Specialization:
Xican@ philosophy, culture, & social organization; decolonial thought, theory, & politics; archaeology/genealogy, existential phenomenology, & radical bio-semiotics; cultural studies & affect theory; Xicana feminisms & queer Xicanx spirit-praxis; liberation philosophies (Sandovalian, Anzaldúan, & Wynterian)
Education:
| Associate of Arts, Liberal Studies | Los Angeles Southwest College |
| Bachelor of Arts, Chicana and Chicano Studies (Highest Honors) & American Indian Studies | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Master of Arts, Chicana and Chicano Studies | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| Ph. D. (in progress), Chicana and Chicano Studies | University of California, Santa Barbara |
Bio:
Kristian E. Vasquez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a land-grabbing university which occupies ancestral Chumash territories. He was born and raised on ancestral Tongva territories in South Gate, California—an unincorporated city of southeast Los Angeles—with family roots to Durango, Michoacán, and Zacatecas, México. He is a proud community college transfer student from Los Angeles Southwest College, part of the Puente Project and the Extended Opportunity Programs. He is the first person in his family to obtain a four-year degree, receiving his B.A. in Chicana/o Studies and American Indian Studies from UC Los Angeles in 2019. He received his M.A. in Chicana/o Studies in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 2021. His research and scholarship focus on the history, phenomenology, and biosemiotics of La Xicanada in California, focused on the activities which emerged from the Indigenous resurgence movements of the 1990s. The tentative title of his dissertation project is The Decolonial Spirit of La Xicanada: Shifts in Being, Consciousness, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, with Dr. Chela Sandoval as his committee chair. His research has been supported by the Louis H. Towbes Fellowship and the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship.
Kristian is a creative blogger, podcaster, and zinester for the Chicanx World-Making & Futurities Project—a (digital) humanities working group investigating and performing low-tech media for Latinx and Chicanx readers, viewers, and listeners. He is also a political education facilitator and coordinates study groups with Eagle and Condor Liberation Front, which is an autonomous collective based in Los Angeles, California. As an adherent to the Sixth Declaration of La Selva Lacandona—a political call for weaving struggles from below and to the left, by the Zapatistas in autonomous zones in Chiapas, México—he participates in the U.S.-based national network Sexta Grietas del Norte, which builds autonomous projects in the U.S. and accompanies los pueblos y las comunidades Zapatistas, the Congreso Nacional Indígena, and the Concejo Indígena de Gobierno. As a writer, he is working on non-academic manuscripts and public writings, within genres such as poetry, the short story, essays, fiction, and experimental memoir (autohistoria-teoría). He loves listening to jazz, punk, noise, powerviolence, death metal, and skacore music. He is a vinyl collector, bibliophile, and loves cooking traditional Mexican foods.
Research:
University of California, Santa Barbara
MA Doctoral-track Research 2019-2021
Advisor: Dr. Chela Sandoval
University of California, Los Angeles
Chican@ Studies Departmental Honors Program - 2019
Advisor: Dr. Reynaldo Flores Macías
Ronald E. McNair Research Scholars Program - 2017-2018
Advisor: Dr. Reynaldo Flores Macías
Projects:
Co-founder and member of the "Eagle and the Condor Liberation Front" (ECLF), an autonomous organization that operates from Tongva territories (Los Angeles, California). ECLF is an anti-authoritarian, horizontal-based collective of urbanized Indigenous community-members, many of whom are also students. As adherents to the “Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle,” ECLF also makes part of La Red Sexta Grietas del Norte, a US-based anti-capitalist network that accompanies the Zapatistas, the Congreso Nacional Indígena, and the Concejo Indígena de Gobierno while also weaving autonomy in our own geographies.
Member of the Chicanx World-Making and Futurities Project that manages the mixed-media platform Xicana Tiahui where he co-hosts a podcast and writes for their blogosphere.
Member of the Zapatismo Reading Collective 805 that studies the history, politics, and struggles of Zapatismo in México and beyond.
Publications:
“‘The Damnés of the Americas’ [Review of Existence of the Mixed Race Damnés: Decolonialism, Class, Gender, Race by Daphne V. Taylor-García],” Radical Philosophy Review, 23, no. 1 (Winter 2020)
“Review of How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory by Gonzalo Lamana,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 3. (Winter 2020)
“Reflections on Chican@ Studies: Notes on Xican@ Knowledge and Intellectual Histories in Higher Education,” in In Search of Our Brown Selves: A Chicano Studies College Reader – eBook edited by Silvia Toscano (Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Co., forthcoming).