History Center Events
Spring 2025
"Indigenous Nurses and Health Advocacy in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1934-1970"
Marissa L. Nichols, PhD
April 15, 2025 at 12 p.m. on Zoom
What can we learn about the history of nursing and rural healthcare from the perspective of Indigenous nursing assistants in Mexico? This talk centers the Indigenous men and women who labored as nursing assistants across the multilingual and multiethnic state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Focused on the mid-twentieth century, the presentation focuses on the Mixtec and Mazatec (Indigenous) nurses who often selectively implemented health programs in response to community requests. It shifts our focus from foreign nurses to the local nurses that played a central role in the expansion of state-sponsored rural healthcare in Oaxaca.
Marissa
L. Nichols is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Healthcare History and Policy in the School of Nursing at Emory University. She is also an American Council of Learned Societies fellow and she holds a PhD in Latin American history from Emory University. Her research puts nursing history into dialogue with ethnohistory (Indigenous history) and focuses on mid-twentieth-century Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico. Her work has been supported by Fulbright-Hays and the American Association for the History of Nursing, among other sources.
For a recording of any of these talks, please contact the Bjoring Center's program manager.
"The 'Brazilian Ladies of Toronto' and the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s: A Transnational History of Nursing" by Luciana Barizon Luchesi, PhD, RN (December 2024)
"Dynamics of Prejudice: Antiracist Nursing Education, 1968-1978" by Cory Ellen Gatrall, PhD, MFA, RN (October 2024)
"Bait, Switch, and Sue: Filipino Nurses’ Solidarity against Exploitative International Recruitment Practices, 2005-2009" by Andre A. Rosario, PhD, RN (September 2024)
"Unearthing Black Midwifery Stories in Virginia" by Linda Janet Holmes, recipient of the Bjoring Center's 2024 Agnes Dillon Randolph Award (April 2024)
"Neither the Colonizer Nor the Colonized: Thai Nursing Students in the Philippines and New England, 1920-1931" by Christine N. Peralta, PhD, recipient of the Bjoring Center's 30th Anniversary Research Fellowship (March 2024)
“Filling the Unforgiving Minute with Sixty Seconds’ Worth of Distance Run: Barbara Fassbinder, Nursing, and AIDS in the U.S., 1986-1991” by Karissa Haugeberg, PhD (February 2024)
"Narrating a Life of Care: Hindsight and Challenges of Interpretation in the Study of Religion and Health" by Angela Xia, PhD candidate in religious studies, recipient of the Bjoring Center's 30th Anniversary Research Fellowship (November 2023)
"Gay Nurses/Straight Health Care: Toward a Queer History of Nursing" by Jess Dillard-Wright, PhD, MA, RN, CNM, recipient of the Barbara Brodie Nursing History Fellowship (November 2023)
"Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care" by Guian McKee, PhD (September 2023)
"History and Memory of Filipino Nurses in U.S. Health-Care Delivery" by Catherine Ceniza Choy, PhD, recipient of the 2023 Agnes Dillon Randolph Award (April 2023)
"Medicine of Care: Oral History of Nurse Practitioners in New York State" by Morag Martin, PhD (March 2023)
"Black Nurses’ Silent Struggle to Integrate Hospital Nursing in the North, 1950-1970" by Hafeeza Anchrum, PhD, RN (Nov. 2022)
"Understanding the Experiences of Male Nurse Practitioners, 1980 to Present" by Marcus D. Henderson, MSN, RN (Oct. 2022)
"A Virtual Roundtable on the History of Black Midwives" with Wangui Muigai, PhD; Michelle Drew, DNP, MPH, CNM, FNP-C, C-EFM; and Gertrude Fraser, PhD (Feb. 2022). Download the History of Black Midwives Roundtable transcript.
Program: "Ancient Wisdom, Resistance and Reclamation: The Historical Contributions of African and African American Midwives 1619 to the Present" - by Michelle Drew, DNP, MPH, CNM, FNP-C, C-EFM
"Trust, Training, and Tradition: Black Midwifery in the Early 20th Century" - by Wangui Muigai, PhD
"African American Doulas: Carrying on the Tradition, Navigating Spaces of Care and Exploitation" - by Gertrude J. Fraser, PhD
Black Midwives: A History Forum
