Born and raised in Texas, José grew up surrounded by both Mexican and American culture. Speaking Spanish and English at home and at school, he never found it unusual to move between the two worlds. During his undergraduate studies in Poitiers, France, he majored in Lettres contemporaines (French Literature) and Anglophone Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. This experience revealed to him parallels between American and French society, particularly in their efforts to construct national narratives and identities. At HiLi, his focus is now on studying, comparing, and contrasting the narratives within the works of Mexican-American and Franco-Maghrébi authors, with the aim of identifying unifying elements between two seemingly different experiences, linked by their bi-cultural identities.
