Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: History of public health, History of Medicine, Latin American History, Colombian History, Citizenship studies, State Formation, Health, and Disease.

About Me: I am a historian of health, disease, and medicine in Latin America, currently serving as an Associate Professor of History at California State University, Channel Islands. My research explores how doctors, intellectuals, state officials, and community members historically defined and framed health and citizenship. Originally from Cali, Colombia, I center my academic work on how communities bargained with state agencies and public health personnel to secure their fundamental rights. Before joining CSUCI, I was an assistant professor at Universidad Icesi in Colombia. My scholarship focuses on public policy, biopolitics, and local medical landscapes in twentieth-century Colombia.

Recent Publications: In the 1930s, Colombia embarked on an ambitious project of national transformation, placing public health at its center. Backed by the state and transnational medical networks like the Rockefeller Foundation, health professionals fanned out across the country to modernize Colombian bodies, habits, and communities in the name of progress. At stake was nothing less than who counted as a citizen worthy of state investment. Diagnosing the Nation: Public Health, Citizenship, and the State in Colombia, forthcoming through the University of Nebraska Press traces the tense, negotiated, and surprising encounters between these practitioners and everyday Colombians. Drawing on national and transnational archives, the book reveals how peasants, workers, and women were cast as either sanitary citizens worthy of redemption or unsanitary subjects whose lives were expendable. Rather than passive targets, ordinary people received, reinterpreted, and contested these discourses—sometimes reinforcing existing hierarchies of class, race, and gender, and sometimes challenging the state’s narrow vision of health and rights.