Victoria González-Rivera, Ph.D.

Professor and Department Chair 
Office: AL-394
Email: [email protected]

Dr. Victoria González-Rivera has been living on the U.S./Mexico border for over two decades and considers this region her second home. The daughter of a Nicaraguan man and a white U.S.-American woman, she grew up in Nicaragua during the last years of the right-wing Somoza dictatorship, the leftist insurrection of 1978, the Sandinista revolution of 1979, and the Contra War of the early 1980s. After graduating with a B.A. in History, Women's Studies, and Latin American Studies from Oberlin College, she obtained her M.A. in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Indiana University. Professor González-Rivera is the first woman of Nicaraguan ancestry to obtain a Ph.D. in Latin American History from a U.S. university.

Her first monograph, Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821-1979, was published in 2011 by Penn State University Press. Her most recent book, Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua, was published by the University of Arizona press in 2024. That same year she published a book chapter on Nicaraguan women's efforts to gain the vote titled “The History of Women’s Suffrage in Nicaragua. An Incomplete History” in the volume Women’s Suffrage in the Americas (University of New Mexico Press). Her essay "Why My Nicaraguan Father Did Not 'See' His Blackness and How Latinx Anti-Black Racism Feeds on Racial Silence" appears in the 2026 edited volume Central American Women in Diaspora: Testimonios of the Generations (University of Arizona Press). She has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Professor González-Rivera has been a member of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies since 2005. She teaches courses on Mexican, U.S., and Chicanx history. Her classes address the history of colonial Mexico and the history of Chicana/os in the U.S., as well as the history of U.S. intervention in Central America and Central American migration to the U.S. In addition to her work as a teacher, scholar, and mentor at SDSU, she is an active member of her community and has served on several non-profit boards. Her current research addresses the nexus between migration, labor, and U.S. imperialism as well as the ways in which slavery and nostalgia for empire shaped the U.S./Nicaragua relationship in the 19th century.