Biography
Dr. Rudy Mondragón is an Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He was formerly a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. As an authoritative voice in boxing, he has been featured in ESPN, Fox Sports, Los Angeles Times, Bleacher Report, Boxing Scene, CNN, Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Times, Washington Post, USA Today, El Universal (Mexico), Reforma (Mexico), and written for LA Taco, Remezcla, and We Are Mitu. As a photographer, his photos and writing have been featured in The Streets Magazine and Indian Country Today. In 2021, he was interviewed by actress, producer, and director Eva Longoria for “La Guerra Civil,” a DAZN documentary about Mexican and Mexican American identity and the epic boxing matches between Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez. In 2022, the documentary debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. He was also interviewed for “In The Company of Kings,” a film about the beauty and brutality of the sport boxing starring Larry Holmes, Bernard Hopkins, Earner Shavers, and other world champions. The film debuted in 2024.
As an interdisciplinary critical sports and ethnic studies scholar, Mondragón’s research bridges comparative ethnic and cultural studies with the sociology of race and sport to interrogate often dismissed sporting spaces of resistance and the political economy of boxing.
Mondragón's interest in sports started in the early 1990s. In 1992, he watched his first boxing match on television between Julio César Chávez and Héctor Camacho. After the 1994 World Cup, Mondragón decided to take up soccer, which eventually earned him a division-1 athletic scholarship to play for the University of California, Irvine. These lived athletic experiences have given Rudy a unique lens to study sports politics and culture.
His first book project, Miles Before the Bell: Race, Sporting Entitlements, and the Brutal Economy of Boxing, draws upon six years of ethnographic fieldwork, multimedia data, and over 35 in-depth interviews with world champion boxers. Miles Before the Bell examines the political economy of boxing and the ways Black and Brown professional boxers navigate and perform resistance via the most spectacular yet under-studied element of the sport: The Ring Entrance. Mondragón advances the concept of the “brutal economy of boxing ” to reveal the complexities and consequences of having a labor pool of fighters who come from the most marginalized sectors of society and are engaged in a sport industry that is under-regulated and not unionized. Despite this context, ring entrances bear witness to Black and Brown performances of radical self-expression that take place in relation to sociopolitical and historical moments. Through their deployment of expressive culture - music, fashion and style, and entourages - boxers curate ring entrances that resist and disrupt dominant ideologies of subordination through their subtle and fluid performances of their oppositional identities and politics. Mondragón calls these performances “sporting entitlements.”
Rudy is the recipient of the University of California Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, American Studies Association Sports Caucus Graduate Student Paper Awardee, North American Society for Sport History Graduate Student Essay Finalist, International Conference on Sport & Society Emerging Scholar Awardee, University of California, Berkeley Oral History Center Graduate Student Fellow, Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles Gold Shield Alumnae Graduate Fellow, and Arthur Ashe Jr. Sports-Scholar Awardee. Mondragón and Dr. Abel Valenzuela Jr. were awarded the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute Research Grant (2022) to conduct a policy brief on boxing regulations in California. Most recently, he was awarded the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research.
[Photo Credit: Tiffany Vaught]