The 2020 Election: A Conversation with Historian and Author Geraldo Cadava D‘00

Historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava will discuss the historical threads that are coming together to shape the upcoming US presidential election, including the history of the Hispanic Republicans, Latinos generally, and their impact on national politics. 

Speaker Bio

Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America and focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Latino History, North American Borderlands, Comparative World Borders, the American West, and social, cultural, and political histories of the United States and Latin America.

Cadava’s first book, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013), focused on the Arizona-Sonora borderland since World War II and won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given annually by the Organization of American Historians. His second book, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), focuses on the history of Hispanics and the Republican Party since the 1960s. Cadava’s essays on this topic have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the NACLA Report on the Americas, and on TheAtlantic.com, WashingtonPost.com, and OZY.com.

This fall Cadava is teaching a new introductory course titled “The 2020 Election in Historical Perspective.” Originally from Tucson, Arizona, Cadava earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from Yale University and his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 2000.