Kristian E. Vasquez is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He completed his B.A. in Chicana and Chicano Studies and American Indian Studies at UC Los Angeles in 2019 as a transfer student from Los Angeles Southwest College (2014-16) and later received his M.A. in Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 2021. His academic and intellectual work attends to the materialism, metaphysics, and performance of La Xicanada in California, specific to the post-Indigenous resurgence movements of the 1990s to unearth the decolonial horizon of Xicanx activity against what he terms "the coloniality of the wor(l)d." This project is tentatively entitled The Decolonial Spirit of Xicanacimiento: Aesthetics, Conocimiento, and Reality and maps its focus on the historical disjuncture of Mexican entanglements with U.S. settler colonialism, an autohistoria-teoría of Xicanx consciousness, and a textual/performance analysis of the music of punk band Subsistencia and hip-hop groups Aztlán Underground and Kozmic Force; the visual art of artist collectives Kalli Arte and Dignidad Rebelde and artist Gilda Posada; and the poetics of the writers Cherríe Moraga and Luis J. Rodríguez. He grounds this project in the geography and cartohistografía of California. Kristian works at the crossroads of decolonial theory, cultural studies, and liberation philosophies to understand affect, being/becoming, and consciousness in the narration of new realities.

With his humanities collaborator Natalia M. Toscano (University of New Mexico's Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies), they are researching and theorizing a book-length project on Chicana/Xicana feminisms that connects with the thought, political philosophy, and anti-capitalist autonomous organization of Zapatismo. Kristian's other collaborative academic projects include a co-written critical essay on the Xicanx humanism and indigeneity of Luis J. Rodríguez with Natalia M. Toscano that is part of In the Long Run: Luis J. Rodriguez’s Life and Literary Legacy edited by Josephine Metcalf & Ben V. Olguín. Kristian's forthcoming non-fiction book with FlowerSong Press is called Xicanx Nomadic Register: Fragments, Musings, and Essays, and he is working on his next non-fiction manuscript called Moral Failure: A Crossroads of Desire, an avant-garde memoir-in-essays that chronicles a becoming anarcho-punk, zinester, urban Zapatista, and student of decoloniality.