Position Title
Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
- Chicana/o/x Studies
Miguel Angel Castañeda is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Castañeda was born and raised in the San Diego/Tijuana borderlands; he received his PhD in History from UC San Diego and was previously the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. A historian of student movements and scholar of relational Chicana/o Studies, Miguel’s work documents how Mexican American youth, men and women from immigrant and farmworker families, alongside Black, Filipina/o, Puerto Rican and feminist students transformed universities in California.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Castañeda is working on his book manuscript “It Was About Self-Determination:” Student Power, the Third World Left, and the Chicana/o Movement, 1967-1980. This work draws archival research, cultural analysis, and oral histories/testimonios to document the Chicana/o student movement at San Diego State University. From 1967 to 1974, Chicana/o students, faculty, and staff built one of the first Mexican American Studies programs and made the department an exemplar of a radically different academic unit, where students controlled many facets of their education and made an institution that had excluded people of color for decades work for their community.
Education
Ph.D. United States History, University of California, San Diego, 2024
M.A. United States History, University of California, San Diego, 2019
B.A. Chicana & Chicano Studies, San Diego State University, 2015
A.A. Chicana & Chicano Studies, San Diego City College, 2013
Research
Research Consultant, “50 Years of Chicana/o Studies at San Diego City College,” Dir. Paul Espinosa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rkvgG5LAuk&t=123s
Research Interests
Relational Chicano/a/x History; Comparative Race and Ethnic Histories; Third World Internationalism; Third World and Chicana Feminisms; Oral History Methods; Social Movements in the Americas; History of the US/Mexico Borderlands; Cultural and Social History