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Alejandro Portes

Alejandro Portes is a premier sociologist who has shaped the study of immigration and urbanization for 30 years. He is chair of the department of sociology at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) as well as co-founder and director of Princeton's Center for Migration and Development. In 1998, Portes became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. From 1998 to 1999, Portes served as president of the American Sociological Association. He has authored and edited numerous books and has published articles on a range of policy issues, including immigrant assimilation, Latin American politics, and United States/Cuba relations.

A Cuban exile himself, Portes has spent his career tracking the lives of different immigrant nationalities in the United States.He has chronicled the causes and consequences of immigration to the United States, with an emphasis on informal economies, transnational communities, and ethnic enclaves. In Portes's Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, he and Hao study the children of immigrants and the factors that determine their successful adaptation to life in the United States, such as family support and school socioeconomic status (SES).

File:Alejandro Portes.jpg

Early Life

Portes was born in Havana, Cuba, on October 13, 1944. He began his under-graduate studies at the University of Havana in 1959 but left after just one year. At the time, Cuba was in the midst of a revolution, as dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown and a new regime was established under the leadership of Fidel Castro. “I left in 1960 because of opposition to the regime and became a political exile,” he says. In 1963, Portes resumed his studies at the Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires. He completed his B.A. in sociology in 1965 at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. Portes was drawn to the field of sociology because he wanted to make sense of his own experience during the Cuban revolution. “I needed to understand what had happened in the country where I was born. [Cuba] was literally taken away from me and my family by a major social process that I could barely understand,” said Portes. Portes pursued his graduate education in sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which housed one of the strongest sociology departments in the country. For his dissertation, Portes studied political radicalism in the urban slums of Chile, a country that was polarized at the time. “I went to Chile to study the political attitudes among low-income urban dwellers in the squatter settlements surrounding the city, immediately before the election of the communist–socialist alliance to power, and that became my first major study,” he recalls. In conjunction with his mentors at the University of Wisconsin, William Sewell and Archibald Haller, Portes authored papers on social stratification and status attainment in three major sociology journals in the late 1960s (10–12). His dissertation work was published in Urban Latin America(2), a book coauthored by John Walton. In addition to the doctorate that he earned in 1970, the University of Wisconsin later awarded Portes an honorary doctorate in 1998. In 2001, Portes's alma mater further distinguished him by asking him to deliver the inaugural William H. Sewell Memorial Lecture. After graduate school, Portes accepted a position as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. After one year at Illinois, he became a tenured associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also associate director of Latin American studies. Portes continued his dissertation work on Chilean political radicalism before turning to the study of immigration, a topic that would become his major research focus in future years.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/33/11917.full

Education and Employment

Education:

Attended University of Havana pursuing under-graduate studies in the year of 1959
After one year, due to the overthrow of Cuba's leader Fuglencio Batista by the infamous Fidel Castro, Portes decided to leave. Fearing prosecution for being a political dissident he continued with his educational pursuits at the Catholic University of Argentina, Buenos Aires 3 years latter
1965, obtained B.A. from Chreighton University, Omaha, NE. in the field of sociology
Graduate level education in sociology earned at the University of Wisconsin in Madison >> Continued studies to earn his doctorate in Sociology
Eventually Portes dissertation in grad school named Urban Latin America was recognized by Wisconsin later and he received honorary doctorate in the year 1998

Employment:

Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Year later became associate Professor at University of Texas, Austin
1975, Portes become full Professor at Duke University
In 1981 Portes decided to leave after four years spent at Duke to accept a position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
1997 Portes joined the department of Sociology at Princeton University in 1997

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/33/11917.full

Service and Involvement

Alejandro Portes is a premier sociologist who has shaped the study of immigration and urbanization for 30 years. Immigrant assimilation, Latin American politics, and United States/Cuba relations are his main work.

He and Hao study the children of immigrants and the factors that determine their successful adaptation to life in the United States, such as family support and school socioeconomic status (SES).

At Hopkins, Portes launched a study of the informal economy—an economy created by unregulated service jobs, such as construction work, landscaping, and domestic services. The key concept that came out of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study was that of “segmented assimilation,” integration into different segments of American society rather than into one mainstream community.

Portes observed that one path of integration, called “downward assimilation,” is especially problematic. “It moves downward, increasing the probability of leaving school early, joining gangs, and integrating into a street and drug culture that commonly leads to imprisonment, teenage pregnancies, and other negative outcomes,” he said.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/33/11917.full

Honors and Awards/Scholarly works

Selected Books^[1]:

1. Immigrant America: A Portrait

2. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation

3. The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents

Selected Publications:

2005 (with William Haller) "The Informal Economy." In N. Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds.) HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY, 2nd edition, New York: Russell Sage Foundation (forthcoming).

2004 (with Lingxin Hao) "The Schooling of Children of Immigrants: Contextual Effects on the Educational Attainment of the Second Generation." PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 101 (August): 11920-11927.

2003 (with Kelly Hoffman) "Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era." LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH REVIEW 38 (February): 41-82.

Honors and Awards:

Alejandro Portes is currently a chair of the department of sociology at Princeton University along with a member of the National Academy of Science.

Portes possesses honorary degrees from The New School for Social Research, the University of Genoa, and also the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He is also on the Board of Trustees and the Scientific Council at the IMDEA Social Sciences Institute.

By 2002, Portes accepted the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association for Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation and in 2008 was awards the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences.

http://sociology.princeton.edu/faculty/alejandro-portes