Biography of Alejandro Portes.

Abstract

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 (1–4). 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 (5–8). In Portes's Inaugural Article (9), 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). ### A Need to Understand the Past 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 …