Roberto Alvarez is a social-cultural anthropologist whose career and life have been guided by a commitment to social justice, and the empowerment of underserved communities. This stems from both his personal history growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border and from his experience in a broad range of social-change contexts. In the U.S. Peace Corps (Panama and Puerto Rico) he discovered the value of anthropology in understanding the effects of social change, inadvertent power, and inequality. Roberto returned home, to San Diego, and completed the PhD in Social Anthropology at Stanford University in 1979. He joined the Institute of Urban and Minority Education (IUME) and the Program In Applied Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University Cross Cultural Research Center at Sacramento State University, as Director of Research and Evaluation, and Associate Director of the College for Migrants Program. At the CCRC he conducted leadership, and ethnographic training, with teachers, community, and indigenous leaders in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Belau, the Northern Marianas (Guam and Saipan), as well as in Chicano/Mexicano and Indigenous communities in the U.S.
In 1985, he re-entered the produce world and worked in the U.S.-Mexico Fruit Industry. This five-year ethnographic experience provided him with a novel understanding of the U.S.- Mexico Border, U.S. Government Policy, transnational process, and ethnic entrepreneurial strategies. A number of his academic publications focus on ethnic markets, entrepreneurs, global agriculture, and the role played by the “transnational state,” in local, regional, and global processes. He has also published extensively on the U.S. Mexico Border.
In 1990-2001, he returned to academia at Arizona State University (ASU), where he founded the Program in Applied Anthropology, to engage both graduate students and the local community in effective educational and policy efforts. He was Chair of Socio-cultural Anthropology, Director of Graduate Studies, and director of ethnography and evaluation for various university programs that included the Project for the Improvement of Minority Education, The Office of Youth Preparation and the President’s Building Great Communities Program. Most recently at UCSD (2001-2012) He was the Director of the UCSD Institute of Global California that focused on retaining and the hiring of minority scholars. He also directed the Logan Heights Ethnography Project in the Chicano/Mexican community where he was raised. Roberto has maintained a commitment to education at all levels, aimed at economically disadvantaged and “minority” student success. Throughout his career he has been dedicated to advancing non-traditional students and faculty in university settings.
Roberto has been an active member, and President, of the Society for Applied Anthropology and was also a founding member and subsequently President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA). He is currently Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
