Roberto Rodriguez

Roberto Rodriguez is an assistant professor in the MAS department at the University of Arizona. He is a longtime-award-winning journalist/columnist who returned to school in 2003 in pursuit of a Master's degree (2005) and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications (Jan. 2008) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Many of his awards have come about in the area of defense of the First Amendment and human rights. He returned as a result of a research interest that developed pursuant to his column writing concerning origins and migration stories of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. His current field of study is the examination of maize culture, migration, and the role of stories and oral traditions among Mexican and Central American peoples. For the past several years, in conjunction with UCLA's César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies – where he and Patrisia Gonzales were named Distinguished Community Scholars in 2003 – he has also embarked upon collaboratively creating Indigenous Studies within the discipline of Mexican/Chicana/o Studies. His work, based on a series of interviews with Indigenous elders throughout the continent, has resulted in several documentaries, including: Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan – We Are One (2005). He continues to write Column of the Americas, a column first syndicated by Chronicle Features, then Universal Press Syndicate. He was a senior writer for Black Issues in Higher Education from 1990-2000 and is the author of: Justice: A Question of Race (Bilingual Review Press, 1997).