Delia Fernández-Jones is the associate dean for Equity, Justice, and Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Letters, associate professor of history, core faculty member of Chicano/Latino studies, and the outgoing chair of the Womxn of Color Initiatives at Michigan State University. Engaging a transformative justice framework, her position on the Dean’s Senior Leadership team centers on creating and sustaining equitable relationships and policies within the college. Fernández-Jones works to help the college deepen its investment in the Culture of Care initiative and make accessible the Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) model.
As a historian and scholar of Latinx studies, she has drawn on her lived experiences as a Latina in Michigan and extensive primary source research, to document and theorize Latinx placemaking in the Midwest. She is the author of the award-winning book, Making the MexiRican City: Mexican and Puerto Rican Migration, Activism, and Placemaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Her book details how disparate Latinx communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges and simultaneously transformed Grand Rapids and the Midwest from the 1920s to the 1970s. She is also the author of two award-winning articles on Latinxs in Michigan.
Originally published at latinostudies.nd.edu.