Edward Telles

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Edward Telles
File:Professor Edward Telles-PERLA-UC Santa Barbara.jpg Sociologist Edward Telles, head of the PERLA project at the University of California, Santa Barbara File:Professor Edward Telles-PERLA-UC Santa Barbara.jpg Sociologist Edward Telles, head of the PERLA project at the University of California, Santa Barbara File:Professor Edward Telles-PERLA-UC Santa Barbara.jpg Sociologist Edward Telles, head of the PERLA project at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Born	Los Angeles, California
🏳️ Nationality	American
💼 Occupation	sociologist, demographer
Known for	Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil and Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Skin Color in Latin America

Edward Eric Telles (born February 8, 1956) is an American sociologist whose work examines race, intermarriage, identity and borders. Formerly a professor in the sociology departments at Princeton and the University of California at Los Angeles, he is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Telles is a leading figure in the study of race and ethnicity in the Americas, emphasizing Brazil, and on intergenerational change and mobility among Mexican Americans. His book Race in Another America and his work at the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro were instrumental to changing discourse on race in Brazil and for producing major policy changes in Brazil, including instituting affirmative action in public universities. In the United States, Telles' research proved controversial at first because it revealed that Mexican Americans did not assimilate in the same way as European Americans and thus challenged the dominant theory. Scholars familiar with assimilation data did not appear to to believe Telles' findings but the reanalysis of his data showed that he was correct. Although critics later accepted Telles' findings, they advocated for care in presenting such "negative findings" lest xenophobes use them to advocate for immigrant restrictionist policies, as they did. On the other hand, they can also be used for those advocating for more inclusionary educational policies. "By spanning the social sciences and the Americas in his research, Professor Edward Telles has helped increase understanding of how race and inequality interact."

Early life and education

Edward Telles was born in Los Angeles, California to Beatriz Ochoa, an immigrant mother from Chihuahua, Mexico who worked as a clerk typist and Raymond Telles, a Mexican American construction electrician. He attended Catholic schools throughout his primary and secondary education and later received a B.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University, an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Between his B.A. and M.A., he was an English as a Second Language (ESL) Instructor and administered federal grants for the Community Development Department of the City of Los Angeles.

Career

After receiving his Ph.D., Telles was a visiting professor at the University of Campinas in Brazil and then became an Assistant Professor at UCLA, where he taught until 2008. He then became Professor at Princeton University, where he directed the Center for Migration and Development. In 2015, he became Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1997 to 2000, Telles served as the Program Officer for Human Rights in the Ford Foundation's Rio de Janeiro office, where he supported programs in Women's and Afro-Brazilian rights and in social science development.

Research and publications

Focusing on race and ethnicity in Latin America, Telles' major books include Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press, winner of several awards, including the Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography (2005), as well as the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for the Best Book from the Race and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association (2006), the Best Book Award from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association (2006) and the Hubert Herring Award for the Best Book in Latin American Studies from the Pacific Council for Latin American Studies (2005). Telles is also the author of Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Skin Color in Latin America (with the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), an interdisciplinary, multinational team of scholars), published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. Both books are published in Spanish and Portuguese and the former is available in Japanese. Pigmentocracies was based on innovative surveys of race and ethnicity in several Latin American countries and conducted in conjunction with an international team of social scientists (PERLA), which Telles led. He has also published in this area in leading social science journals including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Oxford's Social Forces, and Demography.

In 2008 Telles coauthored Generations of Exclusion, Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race with UCLA sociologist Vilma Ortiz, which won the Otis Dudley Duncan Award (2009) and the Best Book Award from the Pacific Sociological Association (2009).

Reception

About Race in Another America, writing in the Journal of Social History, George Reid Andrews noted: "This is a blockbuster of a book. To a topic — Brazilian race relations — historically fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and disagreement, it brings clarity, logic, and lucidity, not to mention several truckloads of data. The result is the most important work on race in Brazil since Gilberto Freyre's seminal The Masters and the Slaves (1933)…The clarity and lucidity of Telles’s findings, and the wealth of data on which they are based, make this book a genuine tour de force, and the most illuminating examination of Brazilian race relations that I have ever read." Reviewing the book for the American Journal of Sociology, Melissa Nobel noted, "Edward Telles's rich and important book is the latest, and most systematic, sociological study of Brazilian race relations. As its title implies, the book is also comparative, as the significance of race in Brazil is explicitly compared with its significance in the United States and in South Africa, to a lesser extent. American race relations have, and arguably continue, to serve as the paradigmatic case against which other countries are compared and from which sociological theories are derived."

About Pigmentocracies, writing in The New York Times, Brazilian journalist Cleuci de Oliveira noted that, “Today, the socioeconomic consequences of Brazil’s ‘pigmentocracy’ still reverberate: The top one-percent of Brazil’s economy is about 80 percent white; three-quarters of the bottom 10 percent, meanwhile, are black or mixed-race. In 2016, more than half of black or mixed-race students between the ages of 18-24 hadn’t reached high school. And only 13 percent of those in the same age bracket were enrolled in college…Even that happier stat that a third of marriages are mixed-race comes with an asterisk: According to the sociologist Edward Telles, author of Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, the rates of intermarriage are negligible among wealthier Brazilians.”

Choice magazine noted: “Telles and his team have laid a data baseline useful in the continuing quest for the what, how, and why of Latin American racism,” while American Anthropologist found the book, “An excellent source of scholarly and official ethnoracial histories and contexts.” Latin American Research Review found that the book, “...arises from a large multi-country comparative survey of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, coordinated by Telles, who is known for his research on Brazil and among Mexican Americans.”

Latinos in the United States

Telles' major work in this area is Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (with Vilma Ortiz), based on the Mexican American Study Project (MASP) survey of Los Angeles County and San Antonio City, which followed the same respondents of the original MASP survey in 1965-66 as well as their children. He is currently completing another book (with Christina Sue, sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder) on ethnic and national identification among Mexican Americans based on in-depth surveys with 75 U.S. born Mexican Americans and the MASP survey. He has also published extensively on issues of immigration to the United States.

Honors and awards

Telles has received a Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association and several other awards, including the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in demography, twice, and the Distinguished Book Award for Generations of Exclusion from the Pacific Sociological Association (2009). He was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2009, elected vice president of the American Sociological Association and served in that capacity from 2010 to 2013, In 2018, Telles was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life

Edward Telles lives in Los Angeles, only a few miles west of where he was raised. When asked how he came to sociology, Telles explains, “As a Mexican American growing up in Los Angeles alongside Mexican immigrants (like my mother) and long-time Mexican American residents (like my father), I noticed that Mexican Americans escaped both the assimilation story of European immigrants as well as the stark black-white story. When I began researching poverty in Brazil, where slavery was much larger than in the United States, it became clear to me that race there was much different than in the United States, but racism and racial inequality existed in both. These experiences posed research questions and opportunities that would lead me to produce central works based on hard empirical data. I have also taken this work beyond Brazil and the United States and examined race and ethnicity in other Latin American countries, including Mexico, which I visited often as a child.”

References

External links

• Edward Telles at Princeton.
• Edward Telles at the University of California, Santa Barbara

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