Douglas S. Massey Shares Scholar Reflection on Tenure in Latino Studies
Scholar Reflections
Reflections on a Career in Latino Studies
By Douglas S. Massey
Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Emeritus, Princeton University
Douglas S. Massey is one of the leading scholars of Latino immigration and residential segregation in the United States. At the invitation of the Rutgers Latino Studies Research Initiative, he shares the following reflection on a career shaped by immigrant roots, a lifelong commitment to the Spanish language, and four decades of research on Mexican and Latino communities.
Immigrants have always been a part of my life. My maternal grandparents were immigrants from Finland who settled in the port town of Cordova, Alaska in the early 1920s. My grandfather worked for Kennecott Copper as the foreman of a crew that maintained the rail line between the port to the mine, nearly 200 miles inland. My mother grew up in a working class household in a town of 980, graduated valedictorian in her high school class of 12 students, worked for a year in a salmon canning factory to earn money, and in 1942 with the money she saved took a steamship to Seattle, where over the next four years she worked her way through the University of Washington and graduated in 1946.
It was there that she met and married my father and moved to Olympia, WA in 1947 where his parents lived. These grandparents were both college graduates, and my paternal grandmother looked down on my mother as a second generation immigrant with parents who had barely finished primary school. My mother taught me always to respect those who were less advantaged and had to work their way up in the world, so I have always sympathized with poor and working people, especially immigrants. For me, having immigrant origins was intrinsic to being American.
I grew up in Olympia from my birth in 1952 to my graduation from high school in 1970. For some reason, the teachers in the public schools took it upon themselves to teach us Spanish, and from third to sixth grades, when I received cursory instruction in the language. I took formal courses in Spanish from grades 7 through 12. During the summer of 1970 I attended a summer study program at the University of Salamanca, where I discovered I had been taught Mexican Spanish, not Castilian.
Growing up in the 1960s, I was imbued with the spirit of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, so at college I gravitated toward the social sciences, but every quarter I took a Spanish class so that I would not forget what I had learned before. In the end, I completed three majors in Psychology, Anthropology, and Spanish. In my junior year I decided I wanted to be a demographer and so began taking courses in sociology. I graduated in 1974 and in the fall of 1975 entered Princeton University’s doctoral program in sociology to study demography at the Office of Population Research (OPR).
Although I mastered demographic methods and the fundamentals of fertility, mortality, nuptiality and stable population theory, I was more interested in social demography and gravitated toward the study of migration and the spatial distribution of human populations, topics that were not really covered at Princeton, so I had to teach myself. Given my interest in social stratification, formation in Spanish, and immigrant heritage, for my dissertation I undertook the first nationwide study of Hispanic segregation using the 1970 census, the first enumeration to include a question on Hispanic origin.
Upon receiving my Ph.D. in August of 1978, I was awarded a Hewlett Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship from OPR that I used to do research on Mexican migration to the United States. In this effort, I collaborated with a graduate student in anthropology who had just returned from a year of fieldwork in a small town in the State of Michoacán where three-quarters of the households contained a migrant who worked in the United States. I was impressed with how ethnographic fieldwork could compile accurate and reliable information on undocumented migration, which was just becoming a hot topic both in social science and public policy.
In 1979 I wrote my first grant proposal—for a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to continue research on patterns of Black and Hispanic segregation in the United States, which was awarded. I used it to fund a year spent at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Demography while I went on the academic job market. After receiving and accepting an offer from the University of Pennsylvania to become an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Penn’s Population Studies Center, I immediately wrote another grant proposal, this time to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study processes of Mexico-U.S. migration using a combination of ethnographic and survey methods.
A year later, I wrote another proposal to NIH to study the residential segregation of Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians in U.S. metropolitan areas using data from the 1980 census. It was also funded, and ever since I have done research on Hispanic immigration and segregation. Not being Hispanic myself, I believe I have a duty to learn everything I can about the history and culture of the people I study. I have therefore spent 40 years improving my Spanish and trying to learn everything I can about Latinos both north and south of the border.
I have taken great pleasure in learning about Latin American and Latino history, art, literature, food, drink, music, customs, and manners. I have traveled extensively throughout Latin America and among Latino communities in the United States and have advocated strongly for policy reforms to benefit immigrant sending communities and their destination communities in the United States. I am appalled at the rise of nativism, xenophobia, and anti-Latino prejudice throughout the county in recent years. I continue to hope that I will be able to use my knowledge, experience, and research to reverse these trends to benefit a people I have grown to know, love, and respect.