A Conversation with Our World Class Faculty: Jethro Hernández Berrones

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A Conversation with Our World Class Faculty: Jethro Hernández Berrones

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Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?

My name is Jethro Hernández Berrones. I am an Associate Professor of History, and I've been at Southwestern for 10 years. I teach the history of Latin America, with a particular emphasis on Mexico. I am an expert on 19th and 20th century Mexico. My thematic expertise is in the history of science, medicine, and a little bit of technology.

What sparked your interest in history, specifically your field of Latin American history?

I admire people who know they have a clear orientation towards a particular discipline early in their lives. I admire them because I don't know how they did it and how they found that particular interest. I'm not that kind of person. My interests have changed through time, and therefore, my academic formation and my academic inclination, has changed through time. I have always had an interest in understanding the way things worked. I've never been interested in applying knowledge. I am more interested in generating knowledge.

When I was in high school, I was interested in medicine and biology. I actually did my undergraduate studies in biology and worked in several labs. I learned about and worked in different disciplines within biology. I did my exploration, but I wasn't fully fulfilled. So I decided to get a master's degree in Philosophy of Science. At that point in my life, my questions had shifted from understanding nature and the human body into understanding why our modern societies rely heavily on science. I thought that philosophy of science would give me the answers. I learned that philosophy is a fascinating discipline, but I didn't see myself doing philosophy. I took courses on the history of science and medicine within the master's program, and that's where I found my discipline. That's actually what brought me to the U.S. I wanted to continue learning and doing research on the history of medicine, but in Mexico there were no specializations in the history of medicine. So, I looked elsewhere and came to the U.S. to pursue my doctoral degree in the history of health sciences.

Why did you want to become a professor?

Teaching has always been a core interest in my life. My mother was a high school teacher who taught sociology. We always had conversations about how she approached teaching. In college, I couldn't dissociate research from teaching. I realized that new knowledge had the potential to transform the world. I could not conceive that such knowledge remained secluded. I actually was very concerned with researchers that dedicated their life only to be in the lab or in the field, and not having the desire to communicate their research to the larger public.

When I became a professor I realized that the classroom was the more meaningful place where I could convey some of my ideas, transform lives, and hopefully change the world. In the classroom, I have the opportunity to invite students to see the world from a different perspective. Here students learn about my ideas and my discipline. I provide them with a framework; I invite them to see the world from my perspective. But teaching is also about allowing them to explore their own ideas and understanding the world through their own lenses. So my classroom is also a place for reflection; an opportunity to challenge each other's worldviews.

What brought you to Southwestern?

When I was in the job market, the jobs were very competitive. There are very few tenure track positions in my field. I saw this particular open position at Southwestern and I started doing a little bit of research. I thought that there was a match between my experience and what I wanted to do. What I liked about Southwestern was its focus on teaching. At the same time, I learned that Southwestern acknowledges that in order to teach how to generate ideas, the professor needs to generate ideas. In other words, I learned that at the core of a liberal arts education, there is the passion to discover the world and generate ideas about it. I thought that the teacher-scholar model that Southwestern proposed allowed me to pursue both of my passions, conduct research and teach what I learn and the process of learning in the classroom.

What courses do you teach?

I teach a world history course that focuses on disease. I teach the area surveys of Latin America, colonial and modern. I offer a seminar on the Mexican Revolution and another one on the history of science. Last semester, I developed a new course titled Reproductive Histories in Latin America. All members in my department rotate teaching core courses in the [history] curriculum. So I have also taught Historiography - methods in history - and the research seminar.

You are currently on sabbatical. What research are you conducting during your time away from campus?

Sabbatical is a fascinating opportunity [for faculty] to shift our focus from teaching and doing administrative work for the University run, to research. When faculty have a sabbatical leave, we have all of the time open to dedicate ourselves fully to research. We are very grateful for the time that is given to us, because we can accelerate the speed at which we move forward in our research.

I have a lot of projects, maybe more than I would like to, but I just love what I do. The main project I am working on is finishing writing my book. I am writing a book on the history of homeopathy in Mexico from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. The project is tentatively titledA Revolution in Small Doses.

I was also invited to write a book chapter. In the last three or four years, there has been a growing interest in writing the history of individuals who are part of the margins of healing and medicine. We usually think of the history of health sciences as the history of doctors, medical institutions, public health, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and so on. We rarely pay attention to other people that contribute to health and healing in human societies but are usually perceived as minor, or not as important. Think of midwives, alternative medicines, folk healers, shamans, and so forth. They are all part of the healing culture of different countries, but are rarely historicized. Dr. Claudia Agostoni, a historian at UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, invited me to contribute a book chapter on one of these practitioners. I am writing about Juan N. Arriaga, a homeopath, inventor, spiritist, theosophist, and astronomer, whose life exemplified the middle-class physician or urban Mexico City during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

A few years ago, I began working on the history of midwifery in Mexico. I am currently working on an article about professional midwives in Mexico CIty during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. One of the most important historians of medicine in Mexico said that professional midwifery - midwives who got a diploma from a medical school that entitled them to practice midwifery - ended in 1910, before the Mexican Revolution. When I was doing research years ago, I found files from a school that offered midwifery training and diplomas from 1917 to 1936. So the death of professional midwifery was not 1910. This article will examine how this school operated, how their curriculum was organized, and how midwives applied that knowledge beside the bed of birthing women. This last part is very hard to get at because it is very hard to find clinical histories written by midwives. But I found tons of them in the archives of the school. I am using them to understand how midwives understood the delivering process and how they intervened in both natural and difficult births.

I'm wrapping up a project on a study abroad program with one of my colleagues in the Spanish Department. Hopefully in two years, we want to invite students to come to Mexico City and learn about its history and culture on the ground. I am also working on a long-term mapping project with incoming GIS professor, Dr. Stephanie Insalaco. Using the historical documents from the midwifery school, we want to map midwives and their patients' information. We want to engage students in the organization of data and the creation of these maps. We want to make these maps interactive so students and scholars have access to the academic records of these students of midwifery and the clinical histories they wrote. If the history of midwifery has been invisible, we want to make it digitally visible through this project.

What are you looking forward to teaching in the coming semesters?

I am excited to continue teaching Reproductive Histories in Latin America. This is where my research is moving. Also, I like this course because I developed it as a community based learning course. In doing so, I reconceived my way of teaching. What I wanted to do in this course is actually make it work for the community, and underscore the motto of our department, "everything has a history, and that history matters."

Supported by SU's Community Engaged Learning office, we partnered with GALS, Giving Austin Labor Support, a local NGO that offers support for people who are pregnant, birthing, or raising newborns. We learned that this organization needed to gain visibility. In order to fulfill the learning goals of my class, students read articles and book chapters on the history of reproduction. We also read literature on the contemporary challenges in reproductive healthcare where midwives may make a positive impact. In class, students built up connections between past and present, with the goal of creating social media posts for GALS. We connected what they were learning in the classroom and applied it to a real scenario with the understanding that the product of their academic work would end up being public in support of GALS' efforts. For me, it was transformational. This course design is completely different from my traditional courses. It was useful because we were working towards the benefit of the community and in support of a community group.

I am also looking forward to teaching a course for the study abroad program titled The Layered City: A History of Mexico City. One element of the mapping project includes developing a seminar, a historical GIS lab of sorts. I am excited to develop these courses and offer students the opportunity to engage in cutting edge methodologies to interpret the world from a new perspective.

What is something that your students would be surprised to learn about you?

I hate spiders, even though I think that they're marvelous and fascinating living beings. Every time I go to a natural history museum and there's spiders behind glass, I try to get closer. But not when I see them in real life. At home, whenever we have pests like cockroaches or mice around, I deal with them. My wife deals with spiders.

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