He is from the Dominican Republic and lived in New York City for more than ten years before moving to Washington DC for graduate studies at Howard University. He has received the financial support from the Mellon Mays Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Dominican Studies Institute of City College of New York. His essay “Carlos Cooks: A Dominican Garveyite in Harlem” appears in The Afrolatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States 2010 edited volume by Miriam Jimenez Roman and Juan Flores. Currently, he is revising his dissertation for publication, a narrative that seeks to add a new lane to the intersection of Black and Latino Studies, foregrounding the importance of the Dominican chapter of the African diaspora in the Americas.