Dr. Maribel Santiago is an Assistant Professor of Justice and Teacher Education. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the department of American Ethnic Studies. Dr. Santiago specializes in the teaching and learning of race/ethnicity in K–12 history. Her work centers on the production and consumption of Latinx social studies: what students, policymakers, and educators learn about Latinx communities, and how they conceptualize Latinx experiences.
Her experiences growing up in Los Angeles as the daughter of Zapoteco/Oaxaqueño immigrants where she experienced anti-indigeneity and witnessed anti-blackness, inform Dr. Santiago’s commitment to centering historically marginalized histories. She is part of an emerging collective of social studies education scholars complicating notions of Latinidad that omit Indigenous and Black Latinx histories. As part of this effort, Dr. Santiago leads the History TALLER (pronounced tah-yĕr) research group dedicated to exploring the Teaching and Learning of Language, Ethnicity, and Race (TALLER).
Dr. Santiago earned a Ph.D. in History/Social Studies Education and an M.A. in History, both from Stanford University. She also received the 2019 National Council of the Social Studies Exemplary Research Award for her article in Cognition and Instruction.
Select Publications:
Santiago, M., & Dozono, T. (2022). History is critical: Addressing the false dichotomy between historical inquiry and criticality. Theory & Research in Social Education, 1-23.
Santiago, M. (2020). Diluting Mexican American History for Public Consumption: How Mendez Became the “Mexican American Brown”. Teachers College Record, 122(8), 1-30.
Santiago, M. (2019). Using historical inquiry to challenge the narrative of racial progress. Cognition and Instruction. 37(1).
Santiago, M. (2019). Güeras, Indigenas y Negros: A framework for teaching Mexican American racial/ethnic histories. In M. Gross & L. Terra (Eds), Teaching and learning the difficult past: Comparative Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
Santiago, M. (2019). From multicultural representation to romanticized stories: How contemporary context influences how we conceptualize Latinx school desegregation. Journal of Social Studies Research.
Santiago, M. (2019). A framework for an interdisciplinary understanding of Mexican American school segregation. Multicultural Education Review.
Santiago, M. (2017). Erasing differences for the sake of inclusion: How Mexican/Mexican American students construct historical narratives. Theory & Research in Social Education, 45(1), 43-74.