Broadly speaking, Prof. Bobadilla is a historian of social movements in the United States. He is 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, he 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) explains the growth of the immigrant rights movement and the parallel rise of the modern nativist movement.
He 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.