Water Futures series: Ecology at the Border

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 interests in political economy, state formation, and transnational migration. Before arriving at Georgia Tech, he was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and 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.

Bobby Cervantes is 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 a 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 he was born and raised.

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

Carlos de la Parra is Founder and Managing Partner of Centro Luken de Estrategias en Agua y Medio Ambiente, S.C. (Luken Center for Strategies on Water and Environment), he has over 30 years of experience in environmental research and policy on the U.S.-Mexico border. He previously served as a research professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, as Regional Federal Officer in Baja California, and as SEMARNAT’s representative at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. He currently chairs Restauremos el Colorado and serves on the Board of the North American Development Bank (NADBank) as the Representative of Mexican Civil Society

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include modern Latin America, the intersection of science and culture, public health, and scientific and medical exchange in the Global South. Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Best Book Prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. She is completing two book manuscripts Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, which examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators and her latest project which seeks to re-narrate histories of twentieth century agriculture development aid from the point of view of India and Mexico. She has held numerous grants, including those from the Ford, Mellon, Fulbright, DAAD, and Gerda Henkel Foundations. She was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, 2019-2020, and will hold the Dibner Distinguished Fellowship in History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, 2023-24. 

Ivonne Cruz, Ph.D., is a research scholar at the Claudio X. González Center for the U.S. and Mexico. She is also a faculty member of the Masters of Global Affairs program at Rice University.

Cruz’s research primarily focuses on sustainability issues, specifically the social impact of corporations, climate change topics and the human dimensions of global environmental changes. She has been an independent researcher and consultant for over 15 years and has served in a variety of roles in academia and at international agencies and public sector entities. She has worked for the Environmental Defense Fund, the United Nations Environmental Program, the United Nations Industrial Program, the Global Environmental Facility, NOAA, environmental protection agencies in Mexico and Cuba, and local governments in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe.

Her published work has covered social policy issues and sustainable development strategies, and she has participated in the advancement of sustainability reports for private and public sectors.

Cruz holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in sustainability from the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Spain.