Erualdo R. González

Erualdo R. González is a Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He received his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Irvine. His areas of research are community development, neighborhood planning, planning and health, and urban governance and policy. He contemplates urban questions by combining his interests with social justice and equity, race, ethnicity, class, and immigration lenses, with an emphasis on Chicana/o-Latina/o communities and communities of color generally.

Erualdo is intrigued with understanding how and reasons local community development practices and policies are made, implemented, questioned, and associated outcomes. He is interested in how community engagement responds to urban issues and the outcomes, challenges, and contradictions that may come with engagement. His work is also applied. He has 20 years of experience as a program evaluator and strategic planner of healthy communities and community building initiatives in communities of color and rural and urban settings.

Dr. González’s recently published book Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (2017) by Routledge addresses a critical urban policy issue confronting working-class municipalities around the world—the increased roles of elected leaders and private partnerships on redevelopment in downtown cores and displacement and gentrification. He traces redevelopment from 1970s urban renewal to present day new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning and their implementation in Santa Ana, California, one of the United States’ most Mexican communities. The book provides an intimate analysis of how the discourse and politics of redevelopment institutionalize the disenfranchisement of local community and meanings of diversity and urban social change in response to these redevelopment trends. Latino City is the first to examine contemporary models of choice for revitalization of US cities from the point of view of a Latina/o majority central city, and thus initiates new lines of analysis and critique of models for Latina/o inner city neighborhood and downtown revitalization in the current period of socio-economic and cultural change. Please click link for a podcast interview about the book.

He has published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research and Environment and Planning A, among other leading journals. He has co-authored or authored Special Issues and Supplemental Issues in Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability entitled Emerging Issues in Planning: Ethno-Racial Intersections, Preventive Medicine on Active Living, and the Californian Journal of Health Promotion examining health disparities in Latina/o communities.

He teaches undergraduate service-learning courses on Barrio Studies and Barrios and Health. His growing up in the City of Santa Ana, about 10 miles from California State University, Fullerton, and involvement in local urban planning affairs help integrate the classroom to the region. Introduction to Chicana/o Studies is a course that he offers online.

The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named Dr. González a 2013 Exemplary Diversity Scholar. He is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2011 New Connections grant recipient and member of the Planners of Color Interest Group of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

In the News 

CSUF Faculty Member Erualdo González Studies Gentrification in his Native Santa Ana

New Book Looks at Redevelopment Battles over Santa Ana Becoming “Latino City”

The Gentrification of Santa Ana: From Origin to Resistance