Growing up in a small town in Texas, Dr. Larissa Mercado-López and her family had to drive to the next town to go to a public library. The distance did not keep her from seeking out the fictional worlds that reflected her own.
“Even early on, I had this desire to see myself in literature, so I would actually choose books by the authors’ last names,” she says. “I think I must have read every book by a Latino or Latina author in that library by the time I graduated.”
Decades later, she is an associate professor of women’s studies at California State University, Fresno, where she teaches students how to critically engage with culture. As a researcher, she is helping cultivate the interdisciplinary field of feminist fitness studies, blending cultural studies, literary criticism and her personal experiences to deconstruct popular notions of what it means to be fit, whether it is physical fitness or broader applications of the term “fitness,” such as what it means to be fit for citizenship or fit for a college education.
Mercado-López’s path to her current scholarly stature was not an easy one.
As a young student, she chose to attend the University of Texas at San Antonio for its Mexican American studies program.
“It just blew my mind that I could major in myself,” she says. Mercado-López’s personal identity would soon come to play an even greater role in her academic pursuits.
Near the end of her time at San Antonio, she learned she was pregnant. Initially, she believed that having a family would only disrupt her career trajectory.
