Olivia Cadaval was a scholar, activist, and mentor who exemplified the values of cultural democracy. Committed to public sector folklore, Cadaval mentored countless young scholars interested in cultural work and championed the voices of “community scholars,” whom she described as “people who [are] often not academic scholars, but who work for and are experts on their own communities.” 

Born in Mexico City in 1943, Cadaval migrated to the United States in 1961 to study at MacMurry College in Jacksonville, Illinois. While she cited her work as a cultural liaison for the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife bicentennial program in 1976 as her formal introduction to the field of folklore, her devotion to applied cultural work was already underway.

After moving to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area in 1968 with her husband David Bosserman, Cadaval became an observer of and participant in the day-to-day of the region’s emergent Latino community. At a time when, as she explained, the community had “no encompassing written history,” she immersed herself in cultural advocacy work. As the director of El Centro de Arte, an organization that supported Latino artists, she wrote articles for local Spanish-language newspapers, shepherded grant proposals, organized cultural programs, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with community members, and coordinated research and documentation projects. Her research on the city’s Festival Latino, which became the focus of her dissertation, explored place-making, community building, and identity construction, and was the first comprehensive examination of the Latino presence in the District of Columbia.

In 1984, she and her husband settled in a house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which was then the center of el barrio, or Latino community. Their home, dubbed La Orilla (the Edge), became a gathering place for cultural workers, artists, educators, students, journalists, scholars, and others to collaborate on community-based projects.  

After completing her PhD in American Studies at George Washington University in 1988, Cadaval became a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH). Drawing on her many years of engaged scholarship, she recognized her work with the Smithsonian as an opportunity to create space for communities to speak for themselves and to have a say in how they were represented. Cadaval’s scholarship intersected with her commitment to community, and she brought the same level of energy, dedication, and respect to programs at small grassroots organizations and venues as she did to large established institutions, such as the Smithsonian. She listened deeply, was generous with her time, and was always ready to hear (and share) a good story.

Working locally and internationally, Cadaval’s tenure at the Smithsonian resulted in multiple Folklife Festival programs featuring Latino, Latin American, and the Caribbean cultures, and exhibitions, publications, and educational kits that explored themes such as migration, border communities, and music in Latino culture. She also collaborated with colleagues from across the Institution to demand more Latino representation in leadership and programming.

In recognition of her many contributions to the field, Cadaval was awarded the Américo Paredes Prize in 2012 by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and was selected as an AFS Fellow in 2018. She also received the Smithsonian Institution’s Innovation in Education Achievement Award in 2006.

Among her numerous publications of importance to folklore include:

Cadaval, Olivia. 1998. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival. Routledge.

Cadaval, Olivia, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye, eds. 2016. Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. University Press of Mississippi. 

American Folklore Society (AFS)’s Notable Folklorists of Color exhibitions.  In (2019) with Phyllis M. May-Machunda; (2025) with Phyllis M. May-Machunda and Sojin Kim.

Michelle Banks