Chapter 1: From the Maquila to the Lecture Hall: McLaren, Applied

In this chapter, we will tell a few stories: stories grounded in the critical incident (Tripp, 1993) and autoethnographic (Holman Jones, 2011; Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013) traditions that drive much of our scholarship. Through these stories—and our analyses of them—we hope to lay out for the reader how our critical, radical, and anticapitalist ways of understanding our social, economic, pedagogical, and interpersonal worlds have been developed, molded, and sculpted, and how a quirky, lovely, amazingly articulate and smart-as-fuck bloke from Toronto has been central to these philosophical, practical, and artistic processes—not just for us, Marc and Luis, but to countless numbers of other teachers, thinkers, and activists around the world who yearn for genuine, substantive social justice and thus a way out of capitalism/imperialism. This bloke is Peter McLaren.