Jose is the Training Director of the Veterans Organizing Institute, a program of Beyond the Choir. He is the former Executive Director of Iraq Veterans Against the War and served fourteen years in the U.S. Army from which he was honorably discharged in 2007 as a conscientious objector. Jose is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and teaching at John Jay College focuses on militarization and the politics of veteran status in contemporary American society.