UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For Penn State graduate student Alex Herrera, a combination of academic interest and a surprising research discovery led to one of the proudest moments of her career to date. This past August she was awarded the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship through the United States Department of Education to conduct her dissertation research in Guatemala.
Herrera, a doctoral student pursuing a dual-title degree in Latin American history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies from Tucson, Arizona, will be traveling to Guatemala in March for six months to pursue her research project. This will be a return trip for her, but the first she has taken since the summer of 2019.
While in Guatemala, she will examine how transnational networks of Guatemalan, American and European doctors, public health officials, politicians, city police and sex workers created and shaped prostitution regulations and medical knowledge about sexually transmitted infections in Guatemala City. Specifically, it will focus on the medical and public health justifications for policing sex workers’ bodies for sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis, from 1890 to 1940.
Herrera hopes this work will be able to impact the academic world and beyond in the months and years to come.
“It would be amazing to see the work in criminal cases or human rights cases to see lawyers be able to use this as precedent, that there is historical legacy here.” she said. “That would be incredible to see some kind of positive outcome from that, whatever that may be.”
“When approaching this topic, I always think about how it can be used outside of academics,” she added. “How can my research be used by lawyers, human rights attorneys, or social workers to try to get justice for people who have experiences medical abuse violations or just human rights violations.”
While the importance of the topic is clear for Herrera, there were several contributing factors that led to that final project. Growing up in a medically focused family of medical practitioners, she had an interest in that subject initially but knew that was not the direction for her.
“I started as a pre-med major before switching to pre-public health and after a semester of that I switched to history and Spanish literature,” Herrera said on her time as an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona. “Growing up only 60 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, I had a lot of interest in Latin American history. I also had really amazing undergraduate professors who took me under their wing and showed me how gender and sexuality can be used to analyze history.”
While her time at Arizona led her down an academic path, digging deeper into her interests in Latin American history she found a way to combine her academic interests with an interest in the medical field her family shared.
“I found a way to continue my interest in medicine and public health without being a nurse or doctor. That’s a huge influence on how this topic was chosen,” Herrera said. “When I got to graduate school, I started reading articles about the history of public health and I thought that was really fascinating. That following summer, I was in Guatemala and in the state archives in Guatemala City and found fascinating documents about sex work in Guatemala City in the 1800s, including finding records of women coming from all over the world, including the United States, coming to Guatemala to conduct sex work.”
“That blew my mind. That was so cool and really bizarre,” she said. “Because it challenged basically everything I had already known about prostitution in the city. I always thought it would be very localized, not foreign people coming to the city. That's what kind of started this whole project.”
That discovery has led to her continued research, diving into sex work regulation in Guatemala City beginning with the first law on the topic in 1881. Herrera then worked to document the impact of the law from 1887 to what is known in the 1940s as the "Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment." That experiment was an act of medical malpractice by the United States and Guatemalan government and infected about 1,300 people with STIs and used these people to determine if penicillin could be used to treat STIs for eventual use in the U.S. Army.
Being awarded the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship will allow Hererra to continue to expand on her previous work on the subject, and the honor affirmed all the effort she has put in up to this point.
“It’s really humbling and really affirming. It takes so much time to create these applications, but it also takes years and years and years of work,” she said, adding that it was not just work she did, but work her advisers did for her, as well as in helping see this project through.
“For scholars that have been determined by the Fulbright Commission as experts in their field to approve my work as viable and fundable is really humbling,” Herrera added. “It’s also really incredible to be able to return to Guatemala and collaborate on this project and have Guatemalans contribute and give me their feedback on how they envision the project.”
For Herrera, while this honor is humbling, the meaning behind receiving the fellowship is something she will not forget.
“This award is about collaboration; it’s about increasing research in places that are not typically studied,” she said. “It’s about leveling the playing field here. That’s what I think is really important, to be able to go to a place like Guatemala, collaborating with their researchers, and giving that research back to Guatemala. That’s a really important way I’m approaching this trip and doing this fellowship.”