Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Isidro González joins the CMC history department post-doctoral fellow and visiting professor of history. Born in Tijuana, González moved at a young age to the San Diego area. He attended University of San Diego and then continued with his master’s and PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his dissertation in 2024 while teaching a course on the History of Latinx Migrations. The question of his dissertation was “how were/are disabled people made?” In support of his dissertation, he received the Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Scholarship in the Medical Humanities from the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) for a project that showed how intimate dialogue between observer and observed demonstrated ways in which bedside manner, cultural insensitivity, and an ideology that some minds are worth more than others led to long lives of confinement, surveillance, and sexual sterilization for patients/inmates or, for eugenic professionals, to successful, generative, and long careers in the sciences. González’s work has appeared in Southern California Quarterly and Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research.

The thread that has connected González’s experiences throughout his academic career has been his deep personal understanding of individual stories of migration, disability, and Mexican Identity. “I am a borderlander, if you will” González shares, “I've always just kind of been interested in that aspect… like where we have two cultures sort of meshing, for better or for worse, good and bad,”.  What this concept borderlander means for González changed during his studies of Mexican history and nation building in combination with the history of eugenics in California. His concept of history combines science, medicine, politics, culture, and society on the understanding of disability. “I ended up writing a history of what the eugenic movement really meant in the US West and how concepts of race, ethnicity, religion, and political affiliations played into the pathologization of marginalized people.”

Professor Gonzalez’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the History Department at CMC.