Book Talk: Eladio Bobadilla's "Dangerous Migration"

In the post-World War II years, many Mexican Americans viewed undocumented immigration as a threat to their communities. Yet the interplay among Mexican migrants, Mexican Americans, and white Americans eventually produced a vibrant immigrant-oriented activist movement inspired by larger struggles for civil and human rights.
Beginning with Mexican American opposition to the Bracero Program, Eladio Bobadilla traces the movement’s fault lines that formed around the issue of undocumented workers. Bobadilla reveals how internationalist and human rights discourse influenced the rise of the Chicano movement and its defense of Mexican undocumented immigrants. As time passed, anti-Mexican social, political, and legislative forces produced a nativist backlash that put immigration at the center of the United States’ culture wars and created the fantasy of undocumented workers as an existential threat.
Engaging and vivid, Dangerous Migration illuminates the history of debates over Mexican labor, the emergence of the immigrant rights activism, and the nativist movements that united Latinos with right-wing white Americans.

Read more here.

Eladio B. Bobadilla is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a historian of social movements in the United States, 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, Bobadilla is 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. He relies on both archival and oral history sources to tell stories and explain the past. He is also interested in questions about historical pedagogy and in publicly engaged scholarship, and he regularly writes for public audiences.

His first book, Dangerous Migration: Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights (University of Illinois Press, 2026), explains the growth of the immigrant rights movement and the parallel rise of the modern nativist movement.

Bobadilla is also currently beginning work on two new projects: One is a history of community armed defense, which lays out a broad synthetic history of how historically marginalized groups in the U.S.--people of color, women, queer folks, antifascists--at various points in in numerous ways employed guns, and gun rights, and a philosophy of self- and collective defense to protect themselves and their communities; and the other is a history of soccer supporter culture in the U.S., which argues that the rise of soccer fandom in the U.S. since the 1960s represents the backdrop of several parallel counter-cultural social movements, where radicals, outcasts, and marginalized people found community, expressed a vibrant political identity, and organized, even as the sport became increasingly mainstream.

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