As a mentor, scholar, and community activist, Olivia Cadaval (1943–2025) spent more than four decades creating spaces for Latino and other marginalized communities to assert their voices and identities in both the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and at the Smithsonian.

Committed to collaborative reciprocal research and public-sector folklore, Olivia championed “community scholars,” who she described as “people who are often not academic scholars, but who work for and are experts on their own communities.” In addition to democratizing academic spaces for those who are committed to grassroots work, Olivia inspired and mentored countless scholars from underrepresented communities to pursue academic and cultural heritage careers.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Olivia’s interest in people and culture began during her childhood. “I would go to the market with my sister and watch all of the happenings. The bantering between merchants and customers, the boys pushing produce carts. It fascinated me. I was drawn to the people. Who were they? Where did they live? What did they do? The whole aesthetic of it. The language. I loved it all.”

Olivia came to the United States in 1961 to study at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, where she met her late husband, partner, and colleague David Bosserman, who was “always willing to collaborate on projects.” After moving to the D.C. area in 1968, Olivia, oftentimes with David by her side, began collaborating with cultural workers, artists, educators, journalists, and others on community-based cultural and political projects.

In the 1970s and ’80s, when the Latino community in the D.C. area began to assert its presence, Olivia was at the vanguard of documenting its history and creating spaces for people to tell their stories. Her oral history research on El Festival Latino was the first and still one of the most comprehensive explorations of community building, placemaking, and identity construction among Latinos in the D.C. area. She directed El Centro de Arte, an arts organization that supported cultural work and art among Latino and Latin American artists. These projects demonstrated the participatory and relational scholarship for which Olivia is known.

Olivia was introduced to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the discipline of folklore in 1976, when she was hired as a cultural liaison for the Festival’s bicentennial program. She became a curator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage after completing her PhD in American studies and folklife in 1988. Drawing from her community-based work, Olivia brought a perspective that was grounded in collaboration and community scholarship, and how communities see and represent themselves. She recognized the Festival as a site of community engagement predicated on reciprocity between Festival participants and curators and as an opportunity to create dialogue between communities and outside actors such as government agencies.

Her work at the Center resulted in multiple Festival programs, including U.S. Virgin Islands (1990), U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (1993), El Río (2000), Nuestra Música (2004 and 2005), México (2010), Colombia: The Nature of Culture (2011), and Perú: Pachamama (2015). In addition to her work on the Festival, Olivia contributed to the development of education materials, exhibitions, workshops, and online programs. Her publications include Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival (1998) and (as co-editor) Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (2016). In the 1990s, she was also part of a group of Latino staff members at the Smithsonian who came together to demand broader representation in leadership and programming and greater access to resources. The results of these efforts reverberate today.

After retiring from the Smithsonian in 2017, Olivia remained active. In addition to serving as a mentor and advisor to several students, she continued to develop and consult on community-based programs. In 2018, she curated La Esquina, a photo exhibition that paid homage to street life in the D.C. Latino community. She worked with colleagues from the National Museum of the American Latino on an exhibition that explores social movements among Latino youth in the D.C. area, and she is featured in Somos (2022), a short film created for the museum’s inaugural exhibition.