What can we learn about the history of nursing and rural healthcare from the perspective of Indigenous nursing assistants in Mexico? This talk centers the Indigenous men and women who labored as nursing assistants across the multilingual and multiethnic state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Focused on the mid-twentieth century, the presentation focuses on the Mixtec and Mazatec (Indigenous) nurses who often selectively implemented health programs in response to community requests. It shifts our focus from foreign nurses to the local nurses that played a central role in the expansion of state-sponsored rural healthcare in Oaxaca. 

Marissa L. Nichols is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Healthcare History and Policy in the School of Nursing at Emory University. She is also an American Council of Learned Societies fellow and she holds a PhD in Latin American history from Emory University. Her research puts nursing history into dialogue with ethnohistory (Indigenous history) and focuses on mid-twentieth-century Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico. Her work has been supported by Fulbright-Hays and the American Association for the History of Nursing, among other sources.  

We hope you’ll join us!

Maura Singleton
Center Manager
Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry

E [email protected]
P 434.924.0083; 434.989.1550 (cell)

UVA School of Nursing
202 Jeanette Lancaster Way
P.O. Box 800782
Charlottesville, VA 22908-0782

www.nursing.virginia.edu/nursing-history/