACA recipients while that program was under attack by the Trump administration, and I also directed the first edition of the MSU Latinx Film Festival, where my film premiered before going on to play at film festivals across the country and in Spain, picking up a number of awards and distribution from Pragda along the way.

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In 2019, I made my second film, another award-winning short documentary about an Albanian immigrant who was forced to take up sanctuary in a Detroit church to avoid deportation. That film premiered a few months before my second daughter was born in Lansing. A year later, I began writing a book manuscript on Spanish horror film and the Great Recession, which provoked an economic, social, political and cultural crisis in Spain. "La crisis," as it was called in Spain, was accompanied by cultural anxieties related to mass unemployment and mass evictions, harsh austerity measures and widespread precarity, as well as foreign debt and national sovereignty, the main themes of the book, under advance contract with the University of Toronto Press.

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In 2020, COVID-19 momentarily stopped the world, but working and parenting (sometimes at the same time) never ended, even as schools and daycares closed. Three pandemic years full of death, disease, and a host of disruptions that made a mockery of neoliberal interpretations of the concept of "work-life balance" - at least for the parents of young children and the children of elderly parents - followed. And just as things were finally improving, a mass shooting took place at Michigan State. On the night of February 13, 2023, three undergraduate students were murdered and another five were severely wounded in a classroom and at the Student Union, leaving the MSU campus and surrounding community traumatized. I was helping my three-year-old daughter get ready for bed when I received the university's automated voicemail instructing me to "run, hide, fight." My life was forever changed in that instant. I stopped fearing for my children's lives and started taking action to address the outrageous fact that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and young people in the United States.

 

Never again.