ABOUT ME
Erualdo Gonzalez, Ph.D. is a California State University, Fullerton Chicana/o Studies professor whose research focuses on gentrification in the U.S's disinvested central cities and Latinx communities. His expertise includes community development, intra-ethnic politics of redevelopment, political economy, urban activism, and public policy. He is an applied research expert with over 25 years of experience in program evaluation, participatory action research, and strategic planning with healthy communities and community-building initiatives across the United States.
He's currently mapping commercial gentrification's spatial, temporal, and policy dimensions across five decades in Southern California's Downtown Santa Ana, popularly known by Spanish speakers as La Cuatro, a zone marketing to Mexican immigrant and working-class consumers since the late 1970s and undergoing large-scale gentrification.
Erualdo is the author of Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures (Routledge, 2022). He’s published in leading urban planning and urban affairs journals, such as the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and the Journal of Urban Affairs.
He has an established record of administrative leadership. As chair of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton, he was a member and Faculty Liaison of the historic Cal State University General Education Ethnic Studies Requirement Committee (Assembly Bill 1460), ensuring the integration of Ethnic Studies into the university's general education curriculum. As a faculty member, he has routinely chaired his Department Personnel Committee, guiding the evaluation of faculty files across multiple terms. His role as a strategic thinker and planner is evident in his leadership of committees that shaped the department’s long-term goals. He was also a co-grant writer with department colleagues for the Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice three-year initiative, successfully securing a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.
González's leadership extends across the university, where he has contributed to university-wide organizational development. As co-chair of the subcommittee for the Self Study and Institutional Report for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation on Faculty, he ensured the university's compliance with rigorous academic standards. He helped shape the university's future as a member of the Academic Master Plan Committee and the Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Search Committee. Additionally, his leadership of the Program Performance Review Committee and Department Personnel Committee across various departments on campus underscores his ability to collaborate effectively and collegially with diverse academic teams and departments.
Professionally, González co-coordinated strategic initiatives within the Planners of Color Interest Group (POCIG) of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), such as a Special Issue on ethno-racial intersections in planning, among other activities. He is also an Ambassador for the Latino Alumni Association at Loyola Marymount University, where he led a visioning process to guide the association's initiatives.
Dr. Gonzalez earned his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning and an M.A. in Social Ecology from the University of California, Irvine. He built on his B.A. in Psychology and Chicano Studies from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Born and raised in the vibrant, primarily working-class, and immigrant city of central Santa Ana, California---just 10 miles from his current institution in historically wealthy and conservative Orange--his educational and professional journey is deeply rooted in the very community he now serves and studies.
Publications