Biography

Nature and Nurture

I was born on June 15th 1963 in Los Angeles, California to a Mexican-American mother and a White-American father. I spent my first eight years being raised by my Mexican grandmother in a Mexican neighborhood of L.A. My mother tongue is Spanish and my first cultural environment was Mexican-American.

I moved back to my parent's house, an English-speaking. White-American environment, when I was eight years old and stayed there until I was 18. My upbringing is therefore radically bilingual and bicultural.

My first interests as an adolescent were sports. I excelled at Track and Field and achieved national and international ranking in my event. It may have been from sports that I developed my first academic interest -- anatomy and physiology.

Somatic Studies

From 1981 to 1986 I studied Anatomy and Physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles. I was on a pre-medical track and my goal was to attend medical school and become a doctor.

In June of 1983, whilst training for my sport in the streets, I was hit by a car and suffered fractures in my legs. During my rehabilitation, I became very critical of the treatment that my doctors gave me and I began to rethink my academic and career path. After switching to complementary medicine and taking classes in that field, I decided to pursue that direction. I enrolled in massage school and began taking courses in various different massage techniques. By 1986 I had graduated from UCLA with a Bachelors degree in Kinesiology (Physiological Science) and had been certified in many different styles of massage. I also began a practice in somatic therapies which continues to the present day.

In September of 1987 I was invited by my massage school to teach their anatomy and physiology class. I began a fifteen year career teaching for them. I also started teaching various different massage modalities including some that I developed myself during my employment at the school. I was also hired to teach at other massage schools in Los Angeles and with other workshops. By the early 1990s I began to develop my own classes through my own schools with varying degrees of business success.

I have brought my work over to the U.K. and currently practice and teach somatic therapies through Forest of Arden Healing Arts.

During the development of my work, I came to understand that many somatic problems have their roots in psychological issues. This led me into my next academic field.

Psychology

In 1987 I took a class in Bodymind Integration and it became clear to me that somatic practices alone could not be effective without the help of psychology. I decided to go back into academics and get my Masters of Science degree in Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. My course work lasted from 1990 to 1992 and then I spent four years researching and writing my thesis. In this thesis I wrote the foundational theory for a new bodymind psychology called Radical Therapy. It was a revival of an older version of Radical Therapy that had lapsed into disuse in the eighties. My research began with conversations with the original radical therapists. Taking their ideas as a foundation, I then did a close reading of Karl Marx's writings, under the guidance of my mentor, Walt C. Sheasby, to mine Marx's writings for a latent psychology. Marx's theories of alienation and reification became the roots of the new therapy.

I taught my new therapy and attempted to write a book for publication. My classes grew to a certain degree but publication of the book did not occur. America in the nineties was not ready for a Marxist-inspired psychotherapy. This realization led me to seek the root of both physical and psychological problems in the sociological structures of the time.

Sociology

I began an academic engagement with history, political science and sociology whilst studying for my degree in anatomy at UCLA. I used my university's comprehensive education requirement to educate myself about the world around me. Classes on world history and social movements woke me up to realities that made me uncomfortable and caused me to desire social change. As a bicultural person, I was already primed to see injustice. As a critic of the dominant paradigm in medicine, I was prepared for thinking against the grain of the dominant ideology. I found explanations for the somatic and psychological disorders that I was treating in my bodywork and psychotherapy practice through studying Marxism. Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, became the method through which I processed all fields of study from anatomy to history. It became clear to me that, as a bodyworker and a psychologist, working with only one person at a time (or a few in the case of family and group therapy) I was not contributing enough towards social change. This led me into education.

Pedagogy

In the Summer of 2002 I began searching for a way to get into the educational system. At that time, few people wanted to teach in the increasingly violent and underfunded Los Angeles public schools, so the school system was offering people a chance to begin teaching under an emergency credential and simultaneously study for their teaching credential. I jumped at this chance and soon found myself standing in front of a group of Mexican-American students in a Special Day Class in East L.A. The school was close to where I grew up during my early childhood and I felt as if I was returning to my cultural roots. The situation in the community was now quite different from when I grew up there. Entire neighborhoods were under the sway of gangs and their warfare. The students in my classes had been kicked out of regular education classrooms for reasons such as learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. Most of these kids were on their way to becoming gang members. Three years later, when I transferred to a high school in Hollywood, many of my students were active gang members.

I found myself excited at the prospect of educating these students in such a manner that would activate their consciousness and channel their anger out of the gangs and into the social change movements. Contractually, my job was to teach them literacy, English, literature, history, biology and health. I soon became frustrated by the profound apathy that had settled over these students. Most of them felt hopeless about their situation and about their lack of education. They cared little that they had been kicked out of regular education and many were on the fast track to being kicked out of school altogether. Some would die tragically along the way. My attempts to teach them the history of our people and to instill some pride in them fell on deaf ears. I started to feel that they were hopeless. Until, by accident, I found a flicker of interest - a shred of hope.

While my students had little interest in the history of this or that Mexican hero, they did have an interest in the characters of the stories that we read to teach them literacy. They would express strong opinions against the injustice suffered by protagonists. They cheered on fictional heroes as they charged towards the climax of the story. Literature did for these alienated students what nothing else could -- it enlivened them. They, my young gangsters, pointed the way to my next academic field of study -- literary criticism.

Shakespeare was on the curriculum and I had to find effective ways to teach him to my students. Interestingly, the processes that I used to teach Shakespeare allowed me to access the plays in ways that few English teachers do. I had to find the root of the play and repackage it in a form that my students could understand. Naturally this led me to discover how Shakespeare spoke to the basic human condition in his plays. My problem-students lived in a world that was radically and dangerously immediate and existential; as do many of Shakespeare's characters. This is why my students were able to access them.

It is also significant that during my time learning pedagogy and obtaining my teaching certificate, I developed a tyle of teaching that mirrored my style of bodywork and psychotherapy. It was humanstic and radical. I combined Lev Vygotski's notion of the zone of proximal development with Carl Roger's techniques of empathy and student-centred teaching for an effective and de-alienating pedogogy.

After obtaining my teaching certificate, I returned immediately to university to study literary criticism.

Literary Criticism and Critical Theory

Since I had very little academic background in literature, I spent two years at Santa Monica College obtaining the fundamental skills in this field. During that time I found and enjoyed the Shakespearean theatrical criticism of Carol Chillington Rutter. This led me to finding the writings of her colleague at The University of Warwick, Jonathan Bate. I decided to apply to Warwick to study with them and pursue my next postgraduate degree. In 2009 I completed a Master's of Arts degree in English literature at Warwick. During this year I discovered critical theory which allowed me align most of my academic experiences into one field of study. My years of study in Marxism and psychology gave me a solid base from which to study critical theory. Modules that I took in feminist literary theory, spatial/geographical literary theory, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, theatre studies and Shakespeare studies filled in gaps in my knowledge. Even my somatic studies took on new significance -- although I have not yet had a chance to integrate that with critical theory because critical theory has not yet accepted the integration. The founder of somatic-based critical theory, Wilhelm Reich, has not found much favour in academia.

When applying for my phd, I approached Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate and critical theorist Thomas Docherty with a proposal to study how William Shakespeare was Marxist. Jonathan, rightly, called my proposal anachronistic, and instead proposed that I look at how Marx is Shakespearean; in what ways did Marx's readings of Shakespeare's work allow for an influence from the early modern playwright to the nineteenth century revolutionary theorist. Jonathan then proposed that I look at the same influence for Freud and, in this manner, explore the roots of Shakesperean literary criticism. Thomas Docherty's guidance on the project has expanded it to look at the roots of critcial theory as well. With this doctoral project, I feel as if all my years of study have come to a logical climax in this topic. My topic allows me to explore the engagement of three shapers of the modern world - Shakespeare, Marx and Freud -- with the basic issues that lie at the root of humanity.