Welcome to the Department of Chicana/o Studies!

For general inquiries please contact us at chidept@ucdavis.edu or 530-752-2421, M-F, 9:30 a.m.- 3:30 p.m.  (PT).
For advising appointments, please use appointments.ucdavis.edu or contact Alma Martinez (almartinez@ucdavis.edu).

  

The academic year 2024-25 course schedule is viewable on Major/Minor tab.  (Bottom of the page.)
Our Program Coordinator, Charrise can be reached at cmtorres@ucdavis.edu 

Natalia Deeb-Sossa

Natalia

Professor

  • Chicana/o Studies
2105 Hart Hall
Office Hours
By appointment

Short Biography

Natalia was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and came to the U.S. in 1995 to continue with her graduate studies and escape the Colombian violence, which at that time was shaped by the growing drug trade. She was finishing her degree in economics when the number of kidnaps, extortions, intimidations, and murders became grotesque and unprecedented, even by Colombian standards. These observations of violence eventually brought her to sociology as a field of study. Natalia Deeb-Sossa is a Professor in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Davis who has more than 16 years teaching in public higher education. 

Natalia is an interdisciplinary and transnational Chicana feminist health scholar who has made significant contributions in the areas of gender, race/ethnicity and class, and how they influence reproductive justice and reproductive health, community politics, cultural citizenship, and social justice.

Books

Natalia’s first book published in 2013 with University of Arizona Press (UAP), Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South, illustrates how an intersectional perspective deepens our understanding of the construction of “moral identity” among health-care practitioners.  Difficult working conditions and the built-in inequalities present in the clinic as a workplace made health-care work difficult, in particular for the lower-status staffers: African American and Latina health-care workers. In “Doing Good,” Deeb-Sossa analyzes how health-care practitioners crafted a moral identity by drawing on the cultural resources available to them, using gendered frames, but also racialized frames, classed frames, and nationalist frames.  Natalia explores how these social dynamics affected not only the lives of the Latina/o immigrants, but also the lives of the established residents (white and African Americans), as both groups were thrown together at work. The ways all these health-care providers fashioned a superior self-image perpetuated inequalities by dividing lower-status workers, enforcing racial boundaries, and limiting the health-care access of patients of the “other” race. Her book received excellent reviews (see review by Zaire Dinzey (2014) in the American Journal of Sociology 119(6) 1781-1784 and Helen Marrow (2015)  in Contemporary Sociology 44(1):47-50). 

Deeb-Sossa has published three more books. In 2019 she edited with University of Arizona Press, Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies, an anthology on Chicana/o researchers’ experiences when implementing Community-Based Participatory Research, which showcases the complexity of doing activist scholarship, the variety of ways it may be implemented, how it has been used to create sustainable change, and the challenges to create community empowerment. 

 

In 2022 she co-edited with Dr. Bickham-Mendez, Latinx Belonging: Community Building and Resilience in the United States (University of Arizona Press), a volume that is anchored in the claim that Latinxs are not defined by the marginalities that they experience but instead should be understood as active participants in their communities and in US society. Beyond Deportability conceptualizes belonging as actively produced, not bestowed, and deeply contoured by intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class as well as by the effects of immigration policies and the pronounced social disinvestment in vulnerable communities that has accompanied neoliberal, global capitalism (Yuval-Davis 20011). It focuses on settlement processes, community resilience, and integration, as Latinx immigrant communities are experiencing unprecedented levels of fear and exclusionary conditions that began decades ago but have escalated during the Trump administration.  Beyond Deportability centers and theorizes the production of belonging through the use of case studies that highlight place-specific ongoing, dynamic negotiations of the “everyday.”

 

Her latest co-edited book (2024) with Dr. Yvette G. Flores and Dr. Angie Chabram, Testimonios of Care: Feminist Latina/x and Chicana/x Perspectives on Caregiving Praxis, (University of Arizona Press), gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios of caregiving guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, highlight solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community.

 

Deeb-Sossa, together with Flores and Dr. Rita Urquijo-Dian are working on the third co-edited volume tentatively titled Maldito (Damned) Cancer!: Chicanx and Latinx Testimonios of Resilience, Illness and Dealing with Mortality that will bring together first person accounts or testimonios highlighting how Chicanx and Latinx experience and deal with el maldito cancer. This co-edited book wants to highlight, through testimonios, Latinx and Chicanx cultural narratives and understandings of cancer as patients, family caregivers, and/or friends. By bringing these narratives out from the shadows this book is an important follow-up to the trailblazing collections Telling to Live, Speaking from the Body, and the forthcoming Testimonios of Care: Feminist Latina/x and Chicana/x Perspectives on Caregiving Praxis.  The three collections of personal testimonies integrate professional and personal perspectives and show that our understanding of health remains incomplete if Latinx and Chicanx cultural narratives are not included. 

 

Current Research: Acompañantes

Supported by the 2022 Chancellor’s Fellowship for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award and the grant for Advancing Sustainable Development Goals, Natalia Deeb-Sossa, with the guidance of El Centro Las Libres, organized and convened a 5-day gathering in Guanajuato Mexico with 19 feminist abortion activist from diverse states of Mexico.  One of the results of this convening is this video titled Las Acompañantes. A description of the video is below. 

Video summary

This video is part of a training process for people who decide to be accompaniers for safe medical abortions.

It is a tool that provides an overview of the process of supporting safe abortions, offering testimony to the existence of people willing to make the experience of the right to abortion possible, especially for those who live in restrictive territories. The idea is to disseminate work based in social and community organization at the service of women and people with the capacity to conceive who need to terminate unwanted pregnancies. It is an example of the solidarity that women have built so that other women have access to safe, stigma-free, and free-of-charge abortions.

In this video, we accompaniers want to share the knowledge, experiences, and resources that we have built each day with each person we have accompanied over the course of decades. Our work is in accordance with the World Health Organization protocol and draws on scientific and technological advances as an act of social justice

 

Selected Publications

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