Natalie Santizo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Office: TBA
Email: TBA
Dr. Natalie Santizo is an interdisciplinary historian from Baldwin Park, California. Her research interests include 20th century history, critical food studies, and racial geographies. Her current project “Critical Latinx Foodways: Racial Formation, Regional Identity, and Placemaking in the San Gabriel Valley, 1900-1968,” exists at the intersection of Chicana/o Studies, History, Racial Geographies, and Food Studies. She is concerned with understanding how foodways—the production, consumption, and distribution of foods and food goods over time—have shaped Latinx placemaking and survival in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. Where this project is historically focused, it uses a mixed-methods approach (archival research, GIS mapping, census data analysis, and oral history) to create two interventions: 1. It grounds public history—building knowledges with marginalized communities—in piecing together Latinx social histories and 2. It advances the framework of “critical latinx foodways,” a methodological process of recovery through a foodways lens that expands beyond this region. Dr. Santizo earned her doctorate from UCLA under the department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies (2022). Prior to SDSU, she served as a UC President’s Postdoc at UC Merced under the department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (2022-2023).