Lecturer in Latinx Studies in the Program in Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her teaching interests include the history of medicine and mental health, the construction race in the United States, migration, and the politics of health and disease.
Her current project examines the emergence of a Latinx mental health activism during the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to correct the pseudoscientific theories associating Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans with mental illness and criminality. By tracing the intellectual debates of psychiatrists and psychologists in Texas, California, and New York, she examines the role of mental health discourses in the construction of the Latinx identity and the inter-ethnic alliances between Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans Her research was showcased in Nexos-(Dis)capacidades, a blog about mental health, disability, and health policies.
She has worked at the Stony Brook Center for Civic Justice to create the Academy of Civic Life, a humanities-focused pre-college program for underserved high school students on Long Island, New York. She coauthored the article “Los Pacientes del Manicomio La Castañeda y sus diagnósticos. Una historia de la clínica psiquiátrica en México, 1910-1968,” and contributed the chapter “La Psiquiatría Infantil en la Secretaría de Educación Pública y la Emergencia de la Educación Especial”to the edited volumen La Psiquiatría Más Allá de sus Fronteras. She has also written about the history of intellectual disability in Mexico.
B.A in History at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
M.A in History at Stony Brook University
Doctoral Candidate in History at Stony Brook University