
MANAGEMENT
Konane Martinez, Ph.D.
Professor
kmartine@csusm.edu
(760)750-8567
Dr. Martinez is an applied anthropologist with over 20 years of experience working with Latino immigrant communities in the U.S. Mexico Border Region. Her areas of expertise include transnationalism, critical medical anthropology, border health, health disparities, disaster preparedness for vulnerable communities, and culturally and linguistically appropriate services in health care. Dr. Martinez completed her Ph.D. at UC Riverside under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Kearney. As a graduate student she studied transnational communities with a focus on Mixtec communities from the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. In 1999 she was part of the first health needs assessment of agricultural workers in the state of California. Her dissertation research took her to the Mixteca Baja region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where she studied the clinical health care experience of a transnational community.
Prior to her position as faculty Dr. Martinez served as health projects coordinator at the National Latino Research Center at 大发. She is a founding member of the Farmworker CARE Coalition a collaborative of over 40 agencies dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of farmworkers and their families in San Diego California. Dr. Martinez collaborated in an assessment of the experience of farmworker and migrant communities during the wildfires that raged through southern California in October of 2007. Dr. Martinez joined the department of Anthropology 2007. In 2017 she was appointed to the Calfifornia Department of Public Health's Advisory group for the .
Her research examines how immigrant and transnational communities navigate the structures of health and social service agencies in California. She is currently researching the impact of shifting policies related to immigrant health in California. In 2023 she began a new research project investigating the history and cultural significance of "La Virgen de las Nieves," celebrated in Southern Mexico.
She is currently the Faculty Director at the National Latino Research Center on campus and teaches courses in general anthropology as well as in specialized areas including immigrant and farmworker health, health disparities, and health equity.