Patricia González Gómez-Cásseres came to Smith in 1981 after receiving a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. She taught courses in Latin American theater and literature for five years and went back to her home in Colombia in 1986. She returned to the United States and taught at Mount Holyoke College from 1989 to 1998. In 1998, González rejoined the Spanish and Portuguese department at Smith, and since then has been teaching Caribbean literature and culture courses, as well as Spanish language courses.

Her first publication, La sartén por el mango: Encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas, became a major work consulted avidly by Latin American feminists and was used in Latin American women studies courses in many universities in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.

González traveled to Puebla, Mexico, in 2005 to become the resident director of Smith's consortium program for Mexican culture and society, a position she stayed in until 2008.

Her next publications, Confluencias en México palabra y género, covered issues related to women in academia in Mexico across different disciplines, including history, anthropology, literature and philosophy. Her current research centers on Cuban ritual theater and Latin American women writers, and she has authored many scholarly articles.