Department of History

Eladio Bobadilla

  • Assistant Professor

Education & Training

  • Ph.D., Duke University, 2019
  • BIS, Weber State University, 2012

Representative Publications

  • "'I Feel Like This Is My Home': Immigration and the Making of Latino Kentucky," special joint issue of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society and the Journal of Arizona History 64, no.3 (Autumn 2023).
  • "For Us, There Are No More Back Doors': California's Proposition 187, the Paradoxes of Immigration Control, and the Long Struggle for Immigrants' Rights," California History 100, no.3 (2023). 
  • "Immigration Policy, Mexican Americans, and Undocumented Immigrants, 1954-Present," History Now, no. 52 (Fall 2018).
  • "The Needs of Migrant People': American Catholics and Immigrants' Rights in the 20th Century," in Faith and Power: Latina/o Religious Politics Since 1945 (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
  • "Something Was Lost': Segregation, Integration, and Black Memory in the Texas Golden Triangle," in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021).
  • "'Typical Dreamer': Some Reflections on Teaching, Advising, and Advocating for Undocumented, Veteran, and Nontraditional Students," in The Academic's Handbook, 4th ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 
  • "Remembering Immigrant Defender Bert Corona," The Progressive, February 7, 2022.
  • "During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Immigrant Farmworkers are Heroes," in "Made by History" via The Washington Post, March 31, 2020.
  • "COVID-19 and Trump's Racist Rhetoric," Common Dreams, March 20, 2020.
  • "The 'Alt-Right': We Need Courage and Truth, Not False Equivalencies," Common Dreams, September 10, 2017.

Research Interests

Fields:

  • Modern U.S. history
  • Social movements history
  • Labor and working-class history and politics
  • History of race and ethnicity
  • U.S. Latinx history and politics
  • Immigration history
  • Nativism and xenophobia
  • Radicalism and extremism
  • Oral history and memory
  • Veterans studies

Teaching:

  • U.S. Latinx History (HIST 1691)

  • U.S. Immigration History (HIST 0673)

  • U.S. Social Movements History (HIST 1630)

Interests:

Broadly speaking, I'm a historian of social movements in the United States. I am especially interested in ordinary, working-class people who have worked to resist their conditions and their oppressors: by moving across borders, by building supportive (and often radical) communities, by imagining and articulating more humane futures, and occasionally, by more forceful and revolutionary means. More generally, I am interested in how ordinary people have created and lived out radical identities and ideologies spanning the political spectrum and in how both liberatory and reactionary politics have surfaced, reinforced, and recreated one another in U.S. history. I rely on both archival and oral history sources to tell stories and explain the past. I am also interested in questions about historical pedagogy and in publicly engaged scholarship, and I regularly write for public audiences.