History Department

Patricia Vidal Olivares is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History, with an interest in the twentieth century specializing in the history of food programs for children in Chile and the United States. Patricia studied undergrad in Chile, where she studied history and education at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained a master’s degree in history from the same university with a research project on identity and state building in Chile at the beginning of the twentieth century. Patricia taught at the University of Viña del Mar in Chile and has been an instructor at UC Davis for the lecture 161 - Human Rights in Latin America. 

Research Focus

Patricia is interested in Latin American history and international relations, food history, the United States' twentieth-century history, Human Rights, childhood, and gender. Her dissertation project explores school food programs for children in Santiago de Chile and Oakland, California, United States, to examine why and how public-school food programs in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile, and Oakland, California, United States, persisted and evolved even as conservatives’ neoliberal agenda sought to dismantle welfare states in both countries. The project argues that the continuity of the programs in the 1980s masked the quality and quantity of the food served to children, the changing conceptions of “deserving poor,” and the presence of human rights vocabulary in the creation and continuity of those programs. 

Publications

Article

P. Vidal Olivares y J.C. Yañez Andrade, “Debate transnacionales y panamericanos sobre el turismo. Los casos de Argentina y Chile, 1920-1950”, in Notas Históricas y Geográficas, December 2023, 276-302. 

P. Vidal Olivares, “‘We are unknown and ignored as a tourism country.’ Tourism propaganda in Chile between 1929 and 1959”, in Apuntes. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 2019, 46(85), 23-52 Doi: 10.21678/apuntes.85.1044  

Book Reviews

P. Vidal, Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile by Joshua Frens-String. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 322pp. in Global Food History, 2022 8(2) https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2022.2081941  

La ciudad en movimiento: Estudios históricos sobre transporte colectivo y movilidad en Santiago de Chile, siglos XIX y XX by Simón Castillo and Marcelo Mardones ed, in A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, Winter 2022, 19(2): 269-299.