Bobby Cervantes

Bobby Cervantes is Assistant Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he researches and teaches modern U.S. history with special interests in political economy, state formation, and transnational migration. Before joining Georgia Tech in 2026, Bobby was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and the ACLS Oscar Handlin Fellow in American History. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and bachelor’s degrees in government and journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

He is currently 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, electricity, and sewer systems on plots that they or their relatives purchased through exploitative contracts. Yet, for more than eight decades their colonias have represented a significant degree of political sovereignty and property ownership that has eluded working-poor people in our nation’s history. LAS COLONIAS draws decades of local property records, exclusive interviews with residents and developers, and Mexican and U.S. government archives to reveal how America’s coloniashave become the principal institution of transnational poverty and profit on the modern border, where Bobby was born and raised.

His research has been published in The American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History (forthcoming), and edited volumes from Bloomsbury Academic and the University of Pennsylvania Press. 

As a journalist, he has reported on national and Texas news for several publications, including from the Austin-based Capitol Bureau of the Houston Chronicle, where he covered politics in the nation’s strangest state. He has 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.