About
Delia Fernandez-Jones, Ph.D.
Delia Fernández-Jones is a professor, author, administrator, and education advocate.
She is currently an associate professor of history and administrator at Michigan State University. She is also a core faculty member of the Chicano/Latino Studies Program. Since 2024, she has served on the Dean's Senior Leadership team in the College of Arts and Letters as the Associate Dean of Inclusive Access and Faculty Affairs.
Delia was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan among a large, tight-knit Mexican and Puerto Rican community. A MexiRican Latina and first generation college student, she earned a B.A. in history from Grand Valley State University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.She is proud to be one of the first 100 Chicanas to be awarded a PhD in History.
As a scholar, she draws on her lived experiences as a Latina in Michigan and extensive primary source research. Her work centers on Latino placemaking in the Midwest. She is the author of Making the MexiRican City: Mexican and Puerto Rican Migration, Activism, and Placemaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Her book details how disparate Latine communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges and simultaneously transformed Grand Rapids and the Midwest from the 1920s to the 1970s. She is also the author of two award winning articles on Latines in Michigan.
She is involved in a number of public history initiatives with the goal of helping to resolve the erasure of Latinxs in the history of Michigan and the Midwest. Fernández-Jones is a founder and collaborator on two major publicly-engaged history projects. The Grandville Avenue Historical Marker Program is a multi-institutional collaborative that seeks to amend the lack of state historical markers that commemorate Latinx and Black history in West Michigan. Preserving Nuestra Herencia is a another multi-unit collaboration that centerson helping communities preserve their histories through oral histories, digital scanning, and the creation of open access archives.
She has a long record of serving as on public history boards. In 2018, she was appointed by the governor of Michigan to the Michigan Historical Commission, which advises the director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and approves Michigan Historical Markers. She has since been reappointed twice.
Fernández-Jones served on both the Kutsche Office for Local History and the Michigan State University Press's Editorial Board until 2024. She is currently a board member for the Historical Society of Michigan.
Dr. Fernandez-Jones sees demystifying academia for first generation college students and students of color as a priority. Since 2021 she has served as the director of the Womxn of Color Initiative at Michigan State University. Her work and that of collaborators seek to make a space for WOC faculty, graduate students, undergrad, and community members on Michigan State's campus. Specifically, we help to reshape the fabric of the university using womxn of color feminism. In addition, she has worked closely with Latinx undergraduate students through her position as the undergraduate coordinator for the Chicano/Latino Studies program at MSU (2022-2024).