About

Dr. Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of History and Latin American Studies Emerita at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her scholarship is rooted in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, emphasizing the role of indigenous peoples and other colonized groups in shaping those borderlands, transforming their landscapes, and producing colonial societies. Her research explores the histories of landscapes, power, identity, and colonialism in regions such as the Sonoran Desert and Amazonia, with a focus on how these areas have been affected by colonial and ecological processes. She has contributed significantly to the understanding of borderlands in world history, co-editing key volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of the Borderlands of the Iberian World and Borderlands in World History. Her recent work includes the publication of Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain, and she continues to collaborate on projects related to borderlands, ethnohistory, and environmental history. Dr. Radding has held prominent roles in academic organizations, served on editorial boards of major historical journals, and has been recognized internationally as a corresponding member of the Academia Mexicana de Historia. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she works on collective book projects related to her research interests.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Geography
• Political Science
• Economic geography
• Art
• Law
• History

Selected publications

• ASE Annual Meeting Presidential Address 2024

  Ethnohistory · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This presidential address for the American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting, 18–22 September 2024, in Fargo, North Dakota, addresses the conference theme of “Colonial Entanglements and (Dis)Entanglements” paired with the concept of engagement as an ethical and methodological principle of ethnohistorians’ work. The essay develops the full meaning of engagement in four interrelated spheres: social, ecological, epistemological, and cosmological. The closely related concepts of entanglement, (dis)entanglement, and engagement bring to the fore the violence of colonialism and its sequel of displacements, forced migrations, and labor demands. At the same time, they illustrate the historical processes for the emergence of new ethnic identities, spatial and territorial claims, and spiritual rituals and cosmologies. Epistemological engagements involve complex webs of technological exchange across imperial frontiers, leading to new forms of knowledge. The essay highlights the perspective of interdisciplinarity as the framework for ethnohistory, built on the foundations of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, history, and environmental studies. It recognizes the central role of language in the cultural construction of historical memory and the growing ethnohistorical involvement in projects for language revitalization. The essay celebrates the emerging opportunities for co-participatory research designed and carried out with local communities, traditional knowledge keepers, educators, and scholars.

  PublisherDOI

• Los paisajes culturales:

  Tiempos de América · 2025-07-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Resumen: El ensayo principia con los consejos de Eric Van Young que contribuyeron a mi desarrollo intelectual, cuando él mismo exploraba los conceptos de espacio y del medio ambiente en el quehacer histórico e historiográfico. Continuará con la exploración que hizo Van Young en los conceptos de campesinado e indigeneidad a través de sus artículos y en su libro La otra rebelión, y cómo sus indagaciones influyeron en mi propio desenvolvimiento intelectual. Sigue la trayectoria intelectual de Van Young a través de su biografía de Lucas Alamán, A Life Together, y su síntesis del período de 1750-1850 en la historia de México, Stormy Passage. Termina con algunas remembranzas recientes sobre su calidez humana y nuestras conversaciones.

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• I <scp>n</scp> M <scp>emoriam</scp> : <i>Eric Van Young 1946–2024</i>

  The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  s departure from this life on December 20, 2024, was greeted with expressions of admiration and warm memories mixed with sorrow among communities

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• Linda Biesele Hall (1939–2022)

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2025-06-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Sacraments: Christian Rituals and Local Responses at the Fringes of Spanish America, 1529– 1800. 2024. By Oriol Ambrogio Gali

  Indigenous Religious Traditions · 2025-10-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Indigenous Sacraments: Christian Rituals and Local Responses at the Fringes of Spanish America, 1529– 1800. 2024. By Oriol Ambrogio Gali. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 329pp. $70 (hardcover or e- book).

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• Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis: Recovering the Lost History and Culture of Quitobaquito

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2024-10-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Jared Orsi’s sensitive portrait of Quitobaquito builds a stirring tribute to the Tohono O’odham and Hia C’ed O’odham, whose ancestral territory encompassed northwestern Sonora and southwestern Arizona. His clarion call to recover the lost histories of a desert oasis raises a well-researched critique of attempts by the National Park Service (NPS) to render Quitobaquito a wilderness within the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

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• Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis: Recovering the Lost History and Culture of Quitobaquito

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2024-09-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Jared Orsi's sensitive portrait of Quitobaquito builds a stirring tribute to the Tohono O'odham and Hia C'ed O'odham, whose ancestral territory encompassed northwestern Sonora and southwestern Arizona. His clarion call to recover the lost histories of a desert oasis raises a well-researched critique of attempts by the National Park Service (NPS) to render Quitobaquito a wilderness within the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The book interweaves the natural and cultural histories that over millennia shaped the environment of the A'al Vaipia springs, rendered in Spanish as Quitobaquito, and the riparian vegetation they nourished. The sinews that run through all the chapters center on the human-nature nexus, emphasizing change and adaptation over succeeding phases of landscape modification. Reaching deep into the past through the archaeological record and geological time, chapter 1 synthesizes O'odham legend and classic ethnolinguistic studies to speculate on the early phases of habitation and migratory patterns that traversed Quitobaquito and shaped its human ecology. Orsi offers a simple contrast between “staying put” and “moving about” to distinguish between mainly sedentary, agricultural peoples and seminomadic hunter-gatherers, observed as “one-village,” “two-village,” and “no-village” peoples. The ethnonyms applied to these different ways of dwelling in arid lands establish three variants within the broad identity of O'odham peoples, including pre-Hispanic Hohokam settlements. Akimel permanent villages near the rivers supported agriculture; Tohono O'odham two-village people adapted to different seasons with scattered plantings in the mouths of arroyos; and the “no-village” Hia C'ed moved their encampments through broad ecological zones from the fisheries and salt beds of the Gulf of California and the Colorado River Delta to the scrub forests of the Sonoran Desert.The section of this opening chapter entitled “A Clash of Himdags: The Spaniards and the O'odham, 1687–1821” rests on a thin historical and historiographical foundation. For this brief overview of O'odham-Spanish entwined histories, Orsi relies on a few translated sources, centered on the often-cited Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino and military captain Juan Mateo Manje. Their late seventeenth-century entradas began the process of gathering numerous rancherías into missions among the Akimel villages, bringing livestock, new crops, and additional elements of European material culture into O'odham ways of life (himdag). The mission enterprise grew in the river valleys, and Spanish mining and ranching settlements began to expand into the Pimería Alta, but the vast territories of northern Sonora remained under the control of autonomous Indigenous peoples. Orsi's narrative then skips to the late eighteenth century to cite Pedro Font's published diary from the expedition led by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza from Sonora to Upper California. This limited documentary base leads Orsi to miss the layered cultural connections among the O'odham peoples and to simplify their complex relations with Spanish colonists, missionaries, and military and civilian authorities. Mission communities, built and visited by different O'odham bands, became places where the Akimel, Tohono, and Hia C'ed expanded the range of their cultural and ecological adaptations. Orsi's dismissal of “the scant detail of Spanish journals” (p. 28) belies his decision not to research the detailed descriptions of landscapes and peoples conserved in multiple archives or in the excellent annotated publications of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest series, which have made a significant portion of these materials available to students and scholars. Orsi ignored, moreover, Mexican scholarship on the Sonoran Desert and its peoples. Their work helps to place Quitobaquito in the broad spatial and cultural perspectives of greater northwestern Mexico, highlighting specifically the ecological and ceremonial ties between Quitobac (in Sonora) and Quitobaquito.Chapters 2 through 6 focus on Quitobaquito's recent history. Through these chronological chapters over two centuries (1821–2013) the book addresses the National Park Service's vision for this unique cultural and ecological site, and Orsi's principal primary sources are drawn from the NPS archives. Orsi argues persuasively that the NPS's willful erasure of the cultural remains of O'odham and mixed ethnic settlements in Quitobaquito has violated their histories and presented to the public a false idea of wilderness as empty space, devoid of human landscape building. As the story advances to the present day, it takes up new migratory patterns that cannot be ignored: pointedly, the thousands of migrants—including whole families and unaccompanied children—who enter the Sonoran Desert in a desperate attempt to flee violence and grinding poverty. Their struggles for survival and a better life raise ethical and practical questions for the NPS management of Quitobaquito and the entire Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Orsi's narrative dignifies these people, making clear that their presence is now a part of the monument's history, even as he condemns the landscapes of exclusion created by the border wall and the affronts to O'odham himdag carried out by the United States Border Patrol.The book concludes with three recommendations for the NPS in relation to Quitobaquito: partner with O'odham peoples to design management policies that take into account climate change and address the different phases of Quitobaquito's history, replant the orchard that was part of the spring-fed environment of A'al Vaipia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 134), and preserve the “trash,” the materials left behind by border crossers, for interpretive exhibits that could “help visitors form a human connection to migrants” and understand more fully that historic preservation is about historicizing landscapes that are in continual processes of change (p. 137).

  PublisherDOI

• Enduring Indigenous Histories across the Americas

  Latin American Research Review · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • Humanities

  This essay reviews the following works:Negotiating Autonomy. Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy. By Kelly Bauer. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 179. $ 11.00 paperback. ISBN: 978-987-12-5693-8.

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• <i>Strength from the Waters. A History of Indigenous Mobilization in Northwest Mexico</i>. By James V. Mestaz<i>The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro. Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town</i>. By Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert

  Journal of Social History · 2023-07-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Strength from the Waters. A History of Indigenous Mobilization in Northwest Mexico. By James V. Mestaz The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro. Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town. By Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert Get access Strength from the Waters. A History of Indigenous Mobilization in Northwest Mexico. By James V. Mestaz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. xiii plus 298 pp. $30.00).The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro. Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town. By Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xiii plus 307 pp. $34.95). Cynthia Radding Cynthia Radding University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill radding@email.unc.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, shad043, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad043 Published: 26 July 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Living with Nature, Cherishing Language

  2023-12-07

  bookOpen accessSenior author

  This open access book explores connections between environment, language, and cultural integrity, with a focus on Indigenous and minority communities.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard C. Hoffmann

  4 shared

• Elsa M. Chaney

  4 shared

• Jocelyn Olcott

  Weatherford College

  4 shared

• Michael Williams

  Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

  4 shared

• J. Donald Hughes

  4 shared

• Jessaca B. Leinaweaver

  4 shared

• Maria Rogal

  Institute of Peruvian Studies

  4 shared

• Rosario Montoya

  Hospital Alemán

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• National Humanities Center Donnelley Family Fellowship (2010…
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2014-2015)
• Fulbright-Robles Senior Scholar Fellowship (2017-2018)