📧 bcervantes@fas.harvard.edu
📍Boston, MA
🤘🏽Texas Forever

HISTORY IN FOCUS
I discuss my recent article in
The American Historical Review here.
Thanks for reading and listening!

Hello and welcome!

I am a historian of poverty in the modern United States with a focus on political economy, state formation, and transnational migration. I am currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In Fall 2026, I will be Assistant Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where I will research and teach U.S. immigration history, poverty studies, and the multiracial South. I received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas in 2023 and bachelor’s degrees in Government and Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. 

I am researching and writing LAS COLONIAS: AN AMERICAN CENTURY, the first historical account of the rural, mostly unincorporated Latino communities, called colonias, along Texas’s 1,254-mile border with Mexico. Nearly one million Americans live in these self-built communities that often lack basic services like potable water and electricity on plots that they or their relatives purchased via exploitative contracts. Yet, their colonias represent a significant degree of political sovereignty and property ownership that has eluded other working-poor Americans in the nation’s history. LAS COLONIAS draws on seven decades of property records, exclusive interviews with residents and developers, and Mexican and U.S. government archives to reveal how America’s colonias have become the chief model of transnational poverty and profit on the modern southern border, where I was born and raised. Harvard’s William F. Milton Fund and Mellon Urban Initiative, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other sources are generously supporting my research.

As a journalist for more than a decade, I have reported on national and Texas news for several publications, including the Austin Bureau of the Houston Chronicle, covering politics in the nation’s strangest state. Along the way, I also reported on new price caps on prison calls for POLITICO, shifts in political partisanship in the Rio Grande Valley for Texas Monthly, and the fusion of journalism and history for the American Historical Association's newsmagazine, Perspectives on History. 

ABOVE: A colonia home, c. 1980. Credit: Hector P. Garcia Papers, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Updated Spring 2026