Hector Hugo Gonzalez

First Mexican-American Nurse to Earn a Doctorate

Joanna Seltzer
Nurses You Should Know
4 min readOct 6, 2022

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Thank you to NAHN for publishing Hector’s bio on your site, as nearly any source we found during research came from, linked to, or reproduced, your original source.

Hector Hugo Gonzalez was born in Roma, Texas in 1937. His family’s Mexican roots trace past the mid-1700s, during a period when porciones, or land grants, were granted by the King of Spain to descendants of Starr County in South Texas. (Spain colonized Mexico from 1521–1821 and Texas did not become part of the United States until 1845). About his family heritage, he is quoted as saying:

“We have been in this country before Mexico was Mexico, before Texas was Texas and before the United States was the United States!”

Hector received his nursing diploma from the Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in 1962 and his Bachelor’s in 1963. He said male students were so rare at that time in nursing school that his school “didn’t even have a restroom for men.” He went on to major in the Administration of Nursing Education for his Master’s from The Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in 1966, and for two years after, he joined the United States Army Nurse Corps and achieved the rank of captain. From 1968–1972 he was a nursing professor at the Incarnate World College and completed his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in curriculum and instruction of higher education in 1974.

Prior to his retirement in 1992, Hector served in many influential roles in the nursing profession — both globally as a nursing education consultant and locally in San Antonio, Texas. He served as the Chairman of the Department of Nursing Education at San Antonio College for twenty years and considered two-year nursing programs to be a revolutionary educational framework. During his tenure, which started in 1972, he designed a program which could be completed entirely at night and made flexible full or part-time curricula options for working students. The school became the first two-year nursing program in the U.S. to have an accredited Continuing Nursing Education program, and had one of the highest minority and male student enrollments, as well as the largest number of qualified minority faculty in the country. Over twenty years later, he was quoted in Minority Nurse’s Hispanic Men in Nursing article as saying:

“Nursing schools are paying a lot of lip service about recruiting minorities and males, but [to a large extent] it hasn’t happened,” believes Gonzalez. He points to the example of medical schools, whose student population now consists of 50% women as a result of aggressive efforts to recruit more female students.”

His professional impact also expanded beyond Texas by serving as the first male president of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses and on the board of directors of the National League for Nursing, where he was commissioned to write the first National League for Nursing’s position paper on Nursing’s Responsibility to Minorities and Disadvantaged Groups (1979). He was also recognized as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and served as an ANA Minority Fellowship Program advisory board member to actively recruit minority nurses into mental health doctoral programs in the 2010s. His legacy in the profession was commemorated as part of the University of Louisville School of Nursing mural last year.

Sources

The information above was sourced from the National Association of Hispanic Nurses, Minority Nurse, NLN, and U of L.

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Joanna Seltzer
Nurses You Should Know

Driven by dynamic collaborations that improve human-centered healthcare design and nudge the status quo.