Robert Mendoza, Ph.D

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California Lutheran University. I received my PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (2023), and I have been teaching at Cal Lutheran since Fall 2023. My research and teaching focus on the representation of different forms of labor in 20th-century and Contemporary Multiethnic literature, including poetry, fiction, and memoirs about various forms of work (factory, office, agricultural, service, informal, and waged/unwaged domestic labor). 

More broadly, I teach Chicano Literature, African American Literature, and Post-Civil War US Literature courses at Cal Lutheran. Additionally, I teach writing classes that focus on various themes, including power/resistance, labor, capitalism, and vocation. In all my classes, I prioritize the development of critical thinking skills by creating writing assignments and in-class activities that allow students to question and critique dominant understandings of different forms of labor. This critical thinking practice not only allows students to reflect on or explore their own vocations but also provides them with the opportunity to participate in contemporary and historical debates and discussions about life under capitalism (protestant work ethic, work-life balance, the abstract domination involved in the accumulation of capital, and so on). As importantly, my courses enable students to develop the necessary skills that are highly valued in the job market, including textual analysis, pattern recognition, communication skills, and several other desirable skills that fall under the broad banner of "soft-skills." Simply put, my teaching centers on both a critical and scholarly approach to questions of labor and capitalism, while also acknowledging that our classes are situated within the broader context of a larger capitalist system. In other words, I'm committed to both the flourishing of my students as literary critics who can confidently navigate the intricacies of a complex literary text and their flourishing as workers who can face the job market and their careers with the utmost confidence.  

My recent research examines the portrayal of various forms of labor (industrial, service, and informal) in 1960s and 1970s US movement literature. More specifically, I examine how authors involved in the Black Arts Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the Nuyorican Movement developed urgent critiques of labor by representing the struggles of Black and Brown workers. Such movement-era writers--including Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Pedro Pietri--engage with the world of work by depicting the arduous experiences of workers either absorbed in or excluded from the formal labor market. Such writings, overall, recentered a new understanding of the proletariat as a category of dispossession rather than a category of exploitation/alienation via the wage relation. Accordingly, this new body of movement literature depicted struggles against racial capitalism as occurring beyond the factory or the formal labor market.

So although some movement-era writers might direct our attention to immediate sites of workplace alienation—such as Tomás Rivera’s unflinching descriptions of Mexican-American child laborers suffering under heat in the farms of…Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra (1971)—much movement literature also attends to a multiplicity of racialized populations fighting racial capitalism’s beyond sites of productive labor: consider the urban riots found in the pages of Amiri Baraka’s “Black People!” (1967) or Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot (1969); the 1968 East Los Angeles highschool walkouts concerned with the question of the futures and social reproduction of Mexican and Mexican-American high school students in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s auto fiction The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973); or the laborious search for the employment in the streets of New York in Pedro Pietri’s poem “Unemployed” (1973). The figures in these texts complicate the traditional narratives of class struggle in the proletarian fiction of the early twentieth century, which often portrayed white male factory workers as the primary representatives of the working class engaged in production struggles.

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. 

Expertise

Multiethnic US Literature, Post-1945 US Literature, Marxist Literary Criticism, Racial Capitalism, Value-Form Theory.