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

Hello and welcome!

I am a scholar of poverty in the modern United States who focuses on public policy, political economy, and transnational migration. Currently, I am a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2023-26) and the ACLS Oscar Handlin Fellow in American History (2024-25). I received my Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Kansas and my B.A. in Government and B.J. in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. 

I am researching and writing LAS COLONIAS: AN AMERICAN HISTORY, the first narrative account of the rural and mostly unincorporated Latino communities, called colonias, along Texas's 1,254-mile border with Mexico. Three-quarters of a million Americans live in subsistence-built communities that lack many basic services on plots purchased through exploitative contracts. Still, their colonias represent a degree of sovereignty and property ownership that has eluded other poor Americans, especially those in racialized and migrant populations. The project draws on local property records, oral histories with residents and developers, and Mexican and U.S. government archives to reveal how these neighborhoods became the exemplar of transnational poverty and profit on the border, where I was born and raised. Harvard's William F. Milton Fund and Mellon Urban Initiative are supporting my ongoing research. 

As a journalist for more than a decade, I have reported on national and Texas news for several outlets, notably the Houston Chronicle’s Capitol Bureau in Austin. I have covered 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, Mary and Jeff Bell Library, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Updated Fall 2024