Rodolfo “Dr. Rudy” Aguilar, Associate Professor of American and Latino Studies

Rodolfo “Dr. Rudy” Aguilar is Associate Professor of Latin American/Latinx Studies (LALS) and American Studies and currently serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the LALS program coordinator. He earned his PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. His scholarly interests include Mexican and Chicana/o/x communities in the Midwest and the U.S. South, popular music, sound studies, immigration, labor, and informal economies. He has written on Latina/o/x engagements with Mexican sonidero subcultures, trap rap, and country music. His peer-reviewed works have appeared in Aztlan, The Black Scholar, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. Most recently, he co-authored a book chapter on Atlanta's Mexican American Chef Smokey and birria.

Email: raguila6@kennesaw.edu  
Website: https://kennesaw.academia.edu/RudyAguilar 

MAST Courses Taught:  

  • AMST 6201: History & Culture of the Americas  
  • AMST 7100: American Studies Methods 
  • AMST 7430: American Popular Music 
  • AMST 7510: Passages to America (migration studies) 
     

Select Publications:   

  • Co-authored with Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez. “The Sun is Gonna Shine for Everybody”: Chef Smokey’s ATL and Slanging “Crack” (or Birria) in Uncertain Times” in Culinary Mestizaje: Racial Mixing, Migration, and Foodways in the U.S. ed. Rudy Guevara and Felipe Hinojosa (Austin: University of Texas Press). Published July 2025. 
      
  • “‘Why the Heck Am I Out Here Lookin’ Country?’: Locating Contradictory Post-Movimiento Chicana/o/x Subjectivity in Little Joe’s “Redneck Meskin’ Boy” Recordings and the Emergence of an Overlapping South” Interdisciplinary Humanities 37, 2 (2020): 44-64. (Published 08/22/2022). 
      
  • “‘You Sound like Atlanta’: The Politics of Sounding and Visualizing Black Soundscapes and Mexican Sensibilities in Kap G’s Trap Rap” The Black Scholar 52, no. 1 (2022): 64-74. 
      
  • “‘Gracias a dios que los bailes me han ayudado’: Exploring the Baile Economy and Symbolic Networking Among Mexican Sonidos in Chicagoland” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 45, no. 1 (2020): 81-108.