This story is part of our occasional series The Power of Moms: Stories of Intergenerational Influence and Climate Legacy.
Julie González earned her PhD in applied demography at University of Texas–San Antonio because her mother, Terry, was a migrant farmer. She remembers her mother traveling to Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin for jobs. As a child, Julie joined her mother to harvest everything from cucumbers to mint to asparagus and detassel ears of corn.
“It was hard because the housing for workers on the farm wasn’t in good condition,” Terry recalls. She migrated from Guanajuato, Mexico, when she was just 10 years old. Her parents were looking for “more opportunities” in the United States. “They left all of that to come here,” she says.
After Terry started working in the fields, she quickly became aware of the environmental hazards she and her daughter were facing. “Sometimes they would dump pesticides that would end up in the land and in the water,” she says. “When that happened we would grab our children and take them to the park.” They began to suffer from headaches caused by the pesticides, which were made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. A 2024 report by the Center for Health Journalism supports what Terry, Julie, and many other migrant workers experienced while in the fields; it details stories of Latino migrant farmworkers who suffered burns and other toxic health effects from working with pesticides.
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Migrant workers usually spent six months on the road, forcing Terry to find childcare for her five children during the months they were in school. “It was very complicated,” she says. “I was in charge of all of them.” When the young Julie groaned about the work, her mother, now 62, recalls telling her that if she didn’t want to work in the fields, she had to get an education. That’s when Julie, the oldest child, began to understand that her experiences of environmental injustice would shape and ultimately become the focus of her academic work. It’s a path that Terry admires. “She cares about the environment and how it can affect people,” she says.
The common denominator: How the environment impacts health
Julie, an avid traveler, has backpacked through five continents, collecting examples of environmental harm. “Everywhere that I went, the common denominator that I observed was how the environment impacted population health,” she says. “In Egypt, the water quality impacted the quality of food I could eat. In Bali, there were microplastics in the ocean where we eat our fish. In Beijing, I was sick from the air pollution.” Research has found nonwhite populations worldwide continue to bear the burden of environmental pollution today.
Julie’s own work uses machine learning and geographic information systems to understand environmentally linked demographic trends, including mortality, fertility, and migration patterns. Her dissertation at UT San Antonio, where she earned her doctorate in 2023, focused on assessing the impact of air pollution on cardiovascular health and mortality rates in Texas and nationwide. She dedicated it “to the memory of my grandparents and their arrival, and the unconditional love of my mother.”
It’s been two decades since Terry has labored in the fields. After her husband died, she started working as a community health educator, providing information on illnesses like tuberculosis, AIDS, and diabetes.
Disturbing patterns in equity
While at UT San Antonio, Julie participated in a pipeline program to diversify the pools of research assistants working in the field. As a postdoctoral fellow at American University in Washington, DC, beginning in 2024, Julie worked with the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity (CECE), where she conducted a pilot study on wildfire displacement in Los Angeles in the wake of 2025’s historic wildfires.
After receiving the initial batch of surveys back for this study, Julie noticed a large segment of Latino respondents were missing. “LA is largely Hispanics, and this is a demographic that ICE agents were targeting,” she says, adding that many were fearful that filling out a survey from a university would make them targets of ICE agents. “This kind of fear precludes environmental research. We don’t live in a research silo. Even when we as researchers take the time to be inclusive with immigration, these populations still remain under-studied,” she laments.
Julie’s latest research shows continuing disturbing patterns in equity. A study on soot pollution, a.k.a. PM 2.5, or minuscule air particles produced by the burning of fossil fuels by coal-fired power plants, industrial facilities, and combustion engines, found higher rates of cardiovascular mortality among poor communities and lower rates in communities where people are proficient in English. Soot pollution is one of the leading causes of premature death worldwide. These tiny particles are easily inhaled and can become embedded in our lungs and pass directly in the bloodstream. Soot exposure can contribute to asthma attacks, respiratory illness, lung cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other health harms.
“If you know English, you’re more likely to go to the doctor and be able to communicate your symptoms,” Julie says. Nationwide, her research shows Texas, Louisiana, and parts of New Mexico were among the areas with the highest concentration of cardiovascular mortality from soot. In Texas, the highest mortality rates from soot were in the Midland region, which has a history of oil production. A 2024 report from the Texas Tribune found that the high concentration of air pollution in Latino communities was, in part, due to a failure of air-monitoring systems.
The work on environmental justice isn’t over
Today, Julie is the Environmental Justice Data and Mapping Society Coordinator at FracTracker Alliance, an organization that uses data to investigate the health effects of fracking, the extraction of oil and gas from underground rock formations, across the United States. Environmentalists have argued that the process contaminates water and soil. Plus burning fracked gas releases methane, a climate pollutant with significantly more global warming power than carbon dioxide.
In response to the Trump administration’s cuts to EPA funding, part of Julie’s job is to use open-source data to create new public streams of information. “A lot of data is no longer available to the public,” she says. For Julie, the work of environmental justice isn’t over. “This is the time where you push even further, where you work even more.”
Terry beams with pride about her daughter. “It’s fantastic… She’s the only one in the whole family who has earned a doctorate. That makes her special.”
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