More than A Scholar: A Symposium to Honor Dr. Edna Viruell-Fuentes’ Legacy in Scholarship, Public Health, and Higher Education | Department of Latina/Latino Studies

Inspired by one of her most influential articles, “More than Culture: Structural Racism, Intersectionality Theory, and Immigrant Health,” this symposium commemorates Dr. Edna Viruell-Fuetnes’ life as a scholar, mentor, and friend. Featuring nine panelists that range from former mentees, research collaborators, and public health practitioners, the symposium will provide a space to reflect on Dr. Viruell-Fuentes’ past work and how we might carry her groundbreaking scholarship on race, health, and Latina/o immigration into the future. Please join us as we outline the breadth of Dr. Viruell-Fuentes’ influence, celebrate her life, and honor her legacy.

During Dr. Viruell-Fuentes’ illustrious career she gave us a rich corpus of research. In this spreadsheet of her published articles and book chapters, you will find publications that Dr. Viruell-Fuentes published or co-authored throughout her long and prolific career. Many of the articles are available for reading as PDFs through the appropriate journal websites. We hope this collection serves as a resource to both pay tribute to the critical scholarship Dr. Viruell-Fuentes created and contributed to the field of Latina/o Studies and Public Health, and a resource for future and current scholars.

Click here for a photo album documenting some of our favorite memories of Edna.

Symposium presenter Dolores Acevedo-Garcia wrote a loving tribute about Edna that can be read here.

WATCH A RECORDING OF THE ENTIRE SYMPOSIUM HERE https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_3yd2yj3n

Speakers:

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, PhD (Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Director, Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy, Brandeis University)

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia is Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, and Director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial/ethnic inequities in health (e.g. residential segregation, neighborhood inequality, immigrant adaptation); the role of social policies in reducing those inequities (e.g. housing policies, immigrant policies); and the health and wellbeing of children with special needs and their families. She received her B.A. in Public Administration from El Colegio de Mexico (Mexico City), and her MPA-URP and Ph.D. in Public Policy with a concentration in Demography from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Dr. Acevedo-Garcia is Project Director for diversitydatakids.org, a comprehensive research program and indicator database on child wellbeing and opportunity by race/ethnicity across multiple sectors (e.g., education, health, housing and neighborhoods) and geographies, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Aída Rosalia Guhlincozzi, MA (PhD Candidate, Geography and GIScience, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Aída Rosalia Guhlincozzi is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and PhD candidate in Geography and GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She uses mixed methods in her research on health care accessibility to linguistically-appropriate physicians for Latinas, and immigrant and Latinx health geographies. In her research, she uses a mixed methods approach of interviews, surveys, and GIS analysis. Her research on spatial mismatch of healthcare access to Spanish-speaking physicians in the suburbs was recently published in the Journal of Latin American Geography October 2020 issue, entitled “‘Buscando el cuidado’: Spatial mismatch of physician services in Spanish for Latinxs in suburban Chicago.” She is an advocate for diversity in Geography and the Geosciences at-large. In the summer of 2019, she co-founded and co-led a camp for middle school girls of color. Aída is a founding board member of the American Association of Geographers Latinx Geographies Specialty Group. She is a co-author of a chapter on Quantitative Methods in the forthcoming book, COVID-19 and Similar Futures: Geographical Perspectives, Issues, and Agendas.

Alana LeBrón, PhD (Assistant Professor of Public Health and Chicano/Latino Studies, University of California, Irvine)

Dr. Alana M.W. LeBrón is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Public Health and Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. LeBrón’s research focuses on understanding and addressing the implications of structural racism for health equity. Much of Dr. LeBrón’s scholarship centers on the intersections of race, socioeconomic position, immigrant generation, immigration status, and gender with health inequities, with a focus on the health of Latina/o communities and community-engaged strategies for understanding and addressing health inequities. Her areas of research include how structural racism shapes policies and ideologies pertaining to immigration, government-issued IDs, environmental racism, COVID-19 response and recovery, and health care and social service access and utilization, and community-driven strategies for interrupting these processes.

Sandra Nadezhda Martínez Díaz Covarrubias, Doctorate (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Guadalajara, Mexico)

Sandra Nadezhda Martínez Díaz Covarrubias portrait

Sandra Nadezhda Martínez Díaz Covarrubias holds a Doctorate in Social Sciences from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), West headquarters, Mexico. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She has developed research and advocacy projects on the integration processes of deportees and returnees to Jalisco, Mexico. She is Visiting Research Specialist on the project The Ripple Effects of the U.S. Immigration Policy Environment: Health and Wellbeing in Migrant-Sending Communities in Mexico led by Dr. Edna Viruell-Fuentes. Dr. Martínez Díaz Covarrubias is the coordinator of the Center for Research and Projects for Gender Equality, AC. She is an adjunct researcher in a research project on health and integration of deportees with gang and substance use experience, within the Program for Migration and Health Research (PIMSA), sponsored by the University of California Berkeley. The Research focuses on processes of integration of returnees/deportees and their families in Jalisco, gender, exercise of rights and public policies focused on return.

Patricia Yvonne Miranda-Hartsuff, PhD (Associate Professor of Public Health, Wayne State University)

The daughter of former farmworkers and sharecroppers, Dr. Patricia Yvonne Miranda-Hartsuff is a health equity policy scholar with over 18 years of experience with community-based participatory methods and expertise in the measurement of population-based health disparities. Dr. Miranda joined Wayne State University in August 2020 as tenured Associate Professor of Public Health. Formerly, Dr. Miranda was tenured Associate Professor of Health Policy & Administration and Demography at Penn State (University Park, PA), and W. K. Kellogg Foundation Health Scholar at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX), the top cancer center in the United States. She has been trained by the World Health Organization in the use of the "health in all policies" (HiAP) approach, and is a graduate of the inaugural 2015-2016 cohort for Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity (LEEAD) program, designed to produce doctoral-trained evaluators from diverse backgrounds who are committed to advancing equity and social justice for children and families. Dr. Miranda has underscored the importance of the intersectionality of gender, race, class and immigration in evaluating health disparities, and has added the critical assessment of the implementation of health in all policies and sociopolitical context to the discourse on health inequity and as a lens to examine important conditions that affect vulnerable populations.

Lisa Ortiz, PhD (Provost Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and Latina/o/x Studies, University of Iowa)

Lisa Ortiz is a Provost Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of Iowa teaching in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and the Latina/o/x Studies Program. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is grounded at the intersection of contemporary Latina/x/o (im)migration, media, and education and focuses specifically on Puerto Ricans. She earned her PhD in Educational Policy Studies with graduate minors in Latina/Latino Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies in 2018 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rocio Salazar, BA (Paralegal, CTM Legal Group, Chicago, IL)

Rocio Salazar is an alumna of UIUC. She graduated in May 2020 with a double major in Latina/Latino Studies and Spanish. In her time at the University Rocio was involved in the Latino Student Association. She is also a sister of Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc. Currently, Rocio works as a paralegal for CTM Legal Group as the only Spanish speaker in the entire firm. Rocio plans on furthering her education and become an immigration attorney in the near future.

Cindy San Miguel, MPH (Program Evaluation Manager, Sinai Urban Health Institute, Chicago, IL)

Cindy San Miguel is a 2013 alum from the Latina/Latino studies department, where Dr. Edna Viruell-Fuentes’ mentorship and guidance was instrumental in the completion of her degree. She is currently a program evaluation manager with the Sinai Urban Health Institute. Cindy’s interests are at the intersection of maternal and child health and health equity. Previously, Cindy was the assistant director of the UIC Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health. Her past work experience also includes providing lung health education through the Respiratory Health Association at various ambulatory clinics of Cook County Health. She also previously worked as a community-based doula for young mothers in the South-Side of Chicago and was a home visitor, serving pregnant women and children throughout the Chicagoland area. Cindy also has an MPH from the UIC School of Public Health in community health sciences and maternal and child health.

Susan Whitlock, MA, MDiv (Freelance Book Editor, Ann Arbor, MI)

Susan Whitlock is a freelance book editor living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She specializes in developmental editing of scholarly works and narrative nonfiction. From 1992-2001 she worked in the copyediting and acquisition departments of the University of Michigan Press. She holds a B.A. in English from Harvard/Radcliffe, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and an M.Div from McCormick Theological Seminary. In her spare time she writes haiku as a way of practicing precision and economy of expression. She has practiced and taught Re-Evaluation Counseling for close to thirty years.