She is the author of The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017. Her book received the 2018 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American cultural history.  

She also served as the lead historian for Proyecto Mission Murals, a multimedia documentary collaboration spearheaded by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to document and present the history of community murals in San Francisco’s Mission District. 

Cordova is originally from San Francisco, where she has focused much of her research.  Her articles include, “Portable Murals: Children’s Book Press and the Circulation of Latino Art,” in Visual Resources, “Hombres y Mujeres Muralistas on a Mission: Painting Latino Identities in 1970s San Francisco” in Latino Studies and, “The Mission in Nicaragua: San Francisco Poets Go To War,” in Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America.  She also has written on the art and life of her maternal grandfather, Paul Feeley, and his participation in the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s at Bennington College in Vermont.

She is currently working on her second book project, Fiesta San Francisco: Imagining the Latin from Prohibition to World War II.  This work excavates the lives of Latina/o/x artists, dancers, and entrepreneurs who worked in San Francisco during an earlier period of massive social change, encompassing the restrictions of Prohibition into the heightened consumption of ethnic identities through nightclubs and bars during World War II.  

Previously, she taught at the the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and at the University of California, Davis. She also has served as an archivist, curator, public historian, and oral historian for various public institutions, including the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. 

Cordova earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.