Assistant Professor
History
Sergio M. González is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. A historian of twentieth-century U.S. migration, labor, and religion, his scholarship focuses on the development of Latino communities in the U.S. Midwest. He is the author of Mexicans in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (New York University Press, 2022) with Felipe Hinojosa and Maggie Elmore. His most recently published book, Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024), explores the relationship between Latino communities, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century Midwest. His current research expands on these themes through two new initiatives. The first examines the history of sanctuary movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, exploring the pivotal role religious institutions and people of faith have played in developing contemporary social movements for immigrant and refugee justice. His second project analyzes the central role the Midwest has come to play in the country’s fraught immigration politics, studying the century-long record of anti-immigrant sentiment in the region and the social movements that have risen to combat it.
González extends his academic scholarship into his service commitments by serving on the executive boards of organizations such as the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective, Wisconsin Humanities, and the State of Wisconsin Historic Preservation Review Board. As a public scholar deeply invested in questions of labor and immigration justice, he has also served as the co-president of his graduate worker union at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Teaching Assistants Association (AFT 3220); the co-founder of and lead organizer for the Dane Sanctuary Coalition; and as a board member of Voces de la Frontera Action, the political action arm of Wisconsin’s largest and most active membership-based immigrant and worker justice organization.
Education
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Courses Taught
González teaches across a variety of departments and programs, including in History; Languages, Literatures, Arts, & Culture; Latinx Studies; and the Honors Program. His courses focus on Latinx belonging and community formation, activism and civil rights movements, urban settlement, faith and religiosity, and the historical development of citizenship in the United States.
Specialization
- U.S. immigration, labor, religious, and urban history; Latinx studies