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Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

headshot of Darrel Wanzer-Serrano with bookshelves in the background
Director, Race and Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI)
Associate Professor
Areas of Speciality
  • Higher Education / Education
  • Latinx/a/o Education Policy & Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI)
  • Coloniality / Decoloniality
  • Discourse / Communication
  • Organizing / Organizations
Contact
  • (979) 862-4650
  • dws@tamu.edu
  • LAAH 459
Personal Website
Department
Communication & Journalism

Biography

Dr. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (he/him/his) is Director of the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is also Core Faculty in the Latino/an and Mexican American Studies (LMAS) Program. His research is focused on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and public discourse, particularly as they relate shifting cultural and organizational terrains. His last book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press, 2015), was the first scholarly monograph on one of the most significant organizations of the Puerto Rican diaspora. The Young Lords (1969-1976) was a revolutionary nationalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist street political organization who advanced a thirteen-point political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the U.S.), the broader liberation of all “Third World people,” equality for women, US demilitarization, leftist political education, socialist redistribution, community control, and other programs as they fit into their platform and ecumenical ideology. As part of the broader Young Lords project, he edited The Young Lords: A Reader (New York University Press, 2010), which was a well reviewed critical edition of primary source documents produced originally by the organization. His scholarship has also appeared in numerous journals, edited books, and in various public forums. Dr. Wanzer-Serrano is currently working on a new project about institutional rhetorics of “servingness” at emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions (eHSIs), with a specific focus on how those discourses emerge from contexts of racialized organizations. Most recently, he edited a forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, for which he penned the introduction that argues rhetorical studies is fundamentally racist and needs some substantive antiracist attention. “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems” is among the top 5 most viewed/downloaded articles in the history of the journal.