José Luis Serrano Nájera is a proud son of immigrant parents from Guerrero and Zacatecas by way of Mexicali, Baja California, México. He grew up on the westside of Long Beach, CA and is part of the first generation of his family to earn a college education in the U.S. He was a community college transfer student who ended up focusing on Chicana/o/x/e History at the University of California, Los Angeles where he eventually earned his Ph.D. Dr. Serrano Nájera’s research foci are national and transnational Civil and Human Rights activism and social movements utilizing archival and oral history research methods.

In the past, Dr. Serrano Nájera’s publications have focused on advocacies, social movements, and armed insurrections countering colonial and imperial powers in U.S. and México during the modern era. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Confronting Colonial Legacies: Chicana/o Transnational Activism and Indigeneity since 1968.” Dr. Serrano Nájera is also currently working on research projects that focus on Chicana/o/x/e educational advocacy, transnational police repression and surveillance of Mexican Peoples’ social movements, transnational labor activism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the impact of oral history on students who partake in Chicana/o/x/e Studies curriculum and pedagogy.

In his teaching, Dr. Serrano Nájera emphasizes cultural, political, social, and transnational topical foci, while at the same time working to achieve student learning objectives of understanding diversity, intersectionality, and the development of Chicana/o/x/e communities across the U.S. He focuses on cultural and human rights expressions in the U.S. and Latin America from an interdisciplinary background in History, Chicana/o/x/e Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, and Cultural Studies. Overall, students in Dr. Serrano Nájera’s courses focus on Chicana/o/x/e and Latina/o/x/e peoples while challenging the hegemonic westernized definitions of politics, culture, identity, governance, and human rights.