Tomás R. Jiménez

Tomás Jiménez is Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  He is also Director of Graduate Studies in Sociology and Director of the Undergradute Program on Urban Studies. His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents).  His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity(University of California Press, 2010) draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. The book was awarded the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos/as Section Distinguished Book Award. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

He is currently working several other projects. The first looks at how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2005.  A second project (with social psychologist John Dovidio (Yale), political scientist Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts), and social psychologist Yuen Ho (UCLA), uses survey data (with embedded experiments) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape the sense of belonging and related intergroup attitudes, behaviors, and support for immigration policies among immigrants and host-society members in the United States. This project is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the United Parcel Service Endowment Fund at Stanford. A third project (with graduate students Anna Boch and Katharina Roessler) uses Yelp! data to examine the contextual factors that predict whether Mexican food has entered a mainstream. In another project, Professor Jiménez, with Marrianne Cooper (Clayman Institute, Stanford University), and Chrystal Redekopp (Laboratory for Social Research, Stanford), are studying how Silicon Valley residents find housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He has been named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2017-19). He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center, and he has written opinion-editorials on the topic of immigrant assimilation in several major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.