Alejandro GuardadoDissertation Completion Fellow

Alejandro Guardado is a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History.

Alejandro Guardado is the son of Mexican immigrants and has earned degrees from Santa Ana College, The University California Irvine, and California State University, Los Angeles. His research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays and the Conference for Latin American History.   

His dissertation, "Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn (1968-2000),” examines how Indigenous activists developed political networks to bolster self-determination movements in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The dissertation centers Indigenous intellectuals, teachers, and farmers who collaborated with Indigenous leaders in neighboring communities and professionals outside of their communities in an effort to renegotiate their relationship with the Mexican government. The dissertation assesses how social capital, regional economies, geography, mobility, and contact with outsiders shaped how Indigenous intellectuals worked to fortify local conceptions of autonomy and self-determination by critically examining the life stories of Indigenous intellectuals. To account for the diversity within Indigenous mobilizations, the dissertation examines four life story accounts within the region of the Sierra Norte. In his attempt to reconstruct the life stories of the Serrano intellectuals in my dissertation, Guardado draws from first person oral history accounts, personal archives, municipal repositories, records from non-governmental organizations, and government surveillance reports.

Alejandro looks forward to completing his dissertation and collaborating with interdisciplinary scholars at the Fox Center.