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Alexandria Herrera

Alexandria Herrera

Dual Ph.D. student in History and Women's Studies
Alexandria Herrera

Education

BA, History, University of Arizona, 2018
BA, Hispanic Literature, University of Arizona, 2018

Professional Bio

Alexandria Herrera is a dual Ph.D. student in History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Herrera's research interests are deeply reflective of her experiences growing up in the Southwest borderlands. Herrera's interests broadly revolve around 20th-and 21st-century Latin-American history and violence against women, state control of bodies, and medicine. Her dissertation investigates a long durée history, 1900 to 2012, of mandatory STI (focusing on Syphilis) testing on sex workers in Guatemala City. The project prioritizes sex worker agency and how they effected and were affected by public health policy. Herrera is also interested in how public health policies and forms of medicalized violence have historically targeted the Kaqchikel Maya community. Herrera is interested in training medical providers to recognize barriers to health care access are rooted in historical structures of inequality and violence for the Kaqchikel Maya and other marginalized communities. She is also interested in collective memory and post-memory—how cultural groups that have undergone violence tell their stories with the use of oral history.