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Dr. Carlos was born in Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico and grew up in the Harbor Area of Los Angeles in a working class immigrant community. As  immigrants he and his family, like many other immigrants and working people lived in a barrio  experiencing life as people who were working poor. This experience of living in poverty has come to influence and to a large extent define his work as a scholar, an activist, a mentor and a father. Even though his parents worked very hard and long hours, they barely scraped by. As a kid growing up in poverty he did not understand the discrepancy between the story of the American Dream and the reality of poverty for most of the people in his community.  He dedicates all of his work in all of its aspects to improving the quality of life for working people, people of color and developing other young critical scholars who challenge the systems and structures that create misery in our society for working people.

He is a proud product of California public school systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine where he specialized in the fields of Political Economy, Political theory, and American Racial and Urban Politics. He earned his M.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach with a focus in Comparative Politics and International Relations and his B.A. is in History and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2013-14, he was a University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellow as well as a Q. A. Shaw McKean, Jr. Fellow with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University.