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

Hello and welcome!

I am a historian of poverty in the modern United States who focuses on political economy, state formation, and transnational migration. Currently, I am a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and will join the Georgia Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor in the School of History and Sociology in Fall 2026. I received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and a B.A. in Government and a B.J. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. 

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 self-built communities that often lack many basic services like clean 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 people in our 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 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 supporting my ongoing research.

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

Updated Spring 2026