Philosophy and critical theory that land in public policy

I hold a degree in Philosophy from the Universidad de Guadalajara and a master's in Critical Theory from 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, in Mexico City. My working life balances three things that rarely sit together: institutional management, academic research, and activism.

The day job is university administration — twenty-six years of it, in institutional statistics, international rankings, strategic planning, innovation, and federally funded programmes for inclusion. The research runs the other way: drug policy, harm reduction, and the practices of care that vulnerable populations build to survive state violence.

That double position is the point. I can read an institutional indicator and I can read a colorimetric test on an adulterated substance, and I argue that public policy only works when those two languages are made to talk to each other. My doctoral research, in preparation for the DECS programme at ITESO, is exactly that argument: Mexican drug policy suffers a chemical blindness — the state has no real-time toxicological screening, so it files complex poisonings under residual codes and misses adulteration with fentanyl, methamphetamine or xylazine — compounded by concealment for survival, as women and gender-dissident people avoid official health services for fear of extortion, prosecution, or losing custody of their children.

As an activist I work for an informed conversation about psychoactive substance use, grounded in scientific evidence and human rights. That horizontal stance runs through how I advise civil society organisations and how I teach: start from what the group already knows and put it in conversation with theory, rather than delivering closed content.

In 2023 I became the first person in Jalisco to obtain a birth certificate with a non-binary gender marker. It is not a loose biographical fact: the question of who counts as a subject of rights runs through everything I research, manage and teach.