Angelo Falcón
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Angelo Falcón (born June 23, 1951 as Angel Manuel Falcón), is a political scientist best known for starting the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (IPR) in New York City in the early 1980s and his studies of Puerto Rican and Latino politics and policy issues. He is President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (formerly the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy), a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy center that focuses on Latino issues in the United States. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).
Falcón has been able to combine academic and policy research with an aggressive advocacy style based on broad coalition-building and community organizing. Noted for his caustic sense of humor and his progressive politics, he has become one of the longest-serving chief executives of a Latino nonprofit in the country who easily straddles the academic and practical policy advocacy and organizing.
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[edit] Biography
Angelo Falcón was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on June 23, 1951, the only son of Dominga "Minga" Cordero and Angel Manuel "Mel" Falcón. He has lived in New York City since the age of six months and grew up in the Los Sures (Southside) section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He currently resides in Harlem in Manhattan.
Falcón attended Public School 17 in Williamsburg, where his first grade teacher unilaterally changed his name to "Angelo" from "Angel," thinking it was a typo. He went on to attend the citywide specialized Brooklyn Technical High School (1965-1969) in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, where he graduated with a specialization in architecture. In high school, he joined with other Puerto Rican and Latino students to organize the El Nuevo Mundo Aspira Club, which began his involvement in community affairs. He went on to attend Columbia College of Columbia University (Class of 1973) where he continued his activism as Chair of the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) and helping to establish the first HEOP, or Higher Education Opportunity Program, at the College. In 1976, he attended the State University of New York at Albany, where he did his graduate work in political science, completed a Masters of Science degree and returned to New York City as an ABD (all but dissertation) in 1980 to write his dissertation. He was awarded the Nelson A. Rockefeller Distinguished Alumni Award from the SUNY-Albany in 1983.
In the early 1970s he worked with Aspira of New York, first as a Club Organizer and rising to the position of the Director of their Manhattan Center. This was during the period when Aspira of New York sued the NYC Board of Education, resulting the historic Aspira Consent Decree (1974) mandating transitional bilingual education programs for eligible Puerto Rican and other Latino students.
During his graduate studies in Albany in the late 1970s, he worked as a teaching assistant and as a technical researcher with the Capitol District Regional Planning Commission. He helped organize a graduate student organization as a result of a fight he led to overturn unfair plagarism rules adopted by the faculty.
Upon his return to New York City in 1980, he began teaching part-time to start work on his doctoral dissertation. He taught at Queens College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1981, while at John Jay, he began organizing what became the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (IPR), as a volunteer organization. In June 1982, the Institute became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and received its first foundation grant from the New World Foundation.
Since that point, Falcón has headed the Institute continuously for more than 24 years. During this period, despite its small size, the Institute developed a national reputation as one of the most innovative policy centers addressing Latino issues in the country. During 1986-1990 he also served as one of the Co-Principal Researchers (along with Rodolfo O. de la Garza of the University of Texas at Austin, F. Chris Garcia of the University of New Mexico, and John Garcia of the University of Arizona) of the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS), one of the largest privately funded social surveys of Latino political attitudes and behavior ever conducted in the United States. In the mid-1990s he was one of the key organizers of the Boricua First! march on Washington, DC and in the early 2000s of the Encuentro Boricua Conference in New York City, among other national initiatives. For further information on this 1981-1999 period, see the entry for the National Institute for Latino Policy.
In 1999, the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy joined in a strategic alliance with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) at the Fund's invitation, where the Institute was renamed the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and functioned as PRLDEF's Policy Division. During this period he served as PRLDEF's Senior Policy Executive and Director of the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. On November 18, 2005, the Institute became independent once again and in 2006 changed its name to the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), with Falcón as its President.
Since 2000, Falcón has also co-chaired the New York Chapter of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. In 2001, he was profiled in a "Public Lives" column in the New York Times ("A 20-Year Battler for Puerto Rican Political Pull" by John Kifner, June 20, 2001, Section B, page 2). In 2004, he wrote the Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans for the government of Puerto Rico and also co-edited the book, Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York. He was named as one of the top 25 "New York Latino movers and shakers" in 2006 by the New York Post (November 28, 2006).
Falcón, a longtime resident of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY, moved to Harlem in Manhattan in 2001. He is divorced and has no children.
[edit] Contributions
Angelo Falcón’s research on Puerto Rican and Latino politics and policy issues has made a number of important contributions to these fields. These include:
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- In his 1978 study, “The Puerto Rican Activist Stratum in New York City,” Falcón, using elite sample survey methods, provided one of the most in-depth analyses of the nature and attitudes ever conducted of Puerto Rican political and community leaders in New York City.
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- His founding and work with the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (1981-2005) has resulted in a number of critical developments in the area of Latino politics and policy. This includes: the first consistent nonpartisan studies of the Puerto Rican and Latino vote at the local and national levels; groundbreaking studies on public sector employment and other access issues for Latinos with government and the private sectors; and the development of the “guerilla research” approach of aggressive action-research from the perspective of the poor and that held the Puerto Rican/Latino political leadership accountable as well as non-Latinos. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Institute was credited with bringing back the advocacy role of Latino community-based organizations and the value of policy analysis as part of their ongoing missions. The Institute’s projects on promoting greater Latino participation in the 2000 Census and in the political redistricting process have introduced new participatory approaches to these civic participation issues that are new in the Latino community.
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- His 1983 paper, “Puerto Rican Political Participation: New York City and Puerto Rico,” was the first systematic examination of the contrast in voting levels between Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, which have been high, and New York City which have been extremely low. He demonstrated the role that social and political structure plays in affecting levels of political participation.
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- His 1985 discussion paper, “Black and Puerto Rican Politics in New York City: Race and Ethnicity in a Changing Urban Context,” was the first systematic examination of the implications of New York becoming a “majority minority” city and one of the first analyses of the relationship between Black and Latino politics.
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- As one of the principal investigators with the 1989-90 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS), Falcón was part of a team of political scientists that conducted this landmark $2 million household survey of Latino political attitudes and behavior in the United States. This was the largest privately funded survey of its kind ever conducted and generated important baseline data on the Latino political experience still in use today.
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- His publication of the monthly "Crítica: A Journal of Puerto Rican Policy & Politics" in 1994-1997 created a unique forum for the discussion of Puerto Rican community issues. This controversial monthly became an important vehicle for holding public official, Latino and non-Latino alike, accountable to community interests. There are plans to bring this publication back as a journal focusing on Latino policy and political issues in 2007.
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- His 2000 report, Opening the Courthouse Doors: The Need for More Hispanic Judges, had the impact of raising consciousness of this issue in the United States Congress and resulting in the appointment of more Latinos to the federal judiciary. In addition, this report was also helpful in derailing the nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada by President Bush to the federal bench.
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- The 2004 report by Falcón for the government of Puerto Rico, the Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans, was the first documentation of the growth of the stateside Puerto Rican population to the point of exceeding for the first time the Puerto Rican population in Puerto Rico. The report also examined the growing economic power of the stateside Puerto Rican community and estimated that they sent close to $1 billion a year to Puerto Rico in what the equivalent of remittances. This report presented a different and more positive image of stateside Puerto Ricans and promoted discussion of the need for a new relationship between Puerto Rico and its diaspora.
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- Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York, a book published in 2004 that he co-edited, is an important contribution to the historiography of the city’s Puerto Rican community. One of his chapters in the book, “De’tras Pa’lante: Explorations on the Future History of Puerto Ricans in New York City,” is considered one of the major statements on the status of the Puerto Rican community of New York City today.
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- Finally, his sheparding the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy to the newly-named National Institute for Latino Policy in 2005-6 will hopefully result in the continuation of his innovative research and advocacy work on behalf of the Latino community.
[edit] Current Directorships
- Community Resource Exchange (New York City)
- Latino Policy Coalition (Los Angeles)
- National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) (Los Angeles)
- National Latino Council on Alcohol and Tobacco Prevention (LCAT) (Washington, DC)
- National Latino Media Council (Los Angeles)
[edit] Selected Published Works
[edit] As author
- Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans (Washington, DC: Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, 2004)
- Opening the Courthouse Doors: The Need for More Hispanic Judges (New York: Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, 2002)
- Still on the Outside Looking In: Latino Employment in New York Broadcast Television (New York: National Hispanic Media Coalition, 2001).
[edit] As co-editor
- Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004)
- Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican & Cuban Perspectives on American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)
- Latinos and Politics: A Select Research Bibliography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).
[edit] Other contributions
- The Nation
- El Diario-La Prensa
- Hispanic Link
- Critíca: The Journal of Puerto Rican Policy & Politics
