Cesar Ché Rodriguez

César “che” Rodríguez was raised by a working-class, Mexican migrant family in Daly City and South San Francisco. His education began with his family. His mother taught him to pursue his education as a form of self-defense, his father encouraged him to practice reflexive criticism, and his older brother helped him to learn from the Blues epistemology.

He pursued his formal, academic training in public schools from pre-K to PhD, including community colleges like the College of San Mateo and Skyline College. This training was facilitated by educational equity and pipeline programs, such as Head Start, the Transfer Alliance Project, TRiO Student Support Services, and the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program.  

His scholarship focuses on the re-/production of racial capitalism through criminalization, a form of racialization and hegemonizing occurring in the seemingly colorblind terms of balanced budgets and law and order. In particular, he explores criminalization as essential to advancing the neoliberal warfare state. He also examines “popular self-activity," the collective protaganism of historically-expropriated, -exploited, and negatively-racialized peoples as they author knowledge and history through struggle.

His current work focuses on the “Oscar Grant moment," a period of intense popular, political mobilizations in Oakland, California, to contest the extrajudicial police killing of Oscar Grant, a young Black father from Hayward, CA.  

Dr. Rodriguez is ultimately motivated by internationalism, autonomy, as well as efforts to radically democratize economy and governance. He is a rank-and-file union member of the California Faculty Association (CFA) and organized with Change SSF.