Tanalís Padilla

Tanalís Padilla (born in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American Latin Americanist professor and historian specializing in 20th-century Mexican social and political movements. She is currently employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata (2008) and Unintended Lessons of Revolution (2021).

Career
She was born in Mexico City, but spent most of her childhood in Tapaxco. Her parents were Marxists and her mother was a teacher. After finishing elementary school, her family immigrated to Culver City, California.

In 1995, she got her bachelor's degree at Pomona College; entering her undergraduate program there expecting to pursue political science or international relations, her history classes under Sidney Lemelle and Miguel Tinker Salas at Pomona and Cindy Forster at Scripps College shaped her worldview. Consequently, she switched her major to history. In 1998, she achieved her master's degree at the University of California, San Diego, obtaining her PhD from there in 2001. She then taught as a visiting professor at Pomona, became a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, tenured professor at Dartmouth College, and now has been working at MIT since 2015.

She is currently writing a book on Cuban medical internationalism, which she previously commented on when praising the vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Works
Additionally co-editing the 2013 special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research and contributing to Mexican newspaper La Jornada, her bibliography includes: